Gifts of fortune, and hints for those about to travel
Date: 2025-04-09T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Travel; Voyages and travels

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Title: Gifts of fortune, and hints for those about to travel

Author: H. M. Tomlinson

Illustrator: Harry Cimino

Release date: April 9, 2025 [eBook #75826]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & brothers, 1926

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75826

Credits: Carla Foust, Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GIFTS OF FORTUNE, AND HINTS FOR THOSE ABOUT TO TRAVEL ***

GIFTS OF FORTUNE

Other Books by the Same Author

THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE
OLD JUNK
LONDON RIVER
WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT
TIDEMARKS

The tall ship—standing out into windy space—

GIFTS OF FORTUNE

AND HINTS FOR THOSE
ABOUT TO TRAVEL

BY

H. M. TOMLINSON

With Woodcuts by

HARRY CIMINO

“Giftës of fortune,

That passen as a shadow on the wall.”

Chaucer, The Merchant’s Tale.

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXXVI

GIFTS OF FORTUNE

Copyright, 1926, by
Harper & Brothers
Printed in U. S. A.

First Edition

H-A

To
The Caliph and his Lady
for placing the unripened pages
of this book in the sun
of the Côte d’Or
at their
Chateau de Missery

CONTENTS

SOME HINTS FOR THOSE ABOUT TO TRAVEL | 1
OUT OF TOUCH | 100
ELYSIUM | 110
THE RAJAH | 116
THE STORM PETREL | 123
ON THE CHESIL BANK | 131
THE PLACE WE KNOW BEST | 186
DROUGHT | 194
A RIDE ON A COMET | 200
REGENT’S PARK | 206
A DEVON ESTUARY | 212

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE TALL SHIP—STANDING OUT INTO WINDY SPACE | Frontispiece
| Facing Page
TO SEE THE GLOW OF SUNRISE ABOVE THE PALISADE OF THE JUNGLE | 8
I MET A CHEERFUL GOATHERD | 56
AFTER A LONG AND FAITHFUL ADHERENCE TO THE BEATEN TRACKS YOU REACH SOME DISTANT COASTAL OUTPOST | 74
SOME NAME IT EDEN OR ELYSIUM | 84
THE BUFFALOES STARED AT US AS WE WENT ALONG, AS MOTIONLESS AS FIGURES IN METAL | 120
AS TO THE SEA, IT HAS NO HUMAN ATTRIBUTES WHATEVER | 158
AT LOW TIDE THESE STONE STAIRS GO DOWN TO A SHINGLE BEACH | 226

GIFTS OF FORTUNE

I. SOME HINTS FOR THOSE ABOUT TO TRAVEL

I

A year or two ago a lively book was published called The Happy Traveller. It is not an indispensable work if you have booked your passage, or are on a ship’s articles, for only Providence can help you then, yet it is a cheerful guide if you would know what long journeys are like, in parts, without making them. Its author, the Rev. Frank Tatchell, proves he has seen enough of the world to satisfy a crew of able seamen. He has seen it from the byroads, the highroads, the decks of local trading ships, and the windows of third-class railway carriages. He has seen it because, apparently, he wanted to; and he has enjoyed it all, or most of it. He has some heroic advice for those whom he judges may be infected by his own enthusiasm, and indeed his book would induce many young men to pull on their boots forthwith: “Be cheerful and interested in everything,” he tells us; and, “Do not bother too much about your inside.”

But what I sought in his volume was not the Malay for Thank you—which he gave me—but what set him going. Why did he do it? There is a word, frequently seen in glossy narrative, “Wanderlust.” The very lemmings must know it. It excuses almost anything in the way of travel lunacy, even to herding with Russian emigrants for fun. It is used as a flourish by those who hope we will fail to notice that they are uncertain what to do with themselves. Mr. Tatchell, however, does not use it once. Yet you see him hustling through the bazaar at Bhamo, where you do not meet many tourists; and he discovers that the half-castes of the Society Isles are especially charming, though he does not pretend that it is worth while voyaging to the South Seas to confirm that; or he peeps into the Malayan forest long enough to note “myriads of leeches in all directions humping and hastening towards the traveller.” He certainly saw those leeches. He saw them hump. But why did he foregather with them, and go to smell Bhamo? For out of so varied an experience he returns but to assure romantic youth sitting on the bollards of our quays and gazing seaward wistfully, “Elephants dislike having white men approach them from behind.” Or of this: “If you should become infested with fleas, sleep out on a bed of bracken one night, and in the morning you will be free from the pests.” Such fruits of travel seem hardly enough. Mr. Tatchell himself was decidedly a happy traveller, and the cause of happiness in others—his book can be commended in confidence—for he admits that his method of enjoying himself in a strange bed is to sing aloud the aria, “Why do the Nations?” But he does not tell us what sent him roving, nor does he produce any collection of treasures, except oddities such as the warning to white men about approaching the behinds of elephants, and Vinakka vinnakka! (Fijian for Bravo.)

Perhaps those little curiosities are enough. We are pleased to hear of them. What else was there to get? It would be very hard for most voyagers to explain convincingly why they became restless, and went to sea. Some do it to get away from us, some to get away from themselves, and some because they cannot help it. I shall not forget the silliness which gave me my first sight of Africa. The office telephone rang. “Oh, is that you? Well, we want you to go to Algeria at once.” I went downstairs hurriedly to disperse this absurdity. But it was no good. I had to go. And because I was argumentative about it they added Tripoli and Sicily, which served me right. After all, while in Africa, one is necessarily absent from Fleet Street. I should have remembered that.

Mr. Tatchell tells us that even a poor man, if he does not leave it till he is in bondage to the income-tax collector or the Poor Law officials, may see all the world. I suppose he may. With sufficient health, enterprise, and impudence, a young fellow could inveigle himself overseas without paying a lot of money to the P. & O. Company; though it wants some doing nowadays, under the present rules of the Mercantile Marine Board and the seafarers’ unions. Shipowners do not lightly engage to pay compensation for accidents to inexperienced hands whose sole recommendation is that they want to see the world so wide. As for getting a berth for the voyage cheaply, it would be foolish to suppose that agents for passenger ships are willing to forgive the fact that you are poor, and will shake Cornucopia about freely. Why should they? You have to pay across the counter in exchange for a ticket, and at the post-war rates. If anyone doubts that this is a hard world, let him cut the painter at Port Said, with a shilling in his pocket, and note what will happen. In some difficult regions you must travel on foot with the natives, and live with them; and that costs very little, even in a land otherwise expensive, but those unsophisticated coasts must first be reached. That simple way of a nomad is all very well in the wilderness, but I think any reasonable man, however thirsty he may be for a draught of primitive Life, would hesitate before sequestering himself in native cities like Calcutta and Singapore, counting cannily the lesser coins, and traveling about in third-class carriages. I noticed that even Mr. Tatchell shrank from the prospect of getting from island to island of Indonesia with the deck passengers. I am not surprised. One is easily satisfied with an occasional hour on the lower deck, in converse with a picturesque native elder. But to eat and sleep there for weeks, among the crowing cocks, the banana skins, the babies, the dried fish, and men and women spitting red stuff after chewing betel nut! It has been done, I believe, but the shipping companies and all their officers set their faces against it. They do not encourage Europeans to travel even second class in those seas, though there is hardly any difference between the cabins of the two classes. Of course, if one were anything of an Orientalist, it would be ridiculous to keep to the first saloon with the Europeans when there were Arab and Chinese merchants in an inferior saloon of the ship.

I do not know how one plans a long voyage, and maintains the excellent plan scientifically through all its difficulties. I have never done any planning. A ship seems to have drifted my way at last by chance, and then, if I did not hesitate too long about it, I went in her, though always for a reason very inadequate. One bitter and northerly Easter I read, because gardening was impossible, Bates’ “Naturalist on the River Amazons.” The famous illustration of that spectacled entomologist in trousers and a check shirt, standing with an insect net in a tropical forest surrounded by infuriated toucans, fixed me when casually I pulled the volume off a library shelf. The book had not been specially commended to me, but its effect was instant. And the picture that artful naturalist drew of the pleasures of Santa Belem de Para, when contrasted with the sleet of an English spring, made me pensive over a fire. I had never seen the tropics. And what a name it is, the Amazons! And what a delightful book is Bates’!

Yet when I enquired into this enticement, Para might as well have been in another star. One may go cheaply to Canada, and risk it. That trick cannot be played on the tropics with impunity. I had the propriety to guess that. Then, one night, a sailor came home from sea, and just before he left he spoke of his next voyage. They were going to Para, and up the Amazon; and up a tributary of that river never before navigated by an ocean-going steamer. “Nonsense,” I said, “it cannot be done—not if you draw, as you say you do, nearly twenty-four feet. And it means rising about six hundred feet above sea level.”

“You can talk,” the sailor replied, “but I’ve seen the charter. We’re going, and I wish we weren’t. Sure to be fevers. Besides, a ship has no right inside a continent.”

I began thinking of Bates. My friend turned up the collar of his coat before going into the rain. “Look here,” he said, “if you have any doubt about it, you may take the trip. There’s a cabin we don’t use.”

I never gave that preposterous suggestion a second thought, but I did write, for a lively morning newspaper, my sailor’s mocking summary of what that strange voyage might have in store. The editor, a day later, met me on the office stairs. “That was an amusing lie of yours this morning,” he said. I answered him that it was written solely in the cause of science and navigation. What was more, I assured him earnestly, I had been offered a berth on the ship for the proof of doubters. “Well,” said the editor, “you shall go and prove it.” He meant that. I could see by the challenging look in his eye that nothing much was left about which to argue. He prided himself on his swift and unreasonable decisions.

Somehow, as that editor descended the stairs, showing me the finality of his back, the attractive old naturalist of the Amazon with his palms at Para, toucans, spectacles, butterflies, and everlasting afternoon of tranquillity in the forest of the tropics, was the less alluring. This meant packing up; and for what? Even the master of the steamer could not tell me that.

It is better to obey the mysterious index, without any fuss, when it points a new road, however strange that road may be. There is probably as much reason for it, if the truth were known, as for anything else. It would be absurd, in the manner of Browning and Mr. Tatchell, to greet the unseen with a cheer, and thus flatter it, yet when circumstances begin to look as though they intend something different for us, perhaps the proper thing to do is to get into accord with them, to see what will happen.

There was no doubt about that voyage, either. I take this opportunity to thank an autocratic editor for his cruel decision one morning on the office stairs, a trivial episode he has completely forgotten. It is worth the break, and the discomfort of a winter dock, and the drive out in the face of hard westerly weather, to come up a ship’s companion one morning, and to see for the first time the glow of sunrise above the palisade of the jungle. You never forget the warm smell of it, and its light; though that simple wonder might not be thought worth a hard fight with gales in the western ocean. Yet later, when by every reasonable estimate of a visitor accustomed to the assumption of man’s control of nature the forest should have ended, yet continues as though it were eternal—savage, flamboyant, yet silent and desolate—the voyager begins to feel vaguely uneasy. He cannot meet that lofty and sombre regard with the cheerful curiosity of the early part of the voyage. He feels lost. St. Paul’s cathedral does not seem so influential as once it did, nor man so important. And perhaps it is not an unhealthful surmise either that man may be only a slightly disturbing episode on earth after all, and had better look out; a hindering and humbling notion of that sort would have done him no harm, if of late years it had given him pause.

To see the glow of sunrise above the palisade of
the jungle.

Well, something of that sort is about as much as one should expect to get out of the experience, that and the ability to call for a porter in Fijian or Chinese. But is it not sufficient? It is hardly as tangible as hearing earlier than the people at home of the wealth of oil at Balik-papan, or what comes of getting in at the Rand on the ground floor. Even as book material it is not so sparkling as Lady Hester Stanhope, or as exciting as sword-fish angling off the Bermudas. Nor does it provide any inspiration, once you are home again, to get to work to plant the British flag where it will do the lucky ones most good. There seems hardly anything in it, and yet you feel that you could not have done any better, and are not sorry it turned out just so.

Besides, there were the men one met. It would not be easy to analyse the impulse which sent one travelling, an impulse strong enough, if vague, to overcome one’s natural desire to be let alone. What did one want, or expect to learn? It would be hard to say. But you are aware, in rare moments, that you have got something almost as good as a word about a new oil-field, through some chance converse with a stranger, about nothing in particular. For it might have been night in the Malacca Strait, with little to give reasonable conviction of the realities except the stars, the tremor of the ship’s rail, and the glow of a shipmate’s cigar; and the other man might not have said much. You had previously noticed he was not that kind. But his casual relation of an obscure adventure—rather as if the droning of the waters had become a significant utterance—gave an abiding content to the shadows.

II

What right have we to travel, when better men have to stay at home? But it would be unwise to attempt an answer to that question, for certainly it would lead, as did the uncorking of the bottle that imprisoned the Genie, to much smoke and confusion. We should not poke about with a naked light amid the props which uphold the august and many-storied edifice of society, even to make sure of our rightful place there. It was a reading of Lord Bryce’s Memories of Travel that started so odd a doubt in my mind. When I had finished it I did not begin to think of packing a bag. I felt instead that I had no title to do that. Lord Bryce, that learned man, had been remembering casually Iceland and the tropics, Poland, the Mountains of Moab, and the scenery of North America. But he did not make me feel that those places should be mine. He, that great scholar, made them desirable, yet infinitely remote, and reservations for wiser men, among whom, if I were bold enough to intrude, my inconsequence would be detected instantly. After reading his book of travel I felt that it would be as wrong in me to possess and privily to treasure priceless Oriental manuscripts as to claim the right to see coral atolls in the Pacific or prospects of the Altai.

We may lack the warrant to travel, even if we have the means. Lord Bryce made it coldly clear that few of us are competent to venture abroad. He made me feel that much that would come my way would be wasted on me, for I have little in common with the encyclopædias. The wonders would loom ahead, would draw abeam, would pass astern, and I should not see them; they would not be there. The pleasures of travel, when we are candid about them, are separated by very wide deserts and tedious, where there is nothing but sand and the dreary howling of wild dogs. An Eastern city may grow stale in a night. “‘Dear City of Cecrops’ saith the poet; but shall we not say, ‘Dear City of Zeus?’” There are days when the ocean is a pond. Its relative importance then appears to be that of a newspaper of last week. Sometimes, too, you do not want to hear that there are three miles of water under you; no less. What of it? In nasty weather the end so far below you of the last two miles is of less importance than the beginning of the first.

It may also happen that when at last your ship reaches that far place whose name is as troubling as the name of the star to which you look in solitude, that—what is it you do there? You gaze overside at it from your trite anchorage, unbelievingly. The first mate comes aft, leisurely, rubbing his hands. You do not go ashore. What has become of the magic of a name? You go below with the mate, who has finished his job, for a pipe. To-morrow will do for Paradise, or the day after. One morning I reached Naples by sea, and I well remember my first sight of it. The stories I had heard of that wonderful bay! The ecstatic letters in my pocket from those who were instructing me how nothing of my luck should be missed! But it was raining. It was cold. I had been travelling for an age. There was hardly any bay, and what I could see of it was as glum as a bad mistake. There was a wet quay, some house fronts that were house-fronts, and a few cabs. I took a cab. That was better than walking to the railway station, and quicker. It is quite easy for me to describe my first sight of Naples and its bay.

But Lord Bryce was not an incompetent traveller. He could see through any amount of rain and dirt. He was competent indeed; fully, lightly, and with grace. To other tourists he may have appeared to be one of the crowd, trying hard to get some enjoyment out of a lucky deal in rubber or real estate, and not knowing how to do it. But he was not bored. He was quiet merely because he knew what he was looking at. What to us would have been opaque he could see through; yet I doubt whether he would have said anything about it, unless he had been asked. And why should we ask a fellow-traveller whether he can see through what is opaque? We never do it, because our own intelligence tells us that what is dark cannot be light. What we do not see is not there.

Yet how much we miss, when on a journey, Lord Bryce reveals. There was not often a language difficulty for him. When he looked at the wilderness of central Iceland he knew the cause of it, and could explain why tuffs and basalts make different landscapes. When he was in Hungary and Poland the problems we should have brushed aside as matters no Englishman ought to be expected to understand, became, in the light of his political and historical lore, simple and relevant. Among the islands of the South Seas, with their unsolved puzzles of an old continental land mass and of race migrations, so learned a traveller was just as much at ease. Once I remarked to an old voyager, who in some ways resembled Lord Bryce, that it was in my dreams to visit Celebes. “But,” he remarked coldly, “you are not an ethnologist.” No; and I can see now, after these Memories of Travel, that I have other defects as a traveller.

Yet I cannot deny that a craving for knowledge, when abroad, may sometimes come over me, with a dim resemblance to the craving for food or sleep. But if I go to my note-books in later years and discover that though I had forgotten them I had many interesting facts stored away, nevertheless it is evident the valuable information does very well where it is. It will never be missed. Its importance has faded. There are other things, however, one never entered in a notebook, and never tried to remember, for they were of no seeming importance then or now, things seen for an instant only, or smelt, or heard in the distance, which are never forgotten. They will recur from the past, often irrelevantly, even when the memory is not turned that way, as though something in us knew better what to look for in life than our trained eyes.

III

Travel, we are often told, gives light to the mind. I have wondered whether it does. Consider the sailors. They are supposed to travel widely. They see the cities of the world, and the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep. And—well, do you know any sailors? If you do, then you may have noticed that not infrequently their opinions seem hardly more valuable than yours and mine. Yet it must be said for them that they rarely claim an additional value for their opinions because they have anchored off Colombo. They know better than that. They know, very likely, that all the cities of the world can no more give us what was withheld at our birth than our unaided suburb. As much convincing folly may be heard at Penang as at Peckham. The sad truth is, one is as likely to grow wiser during a week-end at Brighton as in a “black Bilbao tramp

With her load-line over her hatch, dear lass,

And a drunken Dago crew,

And her nose held down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,

From Cadiz, south on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new.”

The fascination and illusion of that Out Trail! The other day, a man, a wise and experienced traveller, who knows deep water better than most of us, who has hunted whales, and even enjoyed being out of soundings in literature, overheard a voice near us on a dock-head exclaim in delight at the sight of a ship outward bound: “I wish I were aboard her.” He said to me quietly, “I felt like that, too, but really, you know, I don’t want to be aboard. I’m a little bit afraid of the sea.”

So am I. That is one thing, at least, I have learned in travel. I do not love the sea. The look of it is disquieting. There is something in the very sound of it that stirs the apprehension we feel when we listen to noble music; we became inexplicably troubled. It is not the fear of mishap, though that may not be absent. It is more than that, for after all one is much safer in a good ship than when crossing the road at Charing Cross.

It may be a surmise of one’s inconsequence in that immensity of sky and water. And our inconsequence has not been always obvious to us. The ministrations of a city nourish the pride of the social animal and yet make him a dependable creature. Turn him into the open and he shrinks from all that light. The dread problems that our energetic fellow-men create in the cities of the plain make us myopic through the intensity of our peering alarm. We become sure that even the empyrean must watch our activities with grave interest. Yet we may be deceived in that; for on blue water one cannot help noting that the sky does not appear to act with any regard for our interest, and the sea itself is so inscrutable, so vast, and moves with a rhythm that so diminishes one’s own scope and measure, that a voyager may imagine he is confronted by majesty, though an impersonal majesty, without ears or eyes or ruth. That is not comfortable to a sense of self-importance.

Do we travel to learn such things? Of course not. The promise to diminish a feeling of self-importance in a traveller is not one of Messrs. Cook’s happy inducements. We do not travel for that. If we get it at all, we are welcome to it, without extra charge. You must pay more if you want to have a cabin to yourself. There are additional charges, too, if you would deviate from the schedule of your voyage. Should you put off at Penang for a week, and continue by the next ship, that fun must be paid for. Eager still for the end of the rainbow—which, so far on a long voyage, you have not reached, to your surprise and disappointment—you leave your ship at Barbadoes, consult the chart, and judge that what you really want is at Yucatan, at Surinam, at Trinidad, or some other place where you are not; and at a great expense of time and money you go. No use. There again you find that you have taken yourself with you. No rainbow’s end!

I have often wondered what people see who travel round the world in a liner furnished with the borrowings of a city’s club-life and other occasions for idling; Panama, San Francisco, Honolulu, Yokohama, Hong-Kong, Batavia, and Rangoon, all those variations of scenery for the club windows; and so home again. What do they see? The anchorage of Sourabaya is no more revealing than that of Havre, if warmer: a mole, ships at rest, some straight miles of ferro-concrete quays in the distance, flat grey acres of the galvanised roofs of sheds, and a tower or two beyond. True, there are the clouds of the tropics to watch, and a Malay polishing the ship’s brass. Only the mate and the captain are at lunch, for the others have gone ashore. You may make what romance you can out of that.

The others have gone ashore? All the great seaports I have seen have been very much alike; and these liners rarely stay at one long enough to make easy the discovery of a difference. You have no time to get lost. You arrive, and then an inexorable notice is chalked on the blackboard at the head of the ship’s gangway, to which a quartermaster draws your attention as you leave the ship. The old city is two miles away, and the ship sails in two hours. No chance, you see, to get comfortably mislaid and forgotten. Besides, you run off with a car-load of other passengers. Unless the car skids into a ditch the game is up.

Well, after all, that grudging sense of disappointment comes of intemperance with fascinating place-names and illusions. We expect to have romance displayed for us, as though it were a greater Wembley, and it is not. Travellers who “dash” round the world, as the febrile interviewers tell us, who dash across the Sahara or the Atlantic, then get into other speedy engines and dash again, expectant of a full life and their money’s worth, might as well dash to Southend and back till they run over a dog; or dash their brains out, and thus fulfil their destiny. But I am not decrying travel, though sailors, I have been made painfully aware, are much amused by the expectations of those to whom a ship is an interlude of variegated enchantment between the serious affairs of life. I enjoy travel, and a little of it now and then is good for us, if we do not make demands which only lucky chance may fulfil.

The best things in travel are all undesigned, and perhaps even undeserved. I had never seen a whale, for instance, and recently was watching the very waters of the Java Sea where one of them might have been good enough to reward me. Nothing like a whale appeared. Too late for that sort of thing, perhaps. This is the day of the submarine. Or perhaps I stared from the ship listlessly, and with no faith, not caring much whether there were whales and wonders in these days or not. Anyhow, my last chance went. On my way home, while just to the south of Finisterre, I came out of my cabin a little after sunrise merely to look at the weather (which was fine) and a tiny cloud, rounded and defined, was dispersing over the waves, less than a mile away. Shrapnelling? Then a number of those faint rounded clouds of vapour shaped intermittently. The ship was in the midst of a school of whales. There was a sigh—like the exhaust of a locomotive—and a body which seemed to rival the steamer in bulk appeared alongside; we barely missed that shadow of a submerged island. The officer of the watch told me afterwards that the ship’s stem nearly ran over it.

That was a bare incident, however, and perhaps not worth counting. Yet all the significant things in travel come that way. Once in heavy weather I saw a derelict sailing ship; our steamer left its course to inspect her. But she was dead. There was no movement aboard her, except the loose door of a deckhouse. It flung open as we drew near, but nobody came out. The seas ran as they pleased about her deck fixtures. It was sunset, and just when we thought she had gone, for she had slipped over the summit of an upheaval, her skeleton appeared again in that waste, far astern, against the bleak western light. I felt in that moment that only then had the sea shown itself to me.

It is the chance things in travel that appear to be significant. The light comes unexpectedly and obliquely. Perhaps the gods try us. They want to see whether we are asleep. If we are watchful we may get a bewildering hint, but placed where nobody would have expected to find it. We may spend the rest of the voyage wondering what that meant. A casual coast suddenly fixed by so strange a glow that one looks to the opposite sky fearfully; the careless word which makes you glance at a stranger, and doubt your fixed opinion; an ugly city, which you are glad to leave, transfigured and jubilant as you pass out of its harbour; these are the incidents that give a sense of discovery to a voyage. We are on more than one voyage at a time. We never know where Manoa may be. There are no fixed bearings for the City of Gold.

IV

The reader of travellers’ tales is a cautious fellow, not easily fooled. He is never misled by facts which do not assort with his knowledge. But he does love wonders. His faith in dragons, dog-headed men, bearded women, and mermaids, is not what it used to be, but he will accept good substitutes. The market is still open to the ingenious. Any lady who is careful to advise her return from the sheikhs is sure to have the interviewers surprise her at the dock-side. She need only come back from Borneo, by the normal liner, and whisper “head-hunters” to the ever-ready note-books; and if she displays a parang which some Dyak never used except for agricultural purposes, that will be enough to rouse surprise at her daring.

But what are facts? There are limits, as we know, to the credulity of our fellows, as once Mr. Darwin, who considered exact evidence so important, discovered with a shock. What we really want is evidence we can understand, like that most discreet and wary old critic, the aunt of the young sailor. She quizzed him humorously about his flying fish, but was serious at once over that chariot wheel which was brought up on a fluke of his ship’s anchor in the Red Sea. She knew well enough where it was Pharaoh got what he asked for. Give us evidence in accord with our habits of thought, and we know where we are.

Even I have discovered that there are readers of travellers’ tales who decline anything to which there is no reference in Whitaker’s Almanac. A very prudent attitude of mind. I cannot find fault with it because it does not accept mermaids from us, but I do suggest there may be things in the world which have not yet come under Mr. Whitaker’s eye. A little scepticism preserves the soul, though infertility would result if the soul were encased in it; which it rarely is, because luckily sceptics only disbelieve what is foreign to them, and accept in unquestioning faith whatever accords with their philosophy. It is true that more scepticism in the past might have saved us from many dragons and visiting angels, which in its absence spawned and flourished with impunity. On the other hand it would have shut out Mount Zion for ever. It must be said, too, that the good readers who repudiate with blighting amusement those narratives of travel which do not accord with Mr. Whitaker’s valuable index, will yet take, and with their eyes shut, much that compels seasoned travellers to smile bitterly.

If you refer to Mr. Whitaker for the Spice Islands, or the Moluccas, for instance, you will fail to find concerning them one little fact: it is not advertised by Mr. Whitaker; not important enough, perhaps. I should never have known it myself, only I was there, once. I am not at all sure the fact is so insignificant that it should pass without notice, so I will record it here. At Ternate, an island which has been forgotten since white men ceased to kill each other for its cloves, it is easy to believe that you have really escaped from the world. Great gulfs of space and light separate you at Ternate from all the agitations by which civilized communities know that they are the buds, full of growing pains, on the tree of life. They are excellent gulfs of light. There are no agitations. Even the typhoons which herald the changes of the seasons, and not so far away, leave Ternate alone. Its volcano—the volcano is all the island—may blow up some day; but we should not expect earthly felicity to shine tranquilly for ever. Therefore while the isle persists it is delightful to walk the strands and by-paths of that oceanic garden of the tropics, and to feel the mind, so recently numbed by the uproar caused in the building of the Perfect State, revive in quietude. One day, on Ternate, I passed through the shade of a nutmeg grove, and came upon a lane at the back of the village. I could smell vanilla, and looked about for that orchid, and presently found it growing against a sugar palm. Behind that odorous shrubbery was a native house, and beyond the house, and far below it, the blue of the sea. Nobody was about. It was noon. It was hot. The high peak of Tidore across the water had athwart its cone a cloud which was as bright as an impaled moon. I saw no reason why this earth should not be a good place for us, and, thanking my fortune, idled along that lane till I saw another house, set back among hibiscus. It was a Malay home, but larger and better than is usual, for it had more timber in it. Along the front of the verandah was a board with a legend in Malay, the Communist Party of India. This confused me, so I strolled in to look closer, and saw hanging within the verandah portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, and Radek; there were others, though I was not communist enough to recognise them; but there they were in my lonely tropical garden, isolated by those gulfs of light and space from Moscow. The Dutch Resident, on hearing later of my extraordinary discovery, merely shot out his lower lip and spread his hands. Why yes, those little meeting houses were all over the East Indies. Such places, as well as the cinematograph.

It is possible that that little fact, as a minor incident of travel, even if it is unknown to Mr. Whitaker, yet may qualify in its own time a number of those facts which are quite well-known to him and to us.

When we are gazing about us in a strange land it is not easy to distinguish what is of importance from what is of no account. You can never tell whether the words of deepest significance are whispered at Government House or in some low haunt near the docks. It is a matter of luck. Time will show. In any case, even if you feel sure you have been vouchsafed a peep into the Book of Doom, and there saw, in the veritable script of an archangel, what you are at once anxious to announce to your fellows for their good, you may save yourself the trouble. If it is not already known, nobody will bother. There is precious little information of importance in the newspapers that has not been long matured in the wood. It is already as old as sin before the man in the street, poor fellow, gapes at it as news.

It may be possible that the hunters of big game miss much while looking for lions, though their thrilling adventures naturally attract most of our attention. And how their records surprise into envy those shy travellers who think lions are quite all right as they are and where they are! The luck of some well-provided travellers is astonishing. They are never bored. They are never still. Only recently I was reading the book of a traveller back from the wilds, whose time had been occupied, while away, in leaping into the jaws of death and out again, which most of us would have found very trying in that heat. Some exercise is good for us, even in the tropics, but cutting that caper too often might do a man serious harm. That equatorial journey appears to have been a long series of frantic but jolly leaps from one threat of extinction to another—the crocodiles, lethal floods, gigantic fish, venomous snakes, and unarmed savages, were everywhere. It was a land where you have to wear top-boots to keep off the anacondas, as one might wear a steel helmet when meteors are about. But such a story is not so surprising as the serious delight with which it is received on publication, and perhaps with entire belief in its ordinary character for a land of that sort. I well understand it; for I can guess from the eager questions that have been put to me about the ubiquity of leopards by night, the serpents which festoon the forest, and the other noticeable wayside affairs of the wilderness, what could be done with a cheerful and fertile fancifulness. It would never do to disclose the plain truth, which is that one can grow as weary of the sameness of Borneo as of that of Islington. I know of one intrepid sojourner on far beaches, a novelist, who fascinates a multitude of readers with livid and staccato fiction in which figure island princesses whose breasts are dangerous with hidden daggers. Head-hunters and dissolute whites move there in a darkness which means Winchesters, but no sleep; even the intense beauty of those beaches is so like evil that only reckless men could face it. Yet in reality those islands are as placid as though laved by the waters of the Serpentine. A migration from Piccadilly to their shores would make the lovely but tigrish princesses show for what they are, no more dangerous than the young ladies peeling the potatoes at Cadby Hall. Indeed, their bold chronicler, who stimulates feverish longing in the dreary lassitude of England’s wage earners with a violent drug distilled from the beach refuse of that distant archipelago, does most of his work in the bed of a rest-house, which is never approached by a danger worse than a falling coconut.

It seems possible for a romanticist, if he is cynical enough, and if he injects his stimulant with a syringe of about the measure of a foot-pump, to have a nice success with those who suffer from the speed and distraction of our homeland; for though the sufferers will take any stimulant, yet their nerves respond to very little that is not as coarse as a weed-killer. This should not be regretted. It would be dismal, indeed, if they were completely insensitive. The high speed of our weeks driven by machinery, the clangour of engines, crime, and politics, the fear which never leaves the poor victims, for they have been parted from the quiet earth which gives shelter and food, have depraved their bodies and starved their natural appetites. It is a wonder that they feel anything, or care for anything. They are left with but a vague yearning for some life, for any life different from their own; but they are so far gone that they cannot conceive that it might be a life of peace and goodwill. Their very sunrises must be bloody, like their familiar news, or they would not know it for the dayspring; yet the full measure of their fall from grace, which only an alienist could rightly gauge, is that they are not satisfied with a dusky bosom unless it conceals a knife.

But when you are out in these barbarous lands you find that princesses, unluckily, are even less noticeable than the leopards, and when seen are less beautiful. They do not wear knives in their bosoms for the same reason that other charmers dispense with them. Indeed, there is no end to the difference between what you have been led to expect in a place, and what is there. Compare the reality of a tropical forest with its popular picture. That popular notion of it did not grow in the tropics, but in the pages of imaginative fiction and poetry. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it is not so easy to read. One may see more orchids in Kew Gardens in a day than in a year of the tropical woods. If the Garden of Eden had been anything like the Amazon jungle, then our first parents would never have been evicted; they would have moved fairly soon on their own account, without giving notice. A few coloured snakes, on some days, would break the brooding monotony of that forest. They are, however, rarely seen. The animals of these fastnesses seldom show themselves. When they do, it is done inadvertently, and they are off at once. If you meet a tiger when on a ramble by daylight, you may consider yourself lucky if his sudden departure gives you two seconds of him before he is gone for ever. After dark, of course, you would take care that he could not meet you alone, for that place is not yours after sunset, and he knows it.

Tigers, snakes, lovely but malignant nymphs, and head-hunters, are not the dangers. What kills men in the outer wilderness is anxiety, undernourishment, and mosquitoes. The mosquito, the little carrier of malaria, is a more exacting enemy of the adventurer than the harpies and dragons of the fairy tales ever were to knights-errant. He is worse than all the cannibal tribes. Head-hunters, it must be confessed, are far better for conveying liveliness to the pages of a travel book, if it is to be worth the great price usually charged for it. Naturally, a reader wants his money’s worth. A mosquito will not go far, if you are an author, and are writing high romance. When, however, you are dealing personally with the realities of the Congo, you will discover a tendency to feel more concern over the small flies which carry fevers and sleeping sickness than for all the lions and cannibals in Africa. A statue to St. George killing a mosquito instead of a dragon would look ridiculous. But it was lucky for the saint he had only a dragon to overcome.

Now the travellers who accompany cinema operators to the outer dangers are always careful to explain to their eager interviewers, for the lucrative object of a publicity as wide as it can be got, the horrific perils of human flesh-pots, poisoned arrows, giant reptiles, and the other theatrical properties which are recognised instantly by everybody with the requisite awe. On the other hand, we learn from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine that the young men who go to Africa to hunt down that elusive creature the trypanosome of sleeping sickness, venture out unannounced, though they have spent years, and not weeks, in preparing themselves for their perilous quest. They go unannounced, are granted but £100 a year as a reward, and return—if they have that luck—less recognisable than the firemen of their ships; for the very firemen, as we know, have been the subject of happy verse. Yet compared with the skill and enterprise and courage needed for the hunting of that trypanosome, the killing of lions is no more than the handing of milk to kittens. The threats and terrors of the mythologies, the cynocephali, anthropophagi, gorgons, and krakens, were but coarse grimaces to the premonition which would make a modern traveller scuttle home, if he allowed it to numb his heart when he is alone, and hungry and fatigued, in the place where the tiny harbingers of fevers and dissolution are at their liveliest. St. George, with all the sacred incantations of the Church, could not fight such a dragon. But there the difficulty is. It cannot be made into a dramatic picture. It is merely an invisible presence, a haunting diffusion, like doom itself. It cannot be fought. There can be no heroics. There can be no escape. It is one with the sly hush of the wilderness.

V

A friend who lives on Long Island says in a letter: “A tall Cunarder putting out to sea gives me a keener thrill than anything the Polo Grounds or the Metropolitan Opera can show.” No doubt; for he is not a sailor but a man of letters. It is proper that to him the sight of a distant ship, outward bound, should be more appealing than anything he would see at the Opera House. He knows those operas, which are like nothing on earth except operas; but the tall ship, as he calls it, standing out into windy space, rarefied by overwhelming light, to him is Argo; but to a sailor Argo is a legend and nothing on earth, for he is moved by that sort of thing only when he sees it in opera. The ship may look as unsubstantial and legendary as she likes; she may, because she is outward bound, suggest to a man of letters the happy release he will never get from all his contracts with publishers and house-agents; but she is as hard, and is conditioned by as much that is inexorable, as a money-lender’s mortgage.

But what a poster an artist can make of her! No artist, however gifted, could do that with a publisher’s contract or a mortgage. So a ship, after all, whatever nautical and engineering science may do with her, aided by the tastes and habits of millionaires, and the rules and regulations of many committees of exacting experts, must be a symbol which still suggests to men in bondage an undiscovered golden shore, or fleece, of which they will continue to dream, as they dream irrationally of peace while never ceasing to fashion war.

So long as men who must stay ashore are thrilled when they see a liner going out, or do no more on a half-holiday than idle about the docks and speculate around the queer foreign names and ports of registry that show on steamers’ counters, or sit on a beach and throw stones into the water, we may still hope to change the ugly look of things. There is precious little sustenance of hope in whatever keeps us industrious, but there is a chance for us whenever we cease work and sink into idle stargazing.

Stuck on a corner of the morning railway station, where we cannot miss it though usually we have not the time to stop and look at it, is a large poster inviting us to See the Midnight Sun. It shows a liner, and she is heading towards an Arctic glory as bright as any boy’s dream of a great achievement. But it is not stuck there for boys to look at it, though they do. It is meant for those who have been so practical and level-headed in a longish life that they can afford a yachting cruise to the Arctic Circle. Doubtless, therefore, they make those cruises. I can account for that poster in no other way. It is one of the strangest and most significant facts in industrial society. All very well for some of us to read—wasting time as wantonly as if we had a dozen lives to play with—every volume on Arctic travel we can reach, knowing as we read that we shall never even cross the Pentland Firth.

But that station poster is addressed to those who are supposed never to dream, for they have attained to Threadneedle Street. What do they want with the Midnight Sun? Haven’t they got the “Morning Post”? But there you are. Even now they feel they have missed something, and whatever it is they will go to the Arctic to look for it. Cannot they find it in Threadneedle Street? Apparently not. That poster on a suburban station, though I cannot afford to miss the train to examine it for useful details, is like a faint promising hail from a time not yet come. Man is still in his early youth. He may come back from an Arctic holiday some day, or a recreation in China, push over Threadneedle Street with a laugh, and begin anew.

Men of letters who gaze longingly after departing ships, and men of business who are in those ships without the excuse of business, are proof enough that their many inventions, so far, have not got them what they wanted. For London is not quite the loveliness we meant to make it, and we know it. The ruthless place dismays us. In our repulsion from it we say it ought to be called Dementia, and invent golf and the week-end cottage to revive the soul it deadens without recompense. All to no purpose. There is nothing for it but to destroy London and rebuild it nearer to the heart’s desire or else to escape from it, if we can; though no guarding dragon of a grim prison was ever such a sleepless, cunning, and ugly-tempered brute as the machine we have made with our own hands. No wonder it pays to decorate the walls of the capital with romantic but seditious pictures of palms, midnight suns, coasts of illusion and ships outward bound. Nothing could so plainly indicate our revolt from the affairs we must somehow pretend to venerate.

It is not the sea itself, not all that salt water, which we find attractive. Most of us, I suppose, are a little nervous of the sea. No matter what its smiles may be like, we doubt its friendliness. It is about as friendly as the volcano which is benign because it does not feel like blowing up. What draws us to the sea is the light over it. Try listening, in perfect safety, to combers breaking among the reefs on a dark night, and then say whether you enjoy the voice of great waters. No, it is the wonder of light without bounds which draws us to the docks to overcome the distractions and discomforts of departure. We see there is wide freedom in the world, after all, if only we had the will to take it. And unfailingly we make strange landfalls during an escape, coasts of illusion if you like, and under incredible skies, but sufficient to shake our old conviction of those realities we had supposed we were obliged to accept. There are other worlds.

VI

My journeys have all been the fault of books, though Lamb would never have called them that. They were volumes which were a substitute for literature when the season was dry. A reader once complained to me, and with justice, that as a literary feuilletonist I betrayed no pure literary predilections. “You never devote your page,” he said fretfully, “to the influence of the Pleiades. You never refer to 18th century literature. You never look back on names familiar to all who read Latin. What is interesting to truly curious and bookish people might not exist for you. I wonder, for example, if Nahum Tate were mentioned in a conversation, whether you would be able to say what it meant.”

Well, not exactly that. I fear my readiness for the challenge would not pass the test. All that would happen to me would be a recollection of white walls, bright but severe, on which are scattered black memorial tablets, one of them with a ship over it carved in alabaster. An interior as cool and quiet as a mausoleum. There are shadows moving on the luminous white; June trees are murmuring outside. There is a smell of clothes preserved till Sunday in camphor and in sandalwood boxes. A big venerable man is perched high in a rich and glowing mahogany box, whose lifted chin, jutting saliently from white sideboard whiskers, has a dent in its centre; he is talking, with his eyes shut, to one he calls Gard, and I listen to him with deep interest, for once that old man served with John Company, which to a minor figure in his congregation seems miraculous. Then we all stand, and sing the words of a poet strangely named Tate & Brady. Would anyone wish me to quote the words, in proof? Certainly not. There is no need. When we come out of that building there is a stone awry on the grass by the door, commemorating one who was a “Master-Mariner, of Plymouth,” and a verse can be just deciphered on it, which reads:

Thou, as a gallant bark from Albion’s coast,
The storms all weathered and the ocean crost,
Sinks into port in some well-favoured isle,

Where billows never roar, and brighter seasons smile.

The learned literary critics may be as wise as they please, but there is no undoing the early circumstances which have made some names in literature of significance to us, and have put other names, perhaps even greater, forever in the dark. Our literary predilections were cast at our birth. So much depends, too, on where we heard a name first, and what was about the book when we read it. That is the reason why my correspondent’s letter is not irrelevant here, for it caught me out. It gave away the game. It showed me that I could never be a critic of letters. When his complaint came to me, some books for review were beside me. But what was I doing? Sitting in the shade, looking absently at a dazzling summer afternoon just beyond the chair, for I had just read with close attention this fragment in English:

From three to nine miles north-eastward of the northern part of Sangi is a group of islands named Nipa, Bukit, Poa, and Liang, respectively, and about nine miles farther eastward is a chain of six islets and two detached reefs, which extend about nine miles in a north-northeast and opposite directions. From Inis islet, the southernmost of this chain, a reef of rocks extends some distance southward, and it should be given a good berth. All the above islets are covered with coconut trees, but very little is known about them.

Then there followed, for over three hundred closely printed pages, references to many outlandish names, probably occult, such as Busu Busu (“good drinking water may be obtained from a spring at the foot of the hill behind the missionary’s house”), Berri Berri Road, Rau Strait (“it has not been surveyed and is dangerous”), Tanjong Salawai, Pulo Gunong Api (I know enough to say that that means the island of the mountain of fire), Gisi and Pakal, Ceram Laut (“is high and hilly, and had on it, in 1898, a remarkable tree, 428 feet over the sea, which makes a good mark”), Suruake of the Goram Islands (“the inhabitants are quarrelsome and warlike ... anchorage off Wiseleat village, on the north side, in 24 fathoms, at over one mile from the shore and 130 yards from the steep to reef, with a hawser to the latter to prevent driving”). I had been idling with that book, with the work of the latest enterprising novelists waiting beside me for my immediate attention, all the morning, and still could not let it go. Then came the querulous letter pointing out my indifference to the English literature of the 18th century; which in one respect was unjust, for if once I got going on Gulliver I might soon be in prison for sedition. Yet the rebuke was well merited. I would sooner read any volume of Directions for Pilots than the Latin poets. (And I should like to ask whether Ceram Laut has not been sighted since 1898). On the whole, I would much rather sit in a cabin of a ship which had just made fast again, and listen to the men who had brought her home, than read the best modern fiction. I should feel nearer to the centre of life. Never mind the name of the book which had made that a finer day for me. You will not find it in the circulating libraries; but it has an official rote, initialled, and is guaranteed by the Hydrographic Office, Admiralty; so there must be something in it. The volume, in fact, is mysterious only in the queer effect it has upon me. I dare not commend it for general reading, but I myself would sooner peruse it than the essays of Addison because I get more out of it. I should like to describe, in some detail, the place where I bought it, the man who sold it to me, what he said about it, and the seclusions of the Java and Arafura Seas where, far from all contact with English literature, I afterwards examined it. One sunrise, by the aid of this very book, I knew what I saw ahead on the horizon was Pulo Gunong Api.

VII

Someone stumbled down the bridge ladder for which I was making. I could see nothing, but I heard the voice of the chief mate. He was annoyed with himself. Since nightfall our steamer had been without body, except the place where one stood. With a steady look it was just possible to find faith in the substance of the alleyway where the two of us paused to gossip, for its white paint might have been the adherence to the ship of the faintest trace of the day which had gone. Somewhere ahead of us a promontory of Africa reached almost to our course. Our course was laid just to miss it. We were keeping watch for its light. But if the void at the world’s end had been under our prow we should not have known it. It was a dark night. An iron door in the alleyway clanged open with an explosion of light. The light projected solidly overside, with an Arab fireman brightly encased in it, who was emptying sacks of ash.

Before daybreak the roar of our cable woke me. When I peered through the cabin port I thought we had anchored in the midst of a cluster of stars. That was Oran. I should see Africa in the morning. When we left Barry Dock with coal the weather was like the punishment for sin; but tomorrow we should see a white town in the sun, the descendants of the Salee rovers, and Africa—Africa for the first time.

Those first impressions! Quite often our first impression of a place is also our last, and it depends solely upon the weather and the food. This is not doing justice to the world. We shall never learn enough to do justice to our world unless there is something in this talk of transmigration and metamorphosis. I might, for instance, have written down Oran as a mere continuation of the coast of Wales, because next morning the captain and I landed at a jetty, wearing oilskins. This was Africa’s coral strand—how quaint it is, the way the romantic use the facts!—and the grandchildren of the Sallee rovers were carrying coal in baskets, from which black liquid poured down their bodies. To judge by their appearance of bowed and complete submission, every drop of pirate blood had been washed out of them long ago.

There might have been mountains behind the town, though it was hard to see them. Something seemed to be there, but it was thin and smeared. Africa, so far as I could see it that morning, was the office of a shipping agent, where we gossiped of steamers and men we knew, looked at maps on the walls, and wondered what the agent’s fading photographs represented. Then we caught an electric tram, which took us to an hotel in a French town, a town well-ordered and righteously commercial, and garrisoned by French soldiers in cherry-colored bloomers; for this was years ago. The bedroom had a tiled floor, but no fireplace, because the house was built on the theory that we were in Africa, and by getting under a red bale of eiderdown one managed to keep from perishing.

Well, Oran chose to show itself the next morning. You could see then that Wales was very far to the north. Winter, perhaps, had found out in the night that it was in the wrong place. It had gone home. It was not worth while returning to the ship, so I stayed ashore.

The best moments of a traveller are not likely to be divined from the list of the ship’s ports of call. They are inconsequential. It is no good looking for them. They do not seem to be native to any particular spot on earth. They have no relation to the chart. It is impossible to define every one of their elements, and, worse luck, they are not rewards for endurance and patience. You do not go to them. They surprise you as you pass. Nor should they serve as material for travel narrative unless you would make your report delusive, for they have no geographical bearings. Nobody is likely to find them again. It is no good talking about them. Yet without them travel would be worse than the job of the urban dust collector. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and there is no telling how and in what place the happy incidence of light and understanding will come.

Last summer, when walking through a sunken Dorsetshire lane, there was the ghost of an odour I knew, though I could not name it; and at that moment I began to think of a man I met in France early in the war. I climbed the bank to see what was growing above. Bean flowers! Any survivor of the First Hundred Thousand will remember that odour while he lives. The memory of Hesketh Prichard and the smell of bean flowers make for me the same apparition: the white bones of Ypres in the first June of it. Smell is likely to have much to do with a first impression. The Somme battleground, once you were under its threat, I think, was raw marl and smoking rubbish. It doesn’t do, to-day, to walk unexpectedly into the whiff of a place where old rubbish is mouldering in a field on a moist day, not if you are with friends; they may think you are mad; they would not be far wrong, either.

Yes, smell has a lot to do with it. It recalls what the eye registered, put away, and forgot. I shall never forget my first voyage, not while steam tractors are allowed to poison and destroy the streets of London. The gust of hot grease from one of them, as it thunders past, pictures for me what could be seen of the North Sea (December, too!) from the companion hatch of a trawler; a world black and ghast upset out of the sunrise and running down to founder us. The breath of the engine-room puffed up the hatch as she rolled. She had an over-heated bearing somewhere, for the engines had been racing all night; it had been one of those nights at sea. The coaming of the hatch was wet and cold, and the hard wind tasted of iron and salt. The steward was knocking about the coffee cups at the foot of the ladder; but I did not want any. For some unreasonable cause now I do not object to the greasy smell and thunder of steam tractors.

VIII

There should be no itinerary but the course of things. The plan of a journey is made to be broken. Only famous travellers who make daring flights by air to remote coasts to provide aeroplane builders, or manufacturers of synthetic nourishment, with bold advertisements, ever dare to say when we may watch for their return. Let us never challenge the gods, who do not exist, as to-day we all know, yet who may grow peevish if we not only deny their existence, but behave with arrogance, as though to show them that superior man has taken their place.

Reason was only given to us that we might comfort ourselves with it. I remember the smoke-room of a steamer, which was almost deserted, for it was near midnight. Three fellow passengers sat near me, and they were estimating the hour of our arrival in the morning. Their discourse was leisurely and casual, but they were confident; they knew; and with the elaborate and solid worth of that saloon to accommodate even our tobacco smoke, what doubt could there be about human judgments? As to our arrival, we could tell you within about fifteen minutes. I think my fellow-travellers were men of commerce, for they were familiar with the habits of our line and of many other lines; they could judge the hour when we should be home; and they were assured that to relieve humankind of poverty and war would be to invite God’s punishment for unfaithfulness. Then they emptied their glasses and left the place to me and a huge American negro pugilist, who had a fur-lined overcoat and many diamonds, and who spoke to the steward as a gruff man would to a dog.

Our steamer gave the assurance of that astronomical certitude which is inherent in great and impersonal affairs. She held on immensely and with celerity. Sometimes, when one of the screws came out of the water, a loose metal ash-tray on the table forgot itself, became alive and danced, like an escape of the amusement felt by the ship over some secret knowledge she had; hilarity she at once suppressed. The ash-tray became still and apparently ashamed of what it had done. The slow rolling of the steamer was only the maintenance of her poise in a wonderful speed. If your head leaned against the woodwork you could hear the profound murmuring of her energy. We were doing well. No doubt the men who had just gone out were right—at least, about the time of our arrival.

Outside, the promenade deck was vacant. Most of its lights were out. The portal to the room which accommodated our tobacco pipes announced itself to the darkness with a bright red bulb and black lettering. There was an infinity of night. One could not see far into it, but it poured over us in an unending flood. The red bulb seemed rather small after all. There was no sea. There was only an occasional sound and an illusion of fleeting spectres. Going down the muffled stairway to my cabin I met my steward. He warned me that we should be in by seven o’clock. The corridor below was silent, its doors all shut, and another steward was at the end of the empty lane, contemplative, reposeful, the unnecessary watchman of a secure city. The accustomed sounds of the ship, far away and subdued, were the earnest of an inevitable routine and predestination. Almost home now! I switched off the light; began planning the morrow into a well-earned holiday.... And then someone was shaking me with insistence. It was only the steward. The electric light was bright in my eyes.

“Not six yet, surely?”

“Not quite four, sir. But there’s not enough water for her to get in. Better get up now. A tug is expected.”

Here we were then. The engines had done their work. They had stopped. Though it was so early, I could hear people constantly passing along the corridor, and not with their usual leisure. Fussy folk! Plenty of time to shave and put things away! No need to hurry when this was the end of it.

On deck it was still dark. Nothing could be heard but the running of the tide along the body of our stationary ship. The note of the water was pitched curiously high. It was something like the sound of a tide running out quickly over shallows. An officer hurried through a loose group of passengers, politely disengaging himself from their inquiries, and vanished into the darkness of the after-deck. There were only a few lights. They seemed to be irrelevant. Only odd fragments of the ship could be seen. She was but a lump, and was doing nothing, and her people wandered about her busily but without aim. I could hear an officer’s voice loudly directing some business by the poop; there was that sound, and the thin hissing of a steam-pipe.

A big man in an ulster, whom I recognised as one of the fellows who, the night before, had decided at what hour we should arrive, began telling me rapidly how necessary it was for him to catch some train “absolutely without fail.” I think he said he had an important engagement. I was not listening to him very intently. The ship was aground.

But he did not appear to know it. Like the other passengers, he moved to and fro, all ready to start for home, within a few paces of his suit-case. These people waited in confident groups for the tender, guarding their possessions. Some of them were annoyed because the tender was dilatory.

There was no sign of any tender. Beyond us was only the murmuring of the running waters, and the darkness. Through the night a distant sea-lamp stared at us so intently that it winked but once a minute. Its eye slowly closed then, as if tired, but at once became fixed and intent again.

I was leaning over the port side, and the port side was leaning, too. She had a decided list. A seaman came near me and dropped the lead overside. He gave the result to someone behind me, and I turned. Two fathoms! The mate grinned and left us.

The darkness, as we waited for the tender which did not come, was thinned gradually by light from nowhere. I could now see the creature with one yellow eye. It was a skeleton standing in the sea on many legs. Some leaden clouds formed on the roof of night. The waters expanded. Low in the east, where the dawn was a pale streak, as if day had got a bright wedge into the bulk of chaos, was the minute black serration of a town. The guardian lamp at sea grew longer legs as the water fell, and when at last the sun looked at us the skeleton was standing on wide yellow sands. The ship was heeling over considerably now, for she was on the edge of the sands; the engineers put over a ladder and went to look at the propellers.

It was hours past the time of our arrival. There was no tender. There was no water. The distant town was indifferent. It made no sign. Perhaps it did not know we were there. The lady passengers, careless of their appearance, slept in deck chairs, grey and unkempt. The man who had to be in London before noon “without fail” was also asleep, and his children were playing about a coil of rope with a kitten.

IX

My first attempt to read at sea was a dreary failure. Yet how I desired a way to salvation. We were over the Dogger Bank. It was mid-winter. It was my first experience of deep water. A sailor would not call fifteen fathoms deep water; I know that now; yet if you suppose the North Sea is not the real thing when your ship is a trawler, and the time is Christmas, then do not go to find out. Do not look for the pleasure of travel in that form.

That morning, hanging to the guide rope of a perpendicular ladder, and twice thrown off to dangle free in a ship which seemed to be turning over, I mounted to watch the coming of the sun. It was a moment of stark revelation, and I was shocked by it. I could see I was alone with my planet. We faced each other. The size of my own globe—the coldness of its grandeur—the ease with which swinging shadows lifted us out of a lower twilight to glimpse the dawn, an arc of sun across whose bright face black shapes were moving, and then plunged us into gloom again—its daunting indifference! Where was God? No friend was there. There were ourselves and luck. That night a great gale blew.

So I tried Omar Khayyam, which was an act of folly. I could not resign myself even to the ship’s Bible, the only other book aboard. Printed matter is unnecessary when life is acutely conscious of itself, and is aware, without the nudge of poetry, of its fragility and briefness. I tried to read the Christmas number of a magazine, but that was worse than noughts and crosses. “You come into the wheel-house,” said the mate, “and stand the middle watch with me. It’s all right when you face it.” In the still seclusion of the wheel-house after midnight, where the sharpest sound was the occasional abrupt clatter of the rudder chains in their pipes, where the loosened stars shot across the windows and back again, where the faint glow of the binnacle lamp showed, for me, but my companion’s priestly face, and where chaos occasionally hissed and crashed on our walls, I found what books could not give me. The mate sometimes mumbled, or put his face close to the glass to peer ahead. They had a youngster one voyage, he told me, who was put aboard another trawler going home. The youngster was ill. That night it blew like hell out of the north-west. In the morning, so the hands advised the mate, “the youngster’s bunk had been slept in, so they said the other trawler would never get to port, and she didn’t.” I listened to the mate, and the sweep of the waves. The ship trembled when we were struck. But it seemed to me that all was well, though I don’t know why. What has reason to do with it? Is the sea rational?

After that voyage there were others, and sometimes a desert of time to give to books. Yet if to-night we were crossing the Bay, going out, and she was a wet ship, I should have a dim reminder of the sensations of my first voyage, and much prefer the voice of a shipmate to a book. The books then would not be out of the trunk. They would do well where they were, for a time. The first week, uncertain and strange, the ship unfamiliar and not at all like the good ships you used to know so well; her company not yet a community, and the old man annoyed with his owners, his men, his coal, and his mistaken choice of a profession—the first week never sees the barometer set fair for reading. Some minds indeed will never hold tight to a book when at sea. Mine will not. What is literature when you have a trade wind behind you? I have tried a classical author then, but it was easier to keep the eye on the quivering light from the seas reflected on the bright wall of my cabin. It might have been the very spirit of life dancing in my own little place. It was joyous. It danced lightly till I was hypnotised, and slept in full repose on a certitude of the virtue of the world.

But recently there was an attempt, the time being spring, to cut out the dead books from my shelves, the books in which there was no longer any sign of life. Then I took that classical author, rejected one memorable voyage, and looked at his covers. When he was on the ship with me I found him meagre and incommunicative. Something has happened to him in the meantime, however. He is all right now. His covers, I notice, have been nibbled by exotic cockroaches, and their cryptic message adds a value to the classic which I find new and good. Scattered on the floor, too, I see a number of guide books. They are soiled. They are ragged. Their maps are hanging out. When I really needed them I was shy of being seen in their company, and they were left in the ship’s cabin during the day, or in the hotel bedroom. The maps and plans were studied. Sometimes they were torn out of a book and pocketed; I could never find the courage to walk about Rome or Palermo with a Baedeker. It always seemed to me like the wearing of a little Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes on the coat collar.

Those guide books were more interesting on the wet days of a journey, when it was impossible, or undesirable, to go roaming. They were full of descriptions of those things one must on no account overlook when in a country. Yet in the fine morning after a wet day, when I went out without a guide book, the little living peculiarities of the town, which the book had not even mentioned—because everybody ought to be aware of them, of course—were so remarkable that the place where Ariadne was turned into a fountain, and where Aphrodite tried to seduce another handsome young mortal, were forgotten.

I met a cheerful goatherd.

So once, when hunting near Syracuse for “the famous Latonie, or stone quarries, in certain of which the Athenian prisoners were confined,” and several of whom were spared, so the book said, because they could repeat choruses of Euripides, I met a cheerful goatherd, an old man, with a newly fallen kid under his arm, who told me, in an American language so modern that I hardly knew it, that he used to sell peanuts in Chicago. He did not repeat choruses from Euripides, but even the great dramatist, I am sure, would have been surprised by the fables of the peanut merchant. I forgot the quarries, while listening to them. The fabulist and I sat with our backs against a boulder over which leaned an olive tree. The goats stood around, and stared at us; and not, I believe, without some understanding of their master’s stories.

I am reminded of this because a map of southeastern Sicily is hanging out of a book, the banner of a red-letter day. I rescued the volume from the mass of discarded lumber, and found that inside the cover of the book I had drawn a plan of the harbour of Tunis. Why? I’ve forgotten the reason. But I remember Tunis, for I had been drawn thither by this very book, which had said that nobody should leave the Mediterranean without seeing Tunis. There it was, one day. From the deck of my French ship I saw electric trams and the familiar hôtels des étrangers. A galley with pirates at its sweeps was pulling almost alongside us, and desperately I hailed it, threw in my bag, and directed them to take me to a steamer flying the Italian flag, for that steamer, clearly enough, was leaving Tunis at once. That was the ship for me. There was some difficulty with the dark ruffians who manned the galley, who followed me aboard the steamer. There they closed round me, a motley and savage crew. They demanded gold in some quantity, and with menacing flourishes, shattering voices, and hot eager eyes. Their leader was a huge negro in a white robe and a turban, whose expressive gargoyle, with a loose red gash across its lower part, had been pitted by smallpox. I did not like the look of him. He towered over me, and leaned down to bring his ferocity closer to my face. Some Italian sailors stopped to watch the scene, and I thought they were pitying this Englishman. But the latter was weary of Roman ruins, of hotels, of other thoughtful provision for strangers surprising in its open and obvious accessibility, and of guides and thieves—especially of thieves, shameless, insatiable, and arrogant in their demands for doing nothing whatever. At first he had paid them, for he was a weak and silly stranger who did not know the land; but now, sick of it all, he turned wearily on that black and threatening gargoyle while it was still in full spate of Arabic, shook his fist at it, and cried suddenly what chief mates bawl when things are in a desperate plight and constraint is useless. To his astonishment and relief the negro stepped back, turned to his crew and said to them sadly, in plain English, “Come on, it’s no bloody good.” The gang left that ship as modestly as carol singers who find they have been chanting “Christians Awake” to an empty house. Now, evidently guide books cannot lead you to such pleasing interludes, and may even beguile you away from them. I mean that books cannot guide you to those best rewards for travel, unless, of course, they are old and stained. They are full then of interesting addenda of which their editors know nothing, and of symbols with an import only one traveller may read. So when the days come in which, as guide books, they will not be wanted, you may read in them what is not there. This very guide book to the Mediterranean, for example, under the heading of “Oran,” describes it as “the capital of a province, military division, 60,000 inhabitants. It is not certain that Oran existed in the time of the Romans.” Some people would like us to believe that no place on earth can be of much interest unless the Romans once flattened it into meekness. But we have heard far too much of these Romans. They bore us. To-day we call them captains of industry and company promoters. Oran, or what I could see of it in the dark when we arrived, was as rich in promise as though it were thoroughly impeded with classical ruins. There were lights that were a concourse of planets, and as I lay reading in my bunk the ship was so quiet that you could hear the paint crack on a bulkhead rivet. I was reading this very guide book then, and it told me that beyond those calm and mysterious planets were Tlemçen, and Ein Sefra, “an oasis 1,110 metres above the sea level belonging to the Duled Sidi Sheikh. Here one catches a glimpse of the Algerian desert, which is the fringe of the Great Sahara.” I caught that glimpse, too, the next week.

These guide books, when you are home again, are as good as great literature. There, for another instance, is Baedeker’s “Switzerland.” Now the truth is, that book, bought for the first journey to the Alps, was among the things I forgot to pack. It was never missed. It is only to-day that we find it is indispensable. For it was bought in the winter of 1913. Again it was night, when we arrived. A sleigh met us, and took us noiselessly into the vaguely white unknown. Pontresina is a good name. In the morning there were the shutters of a bedroom to be opened, and a child who was with me gazed with wide eyes when the morning light discovered to him a field of ice poised ethereally on clouds, though the night had not gone from the valley below us; above the ice was a tincture of rose on far peaks. Is it likely that he will forget it? Or I? In any case, there is a diorama of those peaks in our guide book, and what rosy light is absent from that picture we can give to it.

X

Mayne Reid once persuaded us that to have a full life we should kill grizzly bears, bison and Indians. We were so sure he was right that school and work in London were then the proof of our reduction to pallor in servitude. We have been, since then, near enough to a bison to try it with a biscuit, but have never seen the smoke of a wigwam even in the distance. There remains with us a faint hope that a day will come when we shall see that smoke, for such a name as Athabasca is still in the world of the topless towers of Ilium; but some records of modern hunters of big game, published exultingly, have cured us of an old affliction of the mind. So far as we are concerned the lives of lions and bears are secure.

We now open a new volume on sport with an antipathy increased to a repugnance we never felt for Pawnees, through the reading of a recent narrative by an American writer, who had been collecting in Africa for a museum. He confessed that if he had not been a scientist he would have felt remorse when he saw the infant still clinging to the breast of its mother, a gorilla, whom he had just murdered; so he shot the infant, without remorse, because he was acting scientifically. As a corpse, the child added to the value of its dead mother; a nice group. That tableau, at that moment when the job was neatly finished, must have looked rather like good luck when collecting types in a foreign slum. He must have had a happy feeling when skinning the child.

The heroic big-game hunter, with his picturesque gear, narrow escapes, and dreadful hardships, is a joke it is easy to understand since our so very recent experience of man himself as a dangerous animal. The sabre-toothed tiger of the past was a dove compared with the creature who is pleased to suppose that he was created in the likeness of his Maker. No predatory dinosaur ever equalled man’s praiseworthy understudy of the Angel of Death. Some years ago, on the arrival of fresh news at Headquarters in France of another most ingenious and successful atrocity, I remarked to a staff officer of the Intelligence Department that if this sort of thing developed progressively it would end in the enforced recruitment of orangutans. But that officer happened to be a naturalist. “No good,” he replied. “They wouldn’t do these things.” Such acts are the prerogative of man, who won the privilege in his upward progress.

With his modern weapons and ammunition, an experienced sportsman challenging a lion stands in little more danger than if he were buying a rug. The shock of his bullet would stagger a warehouse. It pulps the vitals of the animal. There is a friend of mine whose pastime it is to shoot big game, and we should pity any tiger he meets. It is not a tiger to him. It is only a target, which he regards with the composure into which he settles when someone brings him a long drink on a salver; and his common habit with a target is to group his shots till they blot out the bull’s eye. What chance has a tiger against so tender a creature? A rabbit would have more, for it is smaller. But at least it can be said for my friend that it merely happens that he prefers such fun to golf; he attaches no importance to it. Though he has shot an unfortunate example of every large mammal Asia has to offer, he does not plead that he has done so in the name of Science. Man himself, with appliances that reduce the craft of the tiger to a few interesting tricks, and an arm which paralyses a whale with one blow, is the most terrible animal in the world. He is the Gorgon. It is his glance which turns life to stone. Science, as stuffed animals are often called, excuses the abomination of any holocaust. If a nightingale were dilated with cotton-wool instead of music, that would be “science,” supposing it were the last of the nightingales. The reason given for the slaughter of so many harmless gorillas in the neighbourhood of Lake Kivu by several travellers was that those rare animals are dying out, and museums required them. Yet it may be said for us that these sportsmen find it necessary to excuse their behaviour to-day. They must explain at least why they feel no remorse. No longer may one destroy a family of apes and boast of it afterwards. If the crime is mentioned publicly, its author is careful to observe that he so acted as a naturalist, no doubt that we may thus distinguish him from a man who would have done the same in the name of religion. We are sometimes advised that the value of a training in science is that it makes honesty of thought more usual than we find it in the ordinary man, who merely rationalises his desires; and for guidance we are directed to examine the sad mental results which come of a purely literary or a political training. We should like to believe this, yet when we find a zoölogist writing to the Times to confess that he would have flinched from the slaughter of a certain rare and fragile creature had he not known that his deed was excused because it was committed in the name of a museum, then a confusion of thought, probably literary, compels us to suggest that science may be no better an apology for a blackguardly act than is rum-running; and we are not forgetting that some of the worst of man’s ferocities have been performed solemnly and with full ritual in the name of God.

But the ethics of the hunt are not to be defined by men whose own boyhood was in the period when the rapid growth of factories and railways was causing a first wholesale clearance of wild life, both human and bestial, from the earth. We are too near to the raw trophies and benefits. That becomes clear, when, as we read in the news not long ago, American warships used live whales as targets for gun-practice. Makers of soap, too, would protest that it is right for commerce to send explosive harpoons into the same creatures, because the supply of fat is thereby increased. The matter is very difficult. Obviously if we want the land the buffaloes cannot have it, and if we want their oil the whales must part with it. The stage which Thoreau reached when he gave up fishing is several centuries ahead for most of us. My own notions about hunting would not bear a close inspection by either humanitarians or sportsmen. If one has heard only a rat whimper when an owl clutched it, and heard it continue to cry as the bird, with talons set vice-like, sat blinking leisurely in deep and complacent thought, then the scheme of things does seem a little sorry, though rats with their fleas are what they are. The scheme, too, includes liver-flukes and ticks. There are forms of life as deadly to man as he is to other animals. One’s right to kill is no more than one’s need and ability to kill. But if man brought compassion into the world, and bestows it on creatures other than his fellows, how did he come by it, and what may be its value in the evolution of life? Is it useless, like saintliness?

XI

The first officer, the only man in the ship who could converse freely with me in English, waved his hand as he went overside. He was going ashore to some friends. The shore of the island was just out of hailing distance. The setting sun was below the height of the land. The huts among the columns of the palms along the beach were becoming formless. Even by day our steamer, among those islands of Indonesia, gave me the idea that she was a vagrant from another and a coarser world. Land was nearly always in sight, but whether distant or close to our beam it might have been a vagary, the vaporous show of a kingdom with which we could have no contact. It would have no name. It had not been seen before. We were the first to see it, and the last. To-morrow some other shape would be there, or nothing. The only reality was our steamer and its Dutchman, chance blunderers into a region which was not for us. Even when the sun was over the ship, and the blaze on the deck was like exposure to a furnace, the coast in sight was but the filmy stuff of an hallucination.

But now the sun was going, and in those seas that spectacle was always strangely disturbing. It was a celestial display which should have been accompanied by the rolling of thunder and the shaking of the earth. One watched for the sudden peopling of those far off and luminous battlements of the sky. But there was no sound. There was no movement. It was an empty display; we might have been surprised by the beginning of a rehearsal which was postponed. One could not help feeling the immanence of a revelation to men who now, open-mouthed, had paused in their foolish activities, and were waiting; and so it was astonishing, after that warning prelude, that only darkness should fall. We were reprieved. Perhaps Heaven did not know what to do with us.

The pale huts receded into nothing. The black filigree of palm fronds above them dissolved in night. The smooth water of the anchorage vanished without a whisper. The day was done. In the alleyway on which my cabin opened a few electric sconces made solid a short walk, which was suspended with vague ends in the dark. The weight of a heated silence, in which there was no more to be discerned than that short promenade, fell over the ship. It was astonishing that she could be so quiet.

In my cabin even an electric fan would have been a companion, but it would not work; it was dumb. The cabin was only a recess in solitude. Every book there had been read, and the advertisements in the newspapers, which were two months old, and had been used for packing. When I left London I took with me some clear and scientific advice about the collecting of insects. “Not butterflies and moths.” My instructions were specific. “Only diptera, hymenoptera, and bugs like these.” The bugs called “these” were exhibited and demonstrated in their British counterparts.

It appeared that I might be of aid to a new study, which now is earnestly seeking an answer to the growing challenge of the insect world to man’s dominion of this earth. This quest was urged on me with cool insistence, careless of any suspicion I might have had that there may be, to an overseeing and directing mind unknown, worse pests than bugs on earth. I accepted the job, the tins, the pins, the forceps, the bottles, chemicals, nets and all, and submitted to a series of elementary lessons. I began with the feeling of a Jain in the matter; but at last was persuaded that I should be performing a social service, for I was reminded that a tse-tse fly could make as good an exhibit of me as ever man made of a gorilla.

With some little entomological routine to be got through daily I began to understand why it was the Victorian naturalists showed a fortitude in adversity which, had they resolved, not on beetles but on something nobler, might have got them to Truth itself. On tropical days so searching that nothing but a sudden threat would have moved a man from where he happened to be resting, I picked up my net with alacrity, filled a little bag with bottles, and toiled to some place which, so the sun and wind told me, would make the shade of old Wallace eagerly readjust his ghostly spectacles as he watched me; and I saw clearly enough then that at an earlier age and with a stouter nerve I should have found fun in collecting record horns and tusks. It was usually in a secluded corner where I was alone; though once, near a Malay village in Celebes, in a clearing which had already become a tangled shrubbery again, I noticed at last a native, his krise in his sarong, sternly watching me. He stood like a threatening image, and whenever I glanced casually in his direction, which I did as often as dignity allowed, he still had that severe look. Presently I found that this area was a Mohammedan graveyard, for I tripped over one of the hidden stones while stealthily following the eccentric course of a fly which looked attractively malignant. The Malay stood over me as I pulled out some thorns with forced deliberation. He did not speak. He picked up a spare net, and spent the rest of the morning adding industriously to my collection.

The close scrutiny of one patch of forest, into which direct sunlight fell, with the eye watchful for the slightest movement, gave one a notion of the density with which that apparently empty jungle was peopled. A biologist once said that most of the world’s protoplasm is locked up in the bodies of insects. You would think so when, having missed a miniature bogie with the net, you scrutinised the place where it had so miraculously disappeared. (Sometimes it was in a fold of the net all the time, discovered when it nailed a careless hand.)

Nothing appears to be there but fronds and branches, yet as soon as the image of the object you missed begins to fade from your recollection, you see, sitting under a leaf, a robber fly eating a victim as large as itself. Near it is a big grasshopper so closely resembling the leaves and stem with which it is aligned that your sight is apt to take it in as a slow transmutation of the foliage. Touch him, and he shoots off like a projectile. His noisy flight betrays a number of things. They move, and then there they are. A shield bug, whose homeland cousins are hated by fruit-growers, moves uneasily in its place. You had supposed it was a coloured leaf-scar. Spiders and mantids run and drop. You mark the fall of one creature, and then are aware that a column of ants is marching through the dead leaves at your feet. Every inch appears to be occupied, where a casual glance would have seen nothing in the whole front of the woods.

The mere collecting of these creatures is but a pastime, though it is easy enough to find species that are unknown to entomologists; yet of very few of those innumerable forms is the life-history known, though some of the little items of the forest prove disastrous, with acquired habits, in the plantations. Man quite easily displaces the tigers and their lairs, but it is more than likely that the little things, of which he has been contemptuous, may put up a more remarkable fight for a place in the sun than he will enjoy.

When the ship was quiet at night, that was the time when the bottles were emptied, and the creatures were put into paper envelopes, with a place and date. The electric sconces outside at night made good hunting ground. Moths like translucent jewels reposed on them; but the luminous plaques were chiefly valuable as attractions for mosquitoes and some flies which would have been unbelievable even by day.

One night, unable for a time to do more work because my hands were wet with sweat caused by my concentration on small and delicate objects, I looked up at some books facing me on the table. A creature with eyes like tiny orange glow lamps was sitting there watching me, its wings tremulous with energy.

It was a moth, demi-octavo in size, and I became at once a little nervous in its presence. I assured it earnestly that moths were quite outside my instructions. Nevertheless, when I rose gently to inspect it, so desirable a beauty I had never seen before. It was jet black, body and wings, though its wings were marked sparsely with hieroglyphics in gold. Was it real? I got the net, and secured it neatly as it rose; brought a killing bottle—might I not have one such creature when Bates and Wallace slew their thousands?—and watched the captive where it quivered, though not in alarm, in a loose fold of the muslin. It was quiet, making a haze of its wings, at times checking them so that I could attempt a translation of its golden message. It had a face ... rather a large black face, in which those glowing eyes were very conspicuous.

I took out the cork of the bottle, looked again at the quivering and fearsome beauty, and put back the cork and shoved the bottle away. It was impossible. It would have been worse than murder. They who destroy beauty are damned. I felt I did not want to be damned. That wonderful form, and the stillness, and the silence, overcame me. This creature was not mine. I freed the prisoner. It shot round the cabin, settled again on a book, and watched me, with its wings vibrating, until I had finished. A dim suspicion that it was more than a moth was inconsequential, but natural.

XII

The men who are under an infernal spell, a spell which our best political economists have proved cannot be and ought not to be broken, and who therefore must run to and fro between London and Croydon all their wretched lives, are astonished when an infant shows more initiative and ventures to New York. But why shouldn’t it? Its journey proved as easy as a perambulator and a nurse. There is nothing in being carried about. Where steamships and railways go anyone may go. You have only to take a seat, and wait. A child could travel in independence from here to Macassar, which is a mere name through distance, and it would but add interest to a long voyage for doting seamen. The trouble for a restless soul begins only when he would turn aside, and go where other people do not. Then he finds that the herd has no sympathy for one of its members who would leave the farmer’s field; no sympathy, no advice, no help; nothing but curt warnings and mocking prophecies.

After a long and faithful adherence to the
beaten tracks you reach some distant coastal
outpost—

After a long and faithful adherence to the beaten tracks you reach some distant coastal outpost, and, enforced, there you pause. There is nothing else to do, so you look inland to the hills. What do they hide? The exiles on the spot, through envy and jealousy—for it would be absurd to suppose that they do not want to lose you—deny all access to those hills. That outpost is touched by a steamer at least once a fortnight, and while waiting for it, each evening, when the other men are as idle as yourself, you ask disturbing questions about the land beyond, The men reclining about the room murmur that nobody ever goes. Some day, of course, before they return home, they intend to stand on those hills. Just once. Wants a bit of doing, though. Pretty bad, the fevers. Can’t trust the natives. Last year a young fellow, just out, he tried it. Thought we didn’t know. Wouldn’t listen to us. Said he would be back in a week. He isn’t back yet. And there was a Dutchman once.... Heard about him? Well. The sagacious informant here glances round to see who is present, and leans over to whisper, ending his story with a malignant chuckle. “And served him right, too.”

If you listened to those fellows in complete social credulity you would merely stay at the rest-house till the next ship anchored, and when she departed so would you, still gazing at the unknown over her taffrail. But she has not arrived yet, and therefore every day, as you look to the hills, you explore a path which leads, so it seems, to those ramparts of cobalt. You have not the cheerful idea, of course, of continuing long enough. That would show courage instead of sociability. You merely wish to gratify, as much as a quiet creature dare, an intolerable desire to approach the forbidden.

Then, in some manner, those hills vanish. After five minutes on that track they go. An illusion? You continue till you reach a secluded valley, a steep and narrow place about which nobody has warned you, though to warn a friend of it, in case he should stray that way by chance, seems at a glance to be a positive duty. You watch a river come down turbulently through woods as dark and still as night. It goes over rocks, but with hardly a sound, as though it were muffled. A native crouches on the coiled roots of a tree on the opposite shore, and eyes you. But he does not move his head. He says nothing. He continues to watch you, and he does not move. Is it possible to get beyond that point? Very likely not. The very hills have disappeared. That dark forest, if it is not impenetrable, would be better if it were. The land is only a dream, and that native is the warning figure in it. You shout over to the figure, but it does not answer. It looks away. So you turn back, listen to more stories for a few more nights in the rest-house, and leave with the next ship.

There is the island of Celebes. Ships go to it direct from England. A child could manage the journey thither. I could not count the number of villages of its coast off which anchored my local trading steamer; we stood in and out of Celebes for weeks. I sought for a man who could tell me about the interior of that island—which has about the same area as Ireland, but a coastline long enough for an archipelago—but never found him. Picture post-cards may be obtained at Macassar and Menado, and trips by motor-car bought for as far as the roads go. But Brighton has the same advantages. Yet when it came to the question of a journey into the interior, then you might as well have been in a London post-office appealing through the wire netting, to a young lady counting insurance stamps, for a way to send a message to Joanna Southcott about that box. Yet there cannot be another large island anywhere in the world with shores so inviting, because those of Celebes are uninhabited, except for short lengths; and the mountains of the interior of that island, which is crossed by the equator, are so fantastic that they might be hiding the wonders of all outlandish legends. No matter. There is no approach, apparently, to the heights. A spell is on the place. You must be content to watch that coast and those hills pass, unless you are more daring than this deponent in flaunting the settled ways and opinions of your fellow-men.

The time does come, it does come, when you can stand the charted paths no longer. It is all very well for the people at home, misled by the narratives of flamboyant tourists, to suppose that the track you are following is one only for the stout of heart. By the map, doubtless, it looks as though it were. But you know better. The chief difficulty on that track, however devious and far it may seem from London, is that you cannot get away from it. While this is strictly true, it must be remembered that it is not altogether a simple excursion for a wayfarer to leave the highways and cross alone and in safety some of the moors of England. The warnings of the friends with whom you consort for a few days at a rest-house in the tropics merit attention. There is something in what they say.

At last you are in no doubt about it. If the warning fables were only half as bad as the reality still the common path could hold you no longer. Boredom with the ways of Labuan is no different from boredom in Highgate. With deliberation you cast your luggage into a godown, careless whether or not you ever see it again, and set out light-foot for the unknown quarter where health is the only fortune, and where all the money in the world cannot buy refreshment when it does not exist, nor goodwill from creatures who do not like your face. If your good luck or common sense prove inadequate, then you are aware you won’t return; but there is satisfaction to be found in the certain knowledge that if you have to pay the ultimate forfeit it will be because you ought to pay it. You cannot find that satisfaction in London, which is in many ways worse than the jungle. If you prove good enough, the wild will reward you with a safe passage; but the city will even punish qualities which make men honest citizens and pleasant neighbours.

In weeks of toil you get far beyond the last echo of the coast. You can imagine you have reached, not another place, but another time, and have entered an earlier age of the earth. Soon after the beginning of the journey up country there was a suspicion, when another silent reach of the river opened, where immense trees overhung and were motionless, and were doubled in the mirror, that now you were about to wake up. This would go. In reality you were not there.

The paddlers ceased. A buffalo, a bronze statue on a strip of sand in the water, stared at the lot of you as you rounded the point. Then he erupted that scene. It did exist; it was alive. The first ripple from the outer world had come to stir into protest that timeless peace.

The river is left, and a traverse made of the forest. Ranges are crossed. You become a little doubtful of your whereabouts. The map treasured in a rubber bag now abandons you to an indeterminate land. The natives are shy, food is scarce and a little queer, and exposure and wounds recall to the memory the unfriendly yarns of the settlement far away. About time to turn back? But the inclination is to go on, for the days seem brighter and more innocent than you have ever known them to be. Even food has become an enjoyable way to continue life; and the camp at sundown, when, offering grace for the pleasure of conscious continuance in fatigue, you look upwards to a fading stratum of gold on the roof of the jungle across the stream, and the cicadas begin their pæan, is richer than success. The very smell of the wood smoke is a luxury. Only at night, when the darkness is so well established that it could be the irrevocable end of all the days, and the distant sounds in the forest are inexplicable if they are not menacing, do the thoughts turn backward. It would be easier, you think then, to be safe.

But the next day you discover that you are not alone in that unknown country. A man meets you, and says that he has heard you were about. He has been trying to find you. He would like to hear a bit of news. He behaves to you as though you were the best friend he had. You learn that he has been there for nearly a year. He came to that corner of the continent from the other side. He says this as though he were merely remarking that it rained yesterday; and the extraordinary character of such a journey causes you to glance at him for some clue to the reason for so obvious a lie. Yet no, that fellow is not a liar—not in such a small matter, anyhow. What is he doing there? Oh, just looking round for gold, or tin, or a job. Have you heard a word, he asks, of a railway coming along?

You cannot journey to any unusual quarter without surprising there one of these wanderers. He is looking a country over, and has lived with the chief’s daughter, and improved the chief’s importance with neighbouring tribes, and has kept open a wary eye for gold or anything else which might be lying about, long before regular communication was made with the sea, and years ahead of the bold explorers about whom the newspapers make such a fuss; he saw the land before the missionaries. These wanderers make rough maps of their own, they are familiar with the most unlikely recesses of the land—which they reached, by the way, from China, or Uganda, or Bogota, or wherever they were last. If one of them tells you his name you need not believe him. The place of his birth is not the place of his confidence. It is no good asking him what he is going to do next, for he does not know. While you are with him, you feel that a better companion for such a country was never born; and when you leave him you know you will never see him again, nor even hear of him. But he is a man you will never forget.

XIII

There was an island, which must have evaporated with the morning mists like other promising things, called Bragman. It is recorded by Maundeville, and he had positive knowledge that on Bragman was “no Thief, nor Murderer, nor common Woman, nor poor Beggar, nor ever was Man slain in that Country. And because they be so true and so righteous, and so full of good conditions, they were never grieved with Tempests, nor with Thunder, nor with Lightning, nor with Hail, nor with Pestilence, nor with War, nor with Hunger, nor with any other Tribulation, as we be, many Times, amongst us, for our Sins.”

The fascination of islands is felt by all of us, but Bragman might not be to everybody’s taste. Some people might say it would have no taste. They would prefer an infested attic in Rotherhithe or Ostend, or any mean refuge with sufficient sin about it to prove they were alive and in danger of hell fire. Yet for others it would certainly give a sense of rest from the many advantages of Europe. They might feel that for the sake of peace they could endure it. What is more, we know that the pleasures of sin can be ridiculously overrated. The most doleful places in the world, where youth seeking joy in bright-eyed recklessness is sure to be soused in ancient and unexpected gloom, are what are known to the feeble-minded and to writers of moral tracts as “haunts of pleasure.” Nobody points out to the eager and guileless, who have been misled by the glamour which literature can cast over even a bath-room, and by the lush reminiscences of dodderers, that for gaiety of atmosphere the red lights of the places of pleasure are quite extinguished by the attractions of a temperance hotel on a wet night. The haunts of pleasure take their place in the museum of mankind’s mistakes alongside the glories of war.

That island of Maundeville’s, which is called Bragman, is only a curious name for one of the Hesperides, or the Fortunate Isles, or the Isles of the Blessed. Some name it Eden or Elysium. We place it where we will, and give it the name of our choice. But naturally it must be an island, uncontaminated by the proximity of a mainland. Every man has his dream of such a sanctuary, and every community its legend, because in our hearts we are sure the world is not good enough for us. Even the South Sea Islanders have word of a better place, the asylum they have never reached in all their thousand years of wandering from east to west about the Pacific. Perhaps man goes to war, or seeks pleasure with abandonment, merely because at intervals he becomes desperately disappointed in his search for what is not of this earth. What does that suggest? But we will leave the suggestion to the metaphysicians, who are as interesting when at such speculations as the fourteenth century cartographers were at geography. It may mean something highly important, but what that is we are never likely to see as we see daylight when the generalization of a mathematical genius illuminates and relates the apparently irrelevant speculations of his arduous but unimaginative fellows. If we would see the turrets of the Holy City, then a stroll round the corner to the Dog and Duck before closing-time may do as well as a longer journey. We only know that all the supreme artists appear to have been privileged, as was Moses, with a sight of a coast, glorious but remote, and that the memory of that unattainable vision gives to their music and verse the melancholy and the golden sonority which to us, and we do not know why, are the indisputable sigil of their greatness.

Some name it Eden or Elysium.

“To reach felicity,” says Mr. Firestone in his Coasts of Illusion, “we must cross the water.” There is no reason for this, but we know it is true, for felicity is where we are not. We must cross it to an island, and a small one. A large island would be useless. It ought to be uninhabited, too, or at the worst it should be very rarely boarded by other wanderers. What account could the company of the Hispaniola have rendered of the pirates’ hoard if they had sought it on a mainland? Where would Robinson Crusoe be now if his island had been Australia? Lost among the dry records of geographical discovery. A large island could not hold the treasure we are after. I remember a shape on the horizon, which often was visible from a Devonshire vantage, though sometimes it had gone. Its nature depended, I thought, on the way of the sun and wind. It was a cloud. It was very distant. It was a whale. It was my imagination. But one morning at sunrise I put my head out of the scuttle of a little cutter, and the material universe had broken loose. The tiny ship was heaving on a groundswell, vast undulations of glass, and over us titanic masonry was toppling in ruin—I feared the explosions of surf would give a last touch to a collapsing island, and Lundy would fall on us. We landed on a beach no larger than a few bushels of shingle. It was enclosed by green slopes and high walls of rock; and we climbed a track from the beach that mounted amid sunlight and shadow. The heat of the upper shimmering platform of granite and heath above the smooth sea, and its smell and look of antiquity, suggested that it had been abandoned and forgotten, and had remained apart from the affairs of a greater and more important world since the creation. We were sundered from everybody. That was my first island, and I still think its one disadvantage is that it is only twelve miles offshore.

For perhaps an island landfall should come only after a long and uncertain voyage. Its coast must appear in a way which suggests as an absurdity that the captain could have performed a miracle with such casual exactitude. This landfall is a virgin gift to us by chance. Indeed most small islands, when lifted by a ship, have that suggestion about them. That is why they are the origin of the better legends of man, and the promise of earthly felicity. They are the dream surprised in daylight on the ocean by the voyager, caught napping in the sun, and we know that a foot set on those impalpable colours would wake the gods to their forgetfulness, and away the spectre would go. Not for us. That is why the ship always sails past.

XIV

Let something survive on earth, if it be only the record of Maundeville’s island, which humanity cannot violate. I am glad Amundsen returned safely, but I am glad also because the North Pole compelled even our wonderful aeroplanes to treat it with respect. Without guessing what our trouble is, we may be growing too clever. Our very boldness may hide that fact from us. It would be a pity if the earth became tired of us, as once it grew weary of the dinosaurs, who appear to have overdone their part. They grew too big. A traveller who recently returned from the upper Amazon asks, for instance, what the future of that region is to be. “Unless oil,” says this gentleman, “renews interest in this part of the world, large sections may revert to savagery, as for instance in the Upper Napo, where already the rubber gatherers have withdrawn, and the Indian tribes who once occupied the territory have returned to their original haunts.” Clearly then the Indian tribes must once have deserted their original haunts. Was that because of the rubber gatherers? However, these savages may be compelled again to leave their original haunts. The explorer suggests that the forest trees could be readily converted into alcohol; though he adds that not much can be done without better transport, and his idea is that the use of flying boats, or hydroplanes, a use he describes as “intelligent,” would in that wasted region “make things possible which otherwise would be out of the question.” And then, to show that this beneficent development is really in the air, and may blossom soon, he reports that the Murato Indians of the Pastazo River have a curious saying. They say, “When the white man comes with wings we are going to die.”

We never doubt that what has been revealed only to the superior race of whites—or as Mr. E. M. Forster describes us, the “pinko-greys”—is better than any idea of an inferior colour. Alcohol and pulp, to our mind, are the better forms for trees, their spiritual transmutation as it were, and death in flying machines more desirable than what we call savagery. The white man with his burden feels that he has not reconciled himself to his god unless he has converted a mountain or a wood into something like Widnes or Dowlais. When the mountain is a mass of slag on which a community crowds into back-to-back hovels, living there in the sure and certain hope of the Poor Law as the crown to its labours, the man of western culture looks at the figures in a Blue-Book, and knows that he has fulfilled the divine injunction. He never suspects that he may be wrong in that. Impossible that the Murato Indians in their forest may be as pleasing as his flying machines and alcohol! Yet perhaps the firs and pines of Newfoundland are not necessarily worse than the rolls of paper into which they are converted. The conversion of a forest into a popular press may be inevitable, like war, but we should not deride the trees which help us to our enlightenment by calling them savage. That seems hardly fair. Let the Murato and all other Indians perish, if there is no other way of getting our alcohol, but to say they are uncivilized as we extinguish them seems a little priggish.

And so our regret is not moved as easily as it ought to be when we remember that the pioneer heroes who will venture to convert that Amazon solitude into oil and other commodities may, nay will, die in numbers of various fevers, along with the Indians who will die because of other things. That is not unjust. For we feel that the transformation of all the world into the likeness of the industrious Black Country need not be hastened on our account. There is a tributary of the Amazon I know, which once rewarded my admiration for it with some fever, but I do not want it to be punished into the likeness of the factories and slime of the Lea at Stratford-by-Bow. I shall never again see that river and its forest, but it is a pleasure to remember that, beyond Whitehall and Versailles, there still it flows between its cliffs of foliage, for whoever would like a complete change from the best that man has thought and done, and is willing to pay the price for it. The explorer of the Amazon who wondered whether it could be translated into a favourable balance sheet, says, “Alone in these dense green solitudes, harmless as they may appear, it is the unknown, the unseen, that terrifies. Man feels that he is battling with an invisible monster more horrible than the river, because the latter attacks in the open and its death stroke is relatively quick, whereas the forest ensnares its victim in the dark, and slowly draws its coils tighter, till death comes as a merciful relief.” But that, of course, is only the impression of a human creature in such a land who is not a forest Indian, and finds himself unable to call up a taxicab at the moment he needs it. To alcohol with the place! The truth is the forest was not meant for him. Whatever its design, it was not that. It does not wish to do him any harm; and though its countenance has the appearance of it, yet it was not composed as a look of doom. If he cannot survive, however, then he must die, and while he is dying it will maintain its aloofness and silence.

So I am glad when the North Pole turns back our aeroplanes. The day will come when they will land there, no doubt. A quantity of black grease, our mark of trade, will be left on the snow, as evidence that man at last has come. But it is just as certain that he will not stay there. Nothing can be done with that place, and it will be left to stare in white emptiness at the stars. We find some comfort, which need not be pure misanthropic lunacy, in the thought of unprofitable deserts and waste lands. Some parts of earth, we are assured, will remain exempt forever from the blight of our appalling activities. Let us pray for more power to the mosquito’s elbow on the Amazon and such places. It is pleasant to remember that he is guarding those regions against saw mills and plant for distilling alcohol from the pulp of the forest. Another sort of traveller, Mr. Norman Douglas, made this confession in a review he wrote of that noble travel narrative, Doughty’s Arabia Deserta—for I would prefer a little society in this misanthropy. I do not want to be solitary in my desert. Says Mr. Douglas, with feeling, “I recall my first view of the Chott country, that sterile salt depression in Tunisia, and my feelings of relief at the idea that this little speck of the globe, at least, was irreclaimable for all time; never to be converted into arable land, or even pasture; safe from the intrusion of potato planters and what not; the despair of the politician, the delight of any dreamer who might care to people its melancholy surface with phantoms, mere illusions, of his own.”

I sing with him, Hosanna! A great region of South Africa is sinking into a like melancholy surface, for which we may thank whatever desiccating Power there may be. It is returning to the dust. Its water is leaving it. Its stones are now unturned. Its prospect is the deceptive mirage. So kingdoms of Central Asia, once the arenas for the battle glories of turbulent Huns and Tartars, have got tired of us, and now turn to the moon her own aspect of parched and shining dunes. And there is that part of Arabia known as the Empty Quarter—the Great Red Desert. What a name that is, the Empty Quarter! It is as satisfying to the mind as the Canadian Barren Grounds, a name so much more moving in its implications than all the statistics of the Wheat Belt.

XV

The traveller was homeward bound, and his liner made its landfall, and turned for Portland and its London pilot. There was no welcome in that look of the coast of home. The shadow of land to port might have been the end of all the headlands of the seas. It was as desolate as antiquity by twilight. There was no rain, but the chill cut to the bone. The sky was old and dark. This frown of the north-land subdued the comfortable life of the ship; it fled below. The little cheerful groups dissolved without a word. The decks were deserted, except for two odd figures, muffled like mummies in a shelter on the lee side. He could find nobody who would face it with him. He strolled aft to the shelter where some men who knew the East used to meet, before dinner, to smoke and yarn, but only a steward was there, a disillusioned familiar who was brusquely piling the unwanted wicker chairs—throwing them at each other.

Somehow even the satin-wood panelling of the stairway to the saloon, with its bronze balustrade, appeared now to be out of place. It did not accord with cold draughts. The glow lamps shone in emptiness, the palms in the corners were dingy. He suspected the life of the ship had suddenly absented itself, and was behind closed doors, whispering of a crisis to which he could get no clue. As he descended to his cabin he paused to watch an officer, muffled in a greatcoat, pass from one side of the ship to the other on a deck above him, but the man was pre-occupied and hurried, and did not notice that the ship had another lonely ghost wandering about her.

In his cabin the little gilt image of a Buddha, Putai Ho-Shang, the god of children and earthly joys, passive and happy, regarded him cheerfully from the clothes chest. That token of the East had more sun in it than all the world into which the steamer had now come. The image was old, perhaps as old as that fading recollection of a land along which the ship was now cruising for haven. Might not that recollection fade utterly before the haven was reached? Was that image cheerful with tidings that were nearer to the springs of life than anything known under the skies of the north? Was it that knowledge which made it confident? There was a suggestion of derision about its happy smile, as though it had a word which made it invulnerable to this bleak air, and to the driving darkness that was the headlong confusion of a region which had lost its light and faith.

The bugle called to dinner. He took no notice of it. He thought he would sooner pack up; at least he could then confirm, putting away some good things he had found in Brunei, Palembang, and Canton, that somewhere life was ardent and young, and was light-hearted while making beautiful things. He placed a porcelain bowl beside Buddha. The two were worth looking at. If you stood in a certain way a golden dragon was hinted in the azure of the bowl. The man who made that did not work in a north-east wind. When he opened his camphorwood chest it filled his cabin with a suggestion of warm nights, of a still sea in which the reflections of the stars were comets rising from the deeps, of the figures of motionless palms drowsing with their heads above a beach. Well, that was over. But he had seen it. Time, now, to put it away, except as a private thought.

But, as he packed away his silks and porcelain the image steadfastly quizzed him. That token of another order of things reclined luxuriously, as if asking him what he was going to do about it, though knowing he could give no answer. He put away everything but the image. He left that in the seat it had occupied all the voyage. He would not touch that yet. The voyage was not quite over. That idol was like an assurance of good. It might be the sign of a wisdom which understood all that he knew, and yet still could contemplate affairs with equanimity, though the sun and the lotus were far away. The image was completely foreign, as incongruous in a ship as he himself would be in a temple; yet you could believe that Putai Ho-Shang was in a place his philosophy comprehended, though that place was chill and cold to him; that in his cheerful mind every extension of the mechanics of industrial progress was provided for, and all the important devices of the busy men who motived that machinery. It would appear as simple to him as the acts of children. He would know all about it, and the end to which it was destined.

The face of the little Cockney steward was at his elbow, with its sardonic smile. “Your tea, sir. We’re nearly in.”

“Where are we?”

“Just orf Southend. Fine morning, sir. The pier’s plain.”

It certainly was a fine morning. The captain passed him on the deck. “Hullo, here we are again. Looks good, doesn’t it? We’ve done nicely, too. She came along last night like a scalded cat, though there was just an off-chance we missed the tide. We’re going up on top of it all right.”

Was that Essex? No land in the East ever had a brighter sparkle. This place was not only alive, but boisterous. It was as young as a star. Their liner was slipping past a collier with a noise of brisk waters which was startling to one who had just left the quiet seclusion of a cabin. The river and its men were about their business. Great ships were moving quickly on a river that was spacious and resplendent. The very sunlight seemed dangerous, with its swift gleaming in a lively breeze. That challenging shouting from a sailing barge was the voice of a young and vigorous land. To that land morning was native; and full tide, pouring with bustling winds and floods of sudden light, made merely the pulse of it. He got the impression that the globe was spinning almost too buoyantly. Gravesend was soon ahead of them, a touch of smoking rose. He dived below, at something like a speed proper to this newly discovered land, to see whether or not his baggage had gone out for the Customs inspection. It had gone. No time had been lost, and even while he looked round his cabin he saw from his port light that the liner was slowing ... she had anchored.

No hurry. Nobody would be waiting for him; not at that hour of the morning. He idled outside. The long vista of the lower deck was vacant. Eh? As he looked aft a tall figure turned into it, leisurely and confident, glancing in curiosity about the ship, a figure that was familiar, yet changed by time. Was that his own boy?

The stranger strolled along and saw him. “Hullo, dad!” And then flushed, and was shy. “She’s a topping ship, isn’t she? I watched her coming up the river. She looked fine. Where’s your cabin?”

They went into it. “The luggage is all set out on the other end of the ship. I came over in the tug with the Customs Officers. They tried to turn me out. What a jolly cabin. I like this. And what’s that funny smell, like spice? I wish I’d been with you.”

They stood looking at each other intently, asking questions, forgetful of time. The boy, smiling and confident, like an assurance of good, regarded him cheerfully from a superior height.

“Here, my lad. Time we were off. There’s a special train for the passengers. Come along, and talk afterwards.”

The boy gave a quiet look round. “Here, is this yours?” He grinned, and picked up the image of Putai Ho-Shang. “What a comic little chap! Is he yours? Righto!” He put Buddha in his pocket.

II. OUT OF TOUCH

We could go no further. Our steamer had left the sea weeks before, and had slowly serpentined her way into the heart of a continent. She had been persuaded over bars, she had waited patiently till floods gave her a chance to insinuate herself against the river current still deeper into that forest of the tropics. She had rounded bends so narrowly that her crew cheered derisively when her gear brought down showers of leaves and twigs from the overhanging front of the forest. When the monkeys answered our syren the bo’sun gave me a look, half appealing, half startled. But now we could go no further. We were nearly two thousand miles from the sea, and just ahead of us was an incline of foaming water. No ship had intruded into that solitude before; beyond the cataracts ahead of us, up into the unexplored wilderness, that river had its origin somewhere in the Andes of Bolivia.

There we anchored. Both anchors were out, because two were necessary. It was doubted that two were enough. Mr. Bullock, the mate, was complaining bitterly. I was standing with him on the forecastle head, and we were both watching the taut cables, which at times were tremulous in the strain of the current. “A nice thing,” he said, “a nice thing. Ever see anything like it before? It isn’t right.”

What he was pointing to was certainly unusual. It is not right, or at least it is most irregular, for forest rubbish to gather in such a mass against a ship’s cables that the danger of something coming adrift is evident. “Ever see anything like it? Eh? I bet you haven’t, mister. It isn’t right. Trees and bamboos and meadows—a whole raft of it, like a day in the country. All it wants is a few cows. And what’s going to happen if she drags, in this place? No steam and the damned jungle under our counter. We should have to rot here, mister, for we’d never get her off. We’re out of touch of everything civilised.”

So it seemed. Not only were great trees caught against the cables, but the trees were in green leaf. They were clouds of leaves, and perhaps birds were still perched in them. A few acres of top-heavy forest had collapsed into the river the night before, and there it was, or what was left of it, verdant and dense. No doubt more of it was to come.

“That’s a new job for a sailor,” commented Mr. Bullock. “Clearing away a copse from a ship’s bows. I shall have to get a boat away to see to that.”

An area of the tangle, a stretch of meadow and a height of foliage, became agitated, and detached itself in the pull of the stream as we watched. It foundered a little, uplifted again, pivoted in a half-circle, came free, and went swiftly by the length of the ship, a travelling island. Behind it swam a peccary.

“There you are,” exclaimed the excited mate. “What did I tell you? Pigs, mister. We’ll get the whole farmyard in a minute.”

Next morning the surrounding forest seemed to have gone. We had nothing but an opaque silence about us. The vapours of the miasmic solitude shrouded the high palisades of trees and leaves. Somewhere the sun had just risen, and the mist was luminous. Imperceptibly the white steam rose, till the bottom of the forest across the water was plain. The jungle looked as though it were sheered off a few feet above the bank in a straight line. But the curtain rose quickly as I watched. To starboard again was the towering and ominous barrier of still leaves and fronds, the place where no man had ever landed. The sun looked at us. Languor fell over the ship. The parrots and the monkeys cried aloud for a minute or two, and then the day became silent. It was no place for a ship. That was an unpleasant word of the mate’s, that we should rot. The sensation in that heated stillness, where there was nothing for us to do but to wait, was certainly of ferment and stagnation. The ironwork of the steamer felt like the plates of an oven.

On the poop, under an awning, the steward was spreading our breakfast. The captain appeared, a slim and stooping figure in white linen and a Panama hat, and walked towards me, fingering his grey beard as he eyed things about him. He did not wear the expression of a man who would respond to a hearty “good-morning.” He rested his hands on the bulwark, and looked overside, contemplating the stream. He stopped by the open door of the chief’s cabin, and wondered to the engineer whether it might not be wise to rig a dam round the rudder, so that wreckage might not get entangled with the propeller. It was at that moment that pandemonium broke out in the bunkers. The noise rose through a bunker hatch, which was open for ventilation; yells, clanging of shovels, crow-bars ringing on bulkheads, shouts, and hysterical laughter. The chief came out in his pyjamas, and the three of us peered down into the twilight below.

The chief bawled commands to his men. There was no answer. The infernal scuffling and clanging below went on. Then as suddenly it stopped. The chief cried down peremptorily, and the stokers heard him. One of them appeared below us, a blackened gnome, his dirty mask veined with pink where the sweat ran. He was panting. When he saw the stern faces above him he showed a broad white smile.

“All right, sir, we’ve done him in. Took some doin’, though.”

“What the hell do you mean? What’s this row about?”

The man vanished. Some whispering went on under the deck. Then several stokers appeared, hauling on a rope. It had a great snake at the end of it, its head limp, its body gashed. The hilarious stokers kicked and shoved the dead twelve feet of it into coils which we could inspect from above.

“There you are, sir,” said one of the showmen. “That’s it. All right to find that in the coal, ain’t it? You ought to have seen the way he scrapped.... And don’t forget we didn’t sign on to kill boa-constrictors, sir,” added a quiet voice, from the dark.

“I don’t wonder at it,” said the mate at breakfast. “Crawled in by a hawse pipe, of course. The ship will get full of ’em, with that green stuff about the cables.”

“Glad to hear it. That will give us some occupation, captain,” our surgeon commented. “Otherwise, we should be dull here.” The surgeon’s mind was inclined to curiosity in wayward things, and he always kept a butterfly-net handy. “One of the men this morning showed me a wound on his elbow. It was hard to stop the bleeding. He didn’t know how he got it, and I didn’t tell him. But there are vampire bats in the fo’cas’le.”

The captain gave an impatient exclamation, and blamed the surgeon for frivolity. “Bats! Vampire bats! You talk like a novelist, doctor. Never heard of bats in a fo’cas’le. You’re thinking of belfries.”

The surgeon chuckled. “You’ll hear all right, captain, when the men find out.”

The captain grumbled through all the meal. Place didn’t smell like a ship, smelt like a hothouse. Nice place to be in. In all his years at sea, nothing like it. Another charter like this, and the owner could look after his boa-constrictors himself. “Mr. Mate, just keep the men from thinking too much about it. A good time now to get some of that work done.”

For me after breakfast, with the decorative office of supercargo, there was no work. There was only the forest to look at, the yellow flood with its flotsam, and the river ahead tumultuous and gleaming in the rapids. The heat increased. The silence was a heavy weight. One felt a little fearful because so much forest made no sound whatever, no more sound than if it had been a dream, not a murmur nor the rustle of a leaf. It was quite still, like an illusion of trees. We might have made a ridiculous escape to the world’s end, and now were a little scared, not knowing what to make of it.

The only movement was the tumult of the cataracts, a glittering and flashing about a mass of black rocks. But that gave no sense that water was falling, but only that it was inclined, for its pour never ended. Beyond those rapids there was nothing; only trees and the sun. Nobody had ever been there. There was no reason why a man should go. The parapet of the cataracts, where black triangles of waves above our heads continually leaped but never seemed to descend, was the edge of the world. While I was gazing at that line of leaping waves, which stretched between the high barriers of the forest, the figure of a man appeared there. He poised for an instant on the verge, in the centre of the line, against the sky, arms stretched out as if in appeal, and then vanished in the spray below.

“See that?” exclaimed the chief. He hurried along to me. “See him? That must have been an Indian. Couldn’t stop himself, there. Can you see him now?”

We could not. We could see only the incline of heaving water. We must have been mistaken, and were beginning to argue about it when an object came slowly away from the foot of the falls. It was an overturned canoe. A swimmer righted it, got in, and began to paddle towards us.

The man came alongside, standing up in his scallop, stark naked, a paddle in his hand, grinning. I thought he must be of some unnamed tribe. He was a little lighter in colour than an Indian, but his curly black hair and beard made him remarkably different. The natives never have beards, though that difference was not so astonishing as his light-hearted grin, which was absurdly familiar in that laughless and inhuman wild. He did not speak, but airily waved his hand as he came alongside, and grabbed our Jacob’s ladder. Up he came, in leisured nonchalance.

“Pardon me,” he said, as he stood up before our gaping company of seamen still smiling, and his fine body glistening. “Anybody lend me a pair of pants?”

Our captain was frowning at him in wonder, but at that he grimaced. “Come aft,” he said. The brown figure nodded to us in good humour, and followed the captain, stepping like a god. He turned, as he was about to descend the companion, and gazed at our house-flag. You may see profiles like his in any collection of Greek antiquities. When he had gone we leaned overside to stare at his dug-out canoe, hitched to our ladder. There was nothing in it but some arrows and a bow, and a machete, all lashed to a peg.

The stranger, that night, came with the chief to my cabin. He inspected our books with evident enjoyment. “Books!” he said. “Books, eh!”

“You know,” he continued looking round at us, “I thought I’d gone light-headed when I saw your ship below the falls. I was so surprised that a jerk sent me over side, and I came down the rapids with an arm over the canoe. I was sure I was going to miss meeting you after all. Too bad!”

He gave us his name. It was that of a learned English judge. I reminded him of that. “Oh, yes. My father. He’d have been amused if he’d seen me this morning. Is he all right?”

He was quite cool about it. This sort of thing, I gathered from his manner, might happen to anybody. “Never expected to meet Christians at a place like this.”

Where had he come from? “Mollendo,” he replied, rolling a cigarette.

Was the man a liar? Mollendo was a thousand miles away on the Pacific side. The Andes were between us. The youngster saw our doubt, and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Mollendo. And I crossed the Andes, though don’t you do it unless you want to. This side of them I lost my gun. Lost everything. Got a canoe and some arrows and a bow, and here I am. You know,” he went on, “you can shoot fish with an arrow. I’ll show you in the morning. That’s how I lived, when I wasn’t with the natives.”

“Is that all?” I asked. I thought of the rumours of cannibals and head-hunters, and the stories of what was in store for those who ventured alone into the region beyond us.

“Well,” he said, taking down a book to see what it was, “well ... it took some months. It’s a bad country. But I say! Fancy your knowing my dad. I thought I was quite out of touch here.”

III. ELYSIUM

That garden, which sloped seaward to three areca palms, was a place which I felt might vanish, if I moved, or changed my thoughts. The daylight was the private illumination of an imagined land, and the strange fronds were a capricious revolt from the conventions of avenues and parks. Then a butterfly, immense in green and black, broke into the picture from above, and fanned his colours slowly over a white trumpet that was upheld noiselessly by an unseen hand from a shrub. He touched it, and the trumpet swayed. The picture was solid.

A tall, stiff figure came out of the rest-house and sat with me on the verandah. That elderly missionary’s white linen suit, neatly creased, and his collar and black bow, which would have been unremarked in Oxford Street, made me conscious of my own careless and limp attire. I always felt that that man might, as a reasonable and friendly neighbour—for we had the rest-house to ourselves—concede something in his dress. But he never relented. The Malay servants could be in no doubt as to which of us was the important Tuan. One of those silent familiars now shaped near us. He brought tea and two queer little cakes. I liked the look of those cakes, but the missionary whistled for the dog, and gave away the cakes perfunctorily. He rubbed his fingers with a handkerchief, and then turned his signet-ring into its right position. He inclined his head kindly to me in a little cross-examination. What had I seen to-day?

He stirred his tea, and shook his head in depreciation over some native wares I had bought. Poor stuff, he said. No good. Better bring it to him in future, before buying it. But it was very hard now to get the genuine old material. He had been collecting it all over the islands for years. He enumerated what rare treasure he had been able to acquire from time to time. The European collectors were willing to pay highly for it. But it was getting very scarce.

He carefully crossed his legs, for to keep neat an ironed linen suit for an hour or two in a moist heat demands the unremitting attention of a man whose self-control is automatic. Why, in the past, he continued, when he visited one of the islands of an isolated group, with some tact and wholesale baptism he could persuade a village to surrender all its totems, idols, carvings and copper drums. Not to-day, though. The whole region has been swept clean. Everybody is converted, or has no God, or is a Mohammedan. But you could buy plenty of English and American stuff. After a pause, which was like an interval for silent regret over good things lost in the past, he spoke, dispassionately, and with the forgiving voice of an ethnologist, who understood the deep springs of astonishing human conduct, of the immoralities of the islanders. He was no bigot. He did not tell me that, but I was sure he forgave irregularities in all but Europeans, and he understood even those.

He had spent fifteen years among the islands. The natives had the minds of children. I learned from him how they should be treated by any benefactor. I was looking at his moustache, for it was interesting to see how little his lips moved as he spoke. There was firmness even in those short iron-grey bristles. His eyes, under those shaggy brows, looked on me from a rectitude which now he could trust without bothering about it. The tropics had made no difference to him. His skin was fresh, and looked hard. He offered me one of his excellent Dutch cigars. He became grimly amused over the instructions left by a white trader for him to carry out. He had buried that man the week before last. That fellow had begged the missionary—because he knew his Malay mistress with her four half-caste children would be careless about it—to have erected a sort of shrine over his grave, with pictures from the Scriptures to hang in it, and this text in a principal place: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

A group of women, their bright gowns as noticeable in the quiet as a burst of gay music, idled slowly past the foot of the garden, and one of them turned her dark face shyly to look at the missionary, but very sternly he did not look at her. The tropics were outside his heart. He could not be invaded. His stiff figure could at any time assume its winter dress in Europe, and he could begin again as though sly but inviting glances across a tropical shrubbery, and sunny islands where life is different, were only like the phases of the moon, which may be observed, if the almanac is watched, and you are sufficiently interested.

The crowns of the areca palms changed, as the sun went down, into three high fountains of gold, which quickly sank into the shades. There were burning films of rose in the sky. Then their light, too, went out. A firefly began to glint in zigzags before the verandah, and a cricket shrilled. A servant brought a lamp. “These islanders come to my church, when I am here, or they go to the mosque,” said the missionary gravely, “but they are all pagans at heart. A man and woman will live together for years, and then come and be married for luck, and bring their children with them. They are baptised for luck. They try to be on the right side all round. I know them. I haven’t given them fifteen years of my life for nothing.”

“But you suggest that you have when you tell me they are still pagans.”

The missionary did not answer. He recrossed his legs carefully. “I like them,” he said simply. “They are good-hearted.”

“If ever you are on the main island come and see me,” he said late that night. “My home is there. You may like to look at my collection.”

The next day he had gone to another congregation across the water. When presently a ship came for me, and I left that beach, she touched on her way home at the village the missionary had named, and there was time to visit his home. The afternoon was almost done. The sun was setting over Borneo, across the water, in a clear saffron sky. I waited for the evangelist on his verandah, and could see through his dwelling of timber to the bright light in the west. The interior of the house was in darkness, but that further doorway was a shape of gold, in which distant coconut palms formed a design in black. I felt I had discovered in that home its resident and privy dream. I spoke of this to the missionary. He did not look at it. “It is very beautiful,” he said gravely.

He led me through that further door of gold to the garden that we might watch the sunset. “I have an arbour on the beach,” he said. A frail little woman was seated within that arbour. She wore an old-fashioned shape of crochet work on her grey hair. She smiled at me but did not speak. “My wife,” the missionary explained. I thanked her for lending me so beautiful an outlook on the world. There could be no nobler place anywhere from which to see the sun go down. She nodded, and smiled sadly, and said “Yes, isn’t it?”

The missionary interrupted my attempt to come to an understanding with my hostess. He had a request that I should take his mail with me. “You can take the letters with you when you board your ship to-night.” We both walked back to the house, leaving his wife in the arbour. She was still looking over the sea to the western light.

He turned to me and shook his head. He touched his forehead significantly.

“She sits there all day,” he said. “She sits there, and when she sees a ship going home, she weeps.”

IV. THE RAJAH

We were told that if we followed the track through the forest for three more days we should reach the River Golok, by Nipong. Then, supposing we could find a prahu and men, another day’s journey would bring us down stream to Rantau Panjang. There we should see so unlikely an object as a railway station, on a branch of the Malay States Railways. With further luck we should catch one of the rare trains, and so reach Tumpat at our ease.

There was no hurry. I did not wish to catch a train again before I was compelled. Just then there were no days of the week. We had morning and night, and sun or rain. At night, the rain drumming on the leaves was always on the same leaves, and it was the same rain. We were nowhere, and I suspected that the real calendar might dispute with my diary over three missing days. What had we done with them? But three days mislaid in that forest might look like three dead leaves. Wherever we camped the place looked like the spot where we halted the evening before. Nothing had changed. The cicadas struck up the same song at the moment when day became exalted, that moment before its light went out. Those still trees suggested our exemption from what concerned an outer world; we were held by the very spell which kept the jungle from progress.

But one afternoon our canoe shot out of the solitude. While watching glide past us what I thought was the same forest, I saw a woman on the bank glance up in surprise from her water-pot as our shadow went by her. A little later there was an incredible modern bridge of iron across the river ahead of us. It was as surprising as coconut palms would be at Charing Cross. We landed, and found bottled beer could be had by asking for it. To the Chinese shopkeeper those English labels were as familiar as his own symbols. I thought, for a moment, that a London excursionist could be at home in that remote Malay village in five minutes.

By the light of morning this surprising homeliness appeared the less secure. It was no more than a little cheerful bravado. The railway bridge, the big Sikh policemen with their rifles, and the array of bottles of European drinks on the shelves of the Chinaman’s store, were not triumphantly significant. The wilderness was not far away. It almost reached the bridge. It stood, patient and dark, waiting just across the padi marshes, with the blue untraversed hills of the interior above it. The sun was that of the dry monsoon. Sauntering leisurely across the iron railway bridge were figures which could have been assembling for the rehearsal of a strange drama, for the costumes of those women coming from Siam into Kelantan to market would make the ballet of a musical comedy look tawdry and unreal. They followed the railway track to the station buildings, where they sat by their wares, which mostly were fruits, scarlet and emerald chillies, yellow lansats, mangosteens the colour and size of new cricket-balls, and crimson rambutans. The natives were as quiet and passive as images. Only their eyes moved; and when a girl whose father was a Chinaman and her mother a Siamese villager looks at you, then you understand that the art of coquetry has been nothing but a Western phrase. The quiet folk of the country, whose life showed ardent only in the audacious colours of their dress, which betrayed their silence and langour; the strange houses under a weight of sun, and the palms and bamboos jetting from the ground like fountains, made that railway track, neat and direct as Western logic, as queer as such logic often appears in the East. The station clock bore the name of a famous London maker. But perhaps it gave only the London hour, and the palms knew better. This also was bravado. The track, so much like commercial orderliness and promptitude, was empty in both directions. Its ballast and sleepers were as arid, hot, and hopeless, as a trail in the desert. A buzzard was floating overhead. Two Chinamen were quarrelling outside the waiting-room.

The unbelievable train came as a sudden shadow and an uproar. Confidence was restored. The order and progress of a Western notion cut straight into the East, and at almost the appointed minute. And presently the cluster of huts and the groups of people by the station began to recede. More progress was being made.

I found myself beside an Englishman in an otherwise empty carriage. He was a stout young man in a despondent suit of Shantung silk. His white sun hat was beside him. He held a handkerchief in his hand, which frequently he passed across his moist face, blowing as he did it. He was reclining his heavy body on one elbow, but his eyes were alert and cheerful. “Morning,” he said loudly. “Didn’t expect to see anyone at that station.”

He was communicative. He was not like the Malays, who will travel with you all day and use only a few words when necessary, reserving their quiet gossip for the evening. I soon knew that he was not like the East, which, however, he understood very well. He thought trade was reviving. He himself was not doing so badly. Only leave alone the people who knew what to do, and no nonsense, and believe him ... and so on. These natives liked being governed and ordered about. They’d never do anything unless they were made to. Lazy swine. Look at him! Fat! Yet he got through enough work, hot as it was.

What was more, there was gold in that country. Only wanted developing. A little organisation, sir. The Malays didn’t know. The Siamese didn’t know. Nor care. The people who knew would have to see that it was done. He hoped to make enough in another five years to get home for good. Then, a little place in the country, and a seat on the local bench, and he would be happy.

The buffaloes stared at us as we went along, as motionless as figures in metal. My fellow passenger was telling me that he had been given a rotten O. B. E. for what he did during the war, but it ought to have been a K. B. E. He reckoned he had earned it. As he told me this I was looking at a Malay child, holding a big deer by a cord. They stared at us intently without moving, and might have been trying to catch a word or two about the O. B. E. as we went slowly past those huts. I heard more then about the rewards for industrious men who would attend strictly to their business in that land, and of what fellows he knew, knew quite well, had been given for their war services. “Though, dammit, sir, they had made enough without that.”

The buffaloes stared at us as we went along, as
motionless as figures in metal.

We ran into our last station. I looked from my carriage window on the strangest figure of a Malay I had seen. He was an old man, but as stout as my English fellow-traveller. He wore a yellow sarong, and yellow is the royal colour. But his tunic was the old scarlet affair, with yellow facings, of an English infantryman. Instead of the hat of a Mohammedan, he wore a white regimental helmet. He had a blue sash. On his breast were displayed a number of ornate decorations, brass regimental badges, and medals won by other people in the past for the most diverse things—for swimming at Plymouth and running at Stamford Bridge. And central on his breast, hanging by a cord, was a conspicuous red reflector from the rear lamp of a bicycle.

My English friend knew him well. He greeted the Malay cheerfully, and bestowed on him another decoration, a silverplated monogram he had found. The old man was so delighted that he regarded my contribution of a dollar with no joy whatever. He continued his conversation with my friend, in Malay, while he crumpled my currency note in his hand.

The Englishman turned to me, as we left the ancient, and chuckled. “See his battle honours and decorations, and all that? Quite mad, you know. Used to be a rajah till we turned him out, and thinks he’s one still. Just as well to humour the poor old thing.”

V. THE STORM PETREL

I paused on the bridge in Old Gravel Lane, that surprising lapse in the walls of Wapping, because water was on either side of it. The street lamps were just lit, but the sky was still high and yellow. The forms of the ships under the dock warehouses were plain, like dim creatures asleep in the shadows at the base of cliffs. It did not look like the present, that silent scene, but the past. I was peering into the past, a vista down the London Dock which evening was quickly closing, when Captain McLachlan took hold of me and brought me back to Old Gravel Lane. I didn’t know his ship was in port. “Don’t lie,” he jollied me. “Don’t pretend you knew I was in, and that you were looking for me.”

As if anyone would lie to McLachlan! No need. He is too good-natured, too sagacious. So judicious and deliberate that he would see through almost any neat and nicely polished artifice. “You never told me you would be here to-day,” I reminded him.

“Well, I’m off at midnight,” he said, still with a grip on my arm. “You come along with me.”

“Not to Glasgow,” I said in alarm.

“No. Just as far as she is now. There she is.” The skipper pointed to a misty confusion of funnels and masts up the dock.

It seemed easy to get to her. She was not far off. But in fact, at that hour, which was neither day nor night, our little journey through streets and sheds, and by quaysides where lower lights were burning though day was in the sky, and the shapes of things were queer, was like an excursion into an inverted world. It was confused. What were streets doing there, and ships? They had been jumbled in an antipodean upset. The lights were not in the right places. The shadows were all wrong. Funnels were in the streets, apparently, and houses in the water. But the skipper kept on talking, stepping over mooring ropes and children on kerbstones.

“That was a nasty passage down,” he was saying.

“It was? But I don’t remember a blow this week.”

“I do; but you wouldn’t have noticed it. I didn’t like it. Here’s me, with forty years of it, but I didn’t like it. Once or twice I wondered whether the old girl could stand it. Aye. Most of the way from the Broomielaw. Mind that rope.”

We were standing now on concrete, looking up at a steamer’s counter. This was McLachlan’s charge. She was not a liner, but an aristocrat compared with the usual coaster. She looked quite big in that place and in that light.

The skipper was shaking his head. “God forbid that I ever see the Storm Petrel again.”

This was a little ridiculous, and not at all like my friend. Almost superstitious of him. I thought it was his fun, but then he turned to mount the gangway of his ship. His face, downcast to his footing, was serious enough. His short, hard moustache looked even grim. It was amusing to discover that the skipper, among the orderly and scientific sequence of his experiences and thoughts, should allow an old myth about a bird to interrupt Scotch logic so irrelevantly. I chuckled as I followed the elderly seaman to his ship, and to divert his attention asked his opinion about the derivation and uses of the word cleat. That gangway reminded me of it. There had been a dispute ashore about it, and McLachlan was the man who would know. He keeps even The Golden Bough in his cabin, with Burns, Shelley, The Evolution of the Idea of God, an encyclopædia, and other incongruous companions. He is the unknown but harsh enemy of all hurried journalists. His untiring exactitude over trifles is awe-inspiring, and even tedious to casual and indifferent men. He paused on deck, gave me the root of the word, and assured me of all its uses, with qualifications; then turned into a door and descended to the saloon.

His steward stood at attention as we squirmed into those seats which will not push back from saloon tables, and then the man went, as the captain made a perfunctory sign for what we wanted. The skipper sat without speaking till he had the glass in his hand. “Ye see, I knew we were in for it as soon as I clapped eyes on yon lunatic,” he remarked. He had not been at all cautious with what he measured into the glasses. “As soon as the Storm Petrel came aboard, two firemen went ashore. He was enough for them. No good talking to the fellows. They were scared. They knew what that warning meant, and it happened they saw him coming up the gangway.”

“I thought it was a bird,” I said.

“No. It’s a parson. You’d know him fine if you were coasting. A wee man. I can’t leave the ship myself, but I wished the fellow to the devil. He didn’t look like a man of God to me that night for all his clericals. And he was so damn jolly when he saw me. He always is. ‘There’s something brewing, captain,’ says he, rubbing his hands. ‘You’re going to get a dusting.’ He was in his oilskins then. A good beginning, wasn’t it?”

“And you got it?”

“And we did. Anyhow, the sight of that man made me give a good look to everything.” He paused for a spell, with his service cap pushed well back, so that I could see the unweathered top of his forehead. He began talking to the clock at the end of the saloon very deliberately. “I’ve seen too much to be easily scared. Perhaps I’m too old to be scared at all. No. I wouldn’t call it fear, at my age. It’s not that. Y’see, you can watch heavy weather without worry, when you know your ship. That’s just it—knowing her. It isn’t a matter of calculation. You know, but you don’t quite know why. So I wouldn’t say that I’m afraid of big waters—not often—not to call it that. But it’s happened at times that I’ve had a sort of white feeling inside me while gripping a stanchion. You could tell it then. The little ship herself was frightened. She’d got more than she could do.

“So it was that night, and all the next day. I had the feeling twice. But that blackbird was enjoying it. He always does, though I hoped then he’d got more than he’d bargained for. But not him. He was all right. I wished he’d gone overside.”

“Who is he? What’s his caper?” I asked.

“He’s a parson. Got a quiet vicarage somewhere, I suppose. I’ve thought about him a lot. Church too peaceful for him, maybe. He mustn’t sin, not in a small country parish, and he needs excitement. It’s as good as drink to him. Better, perhaps. Anyhow, he looks for trouble. He comes and has it with us. ‘Sir,’ says the steward, ‘Mr. Jenkins has just come aboard.’ ‘The hell he has,’ I say, and look at the glass. Sure enough, down it goes. And there the wee man is. ‘Hullo, captain,’ he says, ‘good evening. But it won’t be good for long. I’ve been watching the barometer, and I’ve just had this telegram from the Meteorological Office. There’s going to be a snorter.’ He always seems as pleased as though he’d come into a legacy. Rubs his hands. Looks round. ‘I’m coming along with you,’ says the blackbird.

“And a snorter it is, for sure. All the coasters know him. You ought to hear the men when they see him hurrying along the quay, just before we cast off. They’d tip him overside, give him all the trouble there is, if he wasn’t always so grateful afterwards for the good time he’s had with us. He’s free with his tips. He pays for his fun.”

“Well, anyway, that’s over,” said the skipper. He poured out some more. “I deserve this,” he went on. “That last was a voyage and a half. Now look here. There’s four hours to midnight. I haven’t seen you to talk to you yet. You run home and get your bag. Come round with us. You know you can. So don’t argue. I want to hear about things. It’ll be a quiet trip this time.”

“Any other passengers?”

“Not one. It’s not the season. We’ll have it to ourselves. Likely we’ll have spring weather all the way. That last blow must have emptied the sky. What’s this I hear about the American astronomer who is denying Einstein? Come and tell me.”

I rose to go. It was tempting. I had got to like the smell of the ship. She looked good. And McLachlan’s reliable face, with its taut mouth and moustache, and mocking and contemplative eyes—a talk with him would be more than a holiday. Could I do it?

We mounted the companion to the deck. It was a still night, with an audience of placid little clouds about a full moon. The dock was asleep. I went with the captain to his cabin, for he had a book of mine, and he wished to return it. That peaceful cabin, with its library, and the broad back of the sailor as he peered into his bookcase, settled it. I would hurry home and get my bag. Then there was a voice behind me: “Sir, Mr. Jenkins has come back. He’s just come aboard.”

The skipper turned slowly round to stare at his steward, dragging his spectacles from his eyes as he did so. His mouth was partly open. He only stared for some seconds.

“Has that man brought his bag, Jones?”

“Yes, sir. He’s in his oilskins, sir.”

VI. ON THE CHESIL BANK

I

The Chesil Bank was new to me, and it had no message. It was pleasing, but it was strange, though it was England. It was but a whitewashed wall topped by a tamarisk hedge. Below the wall was a deserted ridge and beach of shingle, tawny and glowing, and a wide sea without a ship in sight. The white wall, the pale and shimmering stones, and the bright sea, were as far from my own interests as a West Indian cay.

A figure appeared in the distance, so unusual a blot on the shingle that I watched it two miles away. There was nothing else to do. It moved with briskness and determination, but appeared to be unconcerned with anything I could see on that strand. It came straight towards me as though it knew I was there, and at length handed me a telegram. It was a smiling and rosy-cheeked little messenger from the post-office, three miles away. The child waited, like the eternal figure of Eros in a British uniform, as though it had been doing this, off and on, in some form or other, since the gods began to sport with the affairs of earth. “What’s all this about?” I asked Eros. But he only smiled. I wondered who was in such a hurry to announce something, and opened the envelope. “Conrad is dead.”

I stared at the messenger for a space, as though there must be something more to come. But nothing more came. Then the messenger spoke. “Anything to go back?”

Anything to go back? No, nothing to go back. Somehow, life seems justified only by some proved friends and the achievements of good men who are still with us. Once we were so assured of the opulence and spiritual vitality of mankind that the loss of a notable figure did not seem to leave us any the poorer. But to-day, when it happens, we feel a distinct diminution of our light. That has been dimmed of late years by lusty barbarians, and we look now to the few manifestly superior minds in our midst to keep our faith in humanity sustained. The certainty that Joseph Conrad was somewhere in Kent was an assurance of solace in years that have not been easily borne.

Yet I cannot pretend to intimacy with him, nor to complete absorption in his work. There was something in him not to be clearly discerned. It was sought in his books with curiosity, but it did not appear to be there. The man was only partly seen, as through a veil. Sometimes his face peered through the filmy obscurity, massively, in still and overlooking scrutiny, his eyes remote but intent, kindly but dangerous, a face in a seclusion one could approach but never enter. Most of us are aware, of course, that we are secluded, and that our friends can never find out where we are. We wish they could. It is not a joy to us that, in the nature of things, we must be alone. But Conrad, perhaps, was more accustomed to exile and a solitary watch under the silent stars. Occasionally he would vouchsafe a closer glimpse of himself, something to make us alert, but at once fade into his own place. He would utter such a word as Meddlers, meaning you and me, meaning all those Englishmen, who, for example, are restive under the constraint of foolish men and statutes, and plainly show it. He would exclaim Humanitarians in a way that implied, merely implied, that pitiful men are a nuisance. My own guess is that he desired to take part in English affairs, for he had strong antipathies, but that he repressed himself, doubting his right to—well, to meddle. Perhaps it is as well he kept out. He would have proved a formidable opponent. But mainly he was silent about the affairs that provoked the prejudices of the English, giving no more than an appraising and ironic glance. Or he would, when we talked with emphasis about our national concerns, make an enigmatic gesture. He was an aristocrat. Yet what does that mean? Of course he was. Aristocrat and democrat are tokens that to-day look much alike, and appear to have no relevance even to a money-lender. We may throw them away. Everybody has forgotten what they mean.

I suppose it is about eighteen years ago since I began to read Conrad. I knew of him, but mistrusted the evidence of the critics. The literature of the sea did not interest me, for I had had some experience with that rollicking stuff; the stories which, we are told, have something called “tang” in them, the stories that represent seamen as good-natured imbeciles, with a violent bully here and there among them altogether too ingenious and foul-mouthed for comfort. Hearty yarns! But I happened to know several seamen, and a few ships. However, one day, in a hurry for a train, I snatched up the Nigger, and began it in the cab on the way to Euston. That was a great surprise. The Narcissus was certainly the kind of craft which made fast in the South-West India Dock; and old man Singleton was the embodiment of the virtues and faults of a race of mariners which, in the year in which I read the book, had all but gone. Singleton was of the clippers. I had known some of those men, and I recognised Singleton at once. This novelist had made a picture of a type of British seaman which, but for his genius, would have been lost to us and forgotten.

There could be no doubt about it. The Nigger was the thing itself, and I had never expected to see it. Next I read Typhoon; and the Nan-Shan and her men were exactly what even now you may meet any day somewhere east of Tower Hill, if you care to look, and know what to look for. I was not certain whether the critics knew it, but to me it was plain that this worker, who was a Pole, I was told, had added to the body of English literature testimony to a period of British ships and seamen which otherwise would have passed as unmarked as the voyages of the men of Tyre and Sidon. Its very atmosphere was there. As for Youth it is, without doubt, one of the finest short narratives in the language, and there will never be again such a yarn of such a voyage in such a ship.

Conrad told me that not seldom seamen wrote to him to say that they knew Singleton well, though “that was not his name.” Of course they knew Singleton. The novelist was very pleased that he could say Singleton had been recognised. It was the kind of assurance he needed then. It is all very well for us to make a fuss now, but Conrad had given the public his best work years before he received from us any worthy signal. He was an extremely sensitive man, and shy and modest, and not so long ago he desired to learn from Englishmen that his addition to our literature of the sea was just, and the kind that we approved. We were in no hurry to give it. I met him first in the company of Norman Douglas and Austin Harrison, in the office of the English Review in its earlier days. Because I knew he was a noteworthy man, and because he looked distinguished and a little haughty, and because only a few weeks before I had reviewed one of his books of the sea, I was nervous and merely looked on. Presently Douglas and Harrison began to talk of the affairs of their Review; Conrad then came over, and stood beside me. He touched my arm, apparently as nervous as I was myself. “Thank you very much for what you said about my book. You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”

I was then a journalist on the staff of a daily newspaper. I was at Sidney Street and elsewhere. But Conrad’s first words to me gave me one of the shocks of my life. Here was a man, whose work, however neglected by the public, was manifestly an admirable achievement. It would be living when much of what was being done in London, and many of the great men whose names were in the headlines daily, would be forgotten. It did not want much knowledge to divine that. And hardly a robust young writer who had a column to fill somewhere every other day but was assured of his place in the handsome scheme of things, and expected one to know his work. Yet this man, who had Youth to his credit, and Typhoon and Lord Jim, touched the arm of his junior and was pleased to say “You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”

A remark of that kind might go far to wreck one’s own career, if it sank properly in. Yet it is as well to point out that, though modest, Conrad could be quick enough in attack when folly or presumption was about. He was not the man to suffer gladly the more ruinous absurdities of his fellows. It was heartening to see that graciousness and diffidence suddenly go, and those dark eyes become lambent at the naming of an arrogant crudity.

I must say there is one of the company of the Narcissus that I deplore. Conrad should never have shipped that man Donkin. He is not a man, but an unresolved dislike, a blot in a good book. Donkin does a little to spoil the voyage of the Narcissus, for Conrad imagined that he had shipped a Cockney; yet Donkin, whenever he speaks, distresses the ear of a Londoner. We do not know his dialect. I fear that Donkin may be, if examined, queer evidence of what was behind that veil which Conrad preferred to keep between himself and his readers.

Mr. Cunninghame Graham, in his preface to Joseph Conrad’s posthumous Tales of Hearsay, quotes with evident pleasure from one of the tales: “It requires a certain greatness of soul to interpret patriotism worthily—or else a sincerity of feeling denied to the vulgar refinement of modern thought which cannot understand the august simplicity of a sentiment proceeding from the very nature of things and men.” Vulgar refinement! A shining epithet. And how it would be quoted with unction by one group of ardent patriots, who would cheerfully shoot another group, with admirable sincerity of feeling, because the patriotism of their opponents, just as sincere if less admirable, stood in their way! Patriotism doubtless is like true religion. It may be entirely an expression of faith, and so need not be reasonable. And we know who have true religion. We have it.

No matter. “There is a fountain in Marrakesh,” says Mr. Cunninghame Graham, “with a palm tree near it, a gem of Moorish art, with tiles as iridescent as the scales upon a lizard’s back. Written in Cufic characters, there is this legend ‘Drink and admire.’ Read and admire; then return thanks to Allah who gives water to the thirsty and at long intervals sends us refreshment for the soul.” And we return thanks to Allah. There is that to go back.

II

When I return to a London suburb I think I shall try to cultivate something resembling one of the drains which occur here and there on the lower slopes of the Wessex moorland above the Chesil Bank. These ditches make our best horticultural efforts as vulgar as excessive begonias. The effect achieved by a ditch comes, apparently, without intent and labour. When a drain is constant over shelves of limestone from an upper spring, and then gathers into a shallow basin before losing itself in the porous desert near the sea; when it occurs so in a narrow combe with a southerly descent and is sheltered from the hard drive of westerly weather, then the still lower air is tropical, and English weeds flourish with an extravagance which hints at a fearful vitality suppressed by cultivation.

One such tiny combe is a short walk above the tamarisks and the white wall of my house. It is easy and even pleasant to carry thither those books some wilful editors consider that I ought to read, unluckily for the books and for them; because if I get well above the ditch then the smell of thyme makes the synthetic odours of a modern novel, as from a dressing table, seem a little queer. No getting round that criticism. And if I stay by the ditch then I waste all the morning standing about in that luxuriant tangle, as fascinated by it as the hover-flies appear to be. No good then to try to read any book. Foolish to expect the wit of recent prose to prove like a dragon-fly, or a lyric to soar and poise like a red admiral. On a hot day, too, the smell of the water mint would make the strongest inducement of Mille Fleurs seem very silly. Besides, one has first to get to the ditch. It is quite near, but the time one takes to reach it is ridiculous. The ditch lies on the other side of an old wall, which is built—or created, for the wall bears no evidence of design—of loose slabs of a limestone of the Lias.

That wall is the trouble. It is hard to get over it, and impossible to get round it. Most of it is hidden in a torrent of bramble, which pours headlong downhill. That wild of bramble is itself a domain in its own right. I have discovered that it is an inhabited tunnel, and the waves of hooked branches form its roof. One morning a stoat, which was leaping about in a game that needs but one player, saw me coming, and dived into a lower door of the mass. Out of other doors, till then unknown, rabbits shot at once, as by magic. It was as though this earth could erupt all the life it needs, at any moment. I suspect these hills could do very well without us, and if Downing Street were to become permanently untenanted perhaps our island would not look any the worse, from one point of view.

A good length of the wall is exposed, at one place. That part of it is, as an orderly mind would say, in need of repair. I hope it will never get it. It is a delightful ruin. Slabs of limestone are scattered about the foot of a ruin of loose rock. They vary in colour. They may be a pale buff, or a bluish grey. The surface of a slab is frequently water-worn, and then it is smooth and silky to the touch, and is lustrous. It looks warm and rich, as though the bones of earth had an unctuous marrow. And any chance fragment makes the age of the tumuli on the hill-top as recent as yesterday, for it will be loaded with fossils, the relics of a sea in which the dinosaurs lived. The chance cross-sections of many nacreous shells give such a tablet of rock the appearance of being marked with shining hieroglyphics; what reading matter for us! No wonder it takes some time to get over it, this wall! Lizards whisk into its crevices, the flickering of shadows where all is still.

Below the overturned wall is the combe in which runs the ditch. There is a dark screen of stunted Scotch firs on the edge of its far side to keep any of the Channel gusts from spilling over. The weeds below have no need to adjust themselves to the draughts. They grow as they please. Teazle and hemp-agrimony flourish into small trees. Once you begin to climb uphill through that jungle, out of the lower fringe of mint and flea-bane—it is time a better name was found for that pleasant little yellow herb of the waste and damp lands—you feel that the heat of the sun is really a direct and incessant burning. The air is humid, and strongly aromatic. The growth in that hollow might be the work of a spell. It does not move. It seems theatrical and even a little threatening in its absolute quietude and stillness. Some resolution is needed for an advance into it. The pinkish murk of the crowns of hemp-agrimony rises above the cream plumes of the meadow-sweet, and though one knows of no attraction in its flower-heads, the butterflies do. I suppose it gives them an upper platform in the light. Out in the wind you may not see a butterfly all day, but here it is usual on a sunny morning to find a gathering of scores of tortoise-shells, peacocks, and red admirals. Perhaps it is a tradition with them that this is the best retreat on the coast. It is a good tradition and should be preserved. I am not sure which of those insects is the most handsome, but I think whichever one of them happens to be arranging itself on the nearest crown, heliotropically, really presenting to the sun its coloured design, yet behaving—if I remain as still as the garden itself—as though it were doing its best to get into the right light for my benefit. Well, it is for my benefit, as well as for my humiliation, because I realise that such a design, though worked to no useful purpose that I can guess, being in that respect inferior to my own designs, yet still might be considered superior to the art of my own well-directed efforts. In any case, while that assembly of useless living colours is winged and convulsive above the weeds, on a good morning, it seems a sort of idleness to make the usual notes of a critic of books.

III

There is no harbour on the curved sweep of this bank of shingle for many miles in either direction. The line of the beach in the north curves so imperceptibly that to the eye it looks straight; towards the southern end it sweeps round like the blade of a sickle, and is as sharp in the run. The five-fathom mark is close inshore, so the first line of breakers is direct upon the shingle. The usual weather, of course, is westerly; nearly always south of west. And in that direction I suppose the next land would be the Bahamas, but I have only local maps, and can lay no exact course to what landfall is in the eye of the wind. Anyhow, there is so much ocean between us and the next land that the waves come in, with any seaward breeze, in regular and massed attacks. They growl as they charge. In summer weather like this it is a cheerful noise, for they are only playing roughly. Then they break and make the shingle fly, with a roar; and a myriad little stones, as a wave draws back, follow it with thin cries.

Both the sea and the coast look bare and barren. Terns in couples patrol up and down, and so close to me that I can see their black caps. Occasionally one will dive—two seconds under water—and it comes up with something which glitters for an instant. On the ridge of the shingle bank a little vegetation is recumbent, forming close mats and cushions, with sere stalks that quiver in the wind, as though apprehensive of their footing. The sea looks even more infertile than the desert of stones. You feel that you and your book, and the terns which now and then find something which glitters, are all the intruding life there is. But some distance away there are a few boats drawn up high and dry—they make good shelters to leeward of sun and wind, and they have a strong but pleasing smell—and at odd times, usually towards evening, a crew of six men will come along to get one out. She is launched down the slope on wooden rollers, in short runs. Half the crew go in her, and one of them throws a seine net steadily overside. The other fellows have the shore end of the seine. The boat goes round a considerable bight, and then lands the other end of the net. If you imagine that hauling in that net and its floats, when any tide is running, is nothing but fun, the men will not object if you put on your weight. That way there is much to be learned.

The gradient of the shingle is steep, and when climbing it with a line in tow the feet slip back into the polished stones at every step. What has this to do, you ask, with a reader of books? Well, what do you suppose a bookman learns at a study table about life? Make him sail a boat now and then, or haul on a net, or herd cows, or dig clay, or weed a field instead of new novels; make him work, if not for a living, then just for a change. What does he imagine keeps London’s chimneys smoking? Once I heard a rude fellow interrupt a famous political economist, who was deploring the sad ways of coal miners. “If you,” he said, “could keep warm in winter only by hewing your own coal out of the rock, you know very well you’d sooner buy a pair of dumb-bells.”

The feet crunch and slip, steadily, while the floats of the net seem to bob no nearer the shore. The weight comes with a rush just about when you feel it is better to read books than to handle seine nets. There is a heaving and a slapping on the stones. To most of us, of course, fish is fish. There is only fish. Yet one haul of the net is almost sure to bring in forms that are fishes, certainly, but which demand to be named. They are so challenging that they stick in the memory, and must be exorcised with names, as we resolve, by putting names to them, all the mysteries that trouble us.

I love fish markets. I enjoy even Billingsgate, though one does get pushed about there, early mornings, and its rain of slobber is bad for neat raiment. One of the most beautiful and terrifying scenes on this earth is a fish market of the tropics. When next you are in Tanjong Priok, do not forget, as you did last time, to go to its fish market. But this English shingle beach, barren as its stones look, is a good substitute for the Tanjong, when the seine net is fruitful. For occasionally it is fruitful, though a deal of wet and heavy labour may be wasted on six mackerel and some squids. The fishermen have no use for the squids, nor have I, but they may be enjoyed. You need only look at them, for they are like odd Chinese shapes in polished and transparent quartz, but magically illuminated from within by the principle of life. Life flushes each hyaline figure. And though, to one way of thinking, six mackerel are not so good as six thousand, yet from another they are just as good. A wonderful family, that of the mackerel! You no sooner begin to remember tunny, albacore, and bonito, than you are translated to a distant sea. There is something else, too. We never see mackerel—or, for that matter, any other fish, in London. We see only provender there. On the stones of this beach, when the red globe of the sun sits almost a-top of the western headland, and the air grows bleak, a mackerel fresh from the sea might be a big fire-opal lost to the ocean’s enchantment. Yes, you may feel a shudder of fear when overlooking the heaving pocket of the seine net.

And how little one knows of such a gathering from the gardens of the pulse! A red gurnard, with its staring eyes of violet, and the livid violet margin to its pectorals, never suggests anything for the pot. Those steady eyes look at you with disconcerting interest. There are red mullet and grey, gar-fish like green snakes, horse mackerel, herring, plaice and dabs, and fry that might be leaping shavings of bright metal. The other afternoon a salmon came in with the rest, a very king, a resplendent silver torpedo of a fellow, who scattered the shingle before he was overcome. And now, because I have been warned that I may look for even stranger messengers from the world we do not know, I am waiting for the opah, the chimæra mirabilis, the angel fish, Darkie Charlie, and the oar-fish or sea-serpent.

IV

That overcrowding of which we complain—declaring first that our cities are much too great, and then blaming our officials because the buildings do not spread quickly enough—is something we really enjoy, I suppose. We could not live without the support of the multitude. We love to walk down Fleet Street, jostling each other on the inadequate sidewalks, pressed together between the motor-buses and the shop fronts. We find the crowd, and keep with it on instinct. The fruits of solitude are astringent and we do not like them. Nothing else will explain why we would sooner sit uncomfortably with fifty strangers in a charabanc, for a journey through a land we cannot see, to a place which is exactly like the one from which we started, than stroll across country in peace at our own gait.

Yesterday I had to go to town again. It ought to have been a pleasure trip, because the town nearest to me is described on the posters, with coloured illustrations, as the kind of place for which men forsake even their London employment. When I remembered its many advertised attractions I felt almost glad that I was out of tobacco. At last I should see this notable pleasure resort with its golden sands and its joyous throng. The change would be interesting, because nothing had happened in my neighbourhood for some time, except weather. True, the tamarisk pennants had begun to rust, and in the next field there was stubble instead of oats. But, except the admonitions of a few selected books, the only sounds at an isolated cottage had been the occasional mewing of the gulls and the mourning of the sea. I had an idea, too, that the wind, as it came ashore, was glad to find our key-hole, for it desired a local habitation and a voice. The voice of the wind, I noticed, was in keeping with the monody of the sea. It is rare for any stranger to pass this house, though some porpoises went by the other afternoon. Just beyond a most individual sea-stock, which somehow is rooted and exalted on the wall at the foot of the garden, daring the light of the ocean, I saw the black forms of the little whales arch past, close in. And the other day a float, from one of the submarine nets of the days that were, drifted ashore, to have a chat with me about old times. It was the only distinguished stranger on the beach.

The pleasure resort, therefore, I expect to bring me back to a conscious existence. Not far from its station there is a magnificent hotel, with a glass verandah and palms, under which I saw men in golfing dress sitting in wicker chairs brooding appreciatively across a broad asphalted road to the gathering ground of the charabancs; and, just beyond the motor vehicles, multitudes of red and yellow and blue air-balloons were swaying aloft, though their attachment to earth was out of sight. I threaded the charabancs, pushed aside men in white ulsters who shouted at me that it was only two bob, and brought up against some iron railings. I leaned on the iron railings for support; they were providential. The beach was below; I mean that I suppose it was, for it all was out of sight except a pailful of it immediately under my eyes, which a child was treasuring. A man was beside the child, in a canvas chair. How he got there it was impossible to see, but he looked worried about it, though resigned. Rank on rank of deck chairs stood between him and the sea, all occupied by people reading newspapers, or asleep, or dead; the intermediate spaces were filled with children. The very sea was invaded. It was impossible to discern where it reached the land. The crowds went out to meet it. They slurred its margin. And on either side of that holiday-maker below me, for miles apparently, the deck chairs extended and shut him in; the sea wall rose behind him. Would he starve to death? Nobody seemed to care. Nobody lowered a rope. When I left him he had fallen asleep, luckily; perhaps to dream of freedom.

Whoever that man was, he was a voluntary prisoner. He must have sought it. If that had been the only beach on that coast, the only view of the sea to be got in the neighbourhood, it would be fair to guess that he had gambled with his hour, and had drawn a blank. Such an accident might happen to anybody, even in the desperate matter of catching the only train of the day, which one had hoped was late. Yet that will not explain his wretched position, because, whether he knew it or not, there is a beach not a great distance from where he was a prisoner on which could be lost the population of a city; but, as I happened to know, no life was there that morning except a few fishermen and some parties of sea-birds. Moreover, the views from that untenanted strand are incomparably finer and wider. It is possible to see from there what a desirable island we have, an island very far from being as overcrowded as we imagine.

Indeed, if the country about that imprisoned holiday-maker has a fault, it is that it is largely as it was when the folk who built its hut-circles and cromlechs occupied it; though I myself do not find that fault with it. For most of a long day on its uplands a traveller will see more tumuli about him than warm and smoking homesteads. Within a morning’s walk of that crowded holiday beach, a fox dropped his rabbit, which he was carrying home, as I came round a prehistoric earthwork, and trotted off reluctantly, in broad daylight. He must have been greatly surprised to find a stranger was trespassing on his hill. On another morning we startled a weasel, which at that moment had worse than startled a short-tailed field mouse. He was more reluctant to go than the fox, but he did retire into a tangle. Not for long, though. His tiny snake-like head was out in a few moments, inspecting us. Then he stole out to look for his abandoned dinner. He became very peevish when he could not find it, for we had hidden it, and explored all the ruts and tussocks in the neighbourhood in impulsive leaps and gallops. We had a leisured view of his cream and chestnut figure, darting and writhing about a roadway which has long been obsolete. Once or twice he seemed as though he were on the point of attacking us.

The land about that holiday resort has been loved by many great artists. The men who first tried to convert the English barbarians to Christianity saw its fruitfulness and settled there; but you might suppose, in spite of its colour, the nobility of its form, and the wealth of its tradition, that there was something wrong with it, for if you keep away from the tarred roads which connect the towns, and that is easy enough, you are in the England that was before the coming of the machines. Its contrast with that near holiday beach where the golden strand is invisible through pleasure-seekers suggests that the machines have so disordered our minds that we shall never again feel happy in independent contact with the earth.

V

The breakers are towering to-day. They explode above the tops of the tamarisks, which are tormented by a south-wester. If a door is opened, pandemonium enters the house. So I have been reading the poets when their subject is the sea. Byron when in a kindly mood once counselled the sea to “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.” Man, especially man the poet, with his conscious understanding of the universe, is inclined to haughtiness. He is a conqueror. He feels that he is one with the powers that roll and are blue. When he is not haughty and sombre in the presence of these powers, he includes them with those embracing thoughts which fondly gather in little children, fawns, and daisies. I do not speak with certain knowledge, but I should guess that any anthology of what poets have written about the sea must cause a mariner a little astonishment. Are they the waters he knows? Then he must be a rude and careless fellow. Now and then when turning the leaves of the book it may occur to him that perhaps the poet did not know what he was talking about. He may set out with “a wet sheet and a flowing sea and a wind that follows fast,” and bound along at the rate of knots for some stanzas; but presently he is sure to ask himself why with the wind in that quarter the good ship “leaves old England on the lee.”

Yet that is a minor difficulty. We can see that a slip of that sort might happen even to a sailor who attempted poetry, especially when one remembers the exigencies of metre and rhyming. No; what would give the mariner most surprise would be the love the poets feel for the sea, their delight in it, their robust faith in its blueness and its rolling and in its beneficent and healing qualities. It might be a public garden, maintained by a highly capable Gardener. I have a number of those special anthologies, and a re-reading of them helps me to understand why it is that the people who, as they say, love the sea, prefer to show their love only at certain favoured points of our coasts, and to leave most of the shore line to the wind and the gulls. These anthologies are not together for their assuagement; for the most part, the poems concern an ocean which can be enjoyably contemplated on a warm day, in choice company, with light thoughts hovering about, vague but gleaming, like the birds. We must have the moral support of society when loving the sea. What would happen if we were left alone with it? One lonely evening by its margin might be enough to scare most of us towards the comfort of the nearest railway station’s lamps. There is but little suggestion of this, however, in the anthologies. They brave it out. “High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire,” or “The Sands of Dee”—such unexpected chill shadows may at times intervene, and change the look of the sea. The brightness goes. Yet only as the sun goes when a trifling cloud blows across its light and warmth. The waves soon sparkle once more according to their poetic wont, and the deep and dark blue ocean rolls on, the ships are brave and free, and jovial sailors look out on their world like happy imbeciles whose function it is to provide matter for our superior amusement. At the worst they saunter through Ratcliffe, as did the crew of the steamer Bolivar, “drunk and raising Cain,” but maintaining even then, we see, their reputation for imbecility. If they survive a dangerous voyage in a steamer, which was only a pack of “rotten plates puttied up with tar,” and meant to founder, their sailor-like protest shows merely in a riotous booze. “Euchred God Almighty’s storm, bluffed the eternal sea!” So let us adjourn to a tavern.

We appear to be incorrigibly romantic. We prefer to give the reality any name but the one which shows we have surmised its nature. It is impolite in Malay society, and even unlucky at night, to mention the dreaded tiger by name. You must refer to him in an allusive and friendly way. With a maritime people the sea is lovely, and sailors are “salts” who provide some comic relief. The more absurd we find those fellows, then the more certain it is that they are genuine “old shellbacks.” How curious it is, then, that sea-lovers are so careful about encountering the object of their affections that they abstain from it except with the support of a multitude! What we mean is, I suppose, that we enjoy leisure when in the midst of our fellow creatures, in a place where everything is done to prevent our coming under those shadows cast by matters which puzzle or distress us, and therefore should be ignored or misnamed.

The sea is such a shadow, whatever the light upon it. The soul of the sea, if it has one, is like that fabulous “soul of the war,” something from which no joy can come by brooding upon it. The sea fascinates me, I admit. I should not enjoy an English holiday away from the coast, and I should be glad if some wise person could explain exactly why. I have felt the same attraction, though then it was more acute, in the aspect of a desolate village which was under the ruthless eye of the enemy’s guns. I did not want to go there, but I went. At sunset alone on a beach where there is nothing but sea and sky and the forsaken shore, the look of the running waters, their harsh and melancholy voices, and the bleak wind which shivers the very herbage, make you feel that you are a homeless stranger. Is this your place? It does not look like it. If verses from the poets then come to your mind, it is only in an ironic way. Absurd to apostrophise that scene! Much effect upon it loving it would have. Perhaps the mere effort encourages the fearful and doubting heart of man, and for that reason we may welcome the poets and the romanticists, who give us the sensation of conquerors, which is something towards the conquest of mind over matter.

The romance of the sea, the sea that inspired exultant lyric and stately prose, the sea wonderful with the old clippers to which we have looked back wistfully, is not quite the sea, we are beginning to feel, that we used to picture. Does that sea exist? It may be ungracious to question it at this moment, so soon after our recent rapture, sincerely felt, over the Cutty Sark. Yet there it is. We are living in an age of revolt. We are interrogating much that once was never questioned. Things must prove themselves anew. What we used to value may be lumber, and must go if it is, even when it is lumber of the mind.

As to the sea, it has no human attributes whatever—

As to the sea, it has no human attributes whatever, though it will absorb anything the poet will give it. It is as alien as the stars, which are bright over lovers, but were just as friendly to Scott’s little party when the blizzard stopped. We may feel what we like when we witness, from a ship off Sumatra, a tropical sunset. The spectacle of the billows of the uplifted Western ocean, in a winter twilight, is enough to make a man feel that he ought to have a religion; but that is only a confession of man’s wondering and questioning mind. There is more pertaining to man in a kitchen midden than in the spacious ocean when it most attracts us. Man, fronting the sea, the sea which is, inexplicably, both hostile and friendly to him because it knows nothing of his existence and his noble aims, is saddened, and is driven to meet its impersonal indifference with fine phrases, that his sense of his worth and his dignity may be rehabilitated. He knows it is absurd to pretend to any love for the sea.

Then why does the sea attract us? For it does, even though we feel now that our lyrical exultation over its moods has been oddly irrelevant. It attracted in the same way the good seamen who were so ill-rewarded for their skill and endurance when making for us what is now the wistful memory of the clippers. They were ill-used, those men. We may make their times romantic in retrospective brooding, and with a sombre imagining of the soul of man fronting the hostile elements in stoic endurance. But it will not do. So much of their heroic endurance was necessitated by facts which any sensible dog would have avoided once he knew what they were like. To live in such quarters, on such food, while doing such work, when there was no need for it, when so easily it could have been ordered otherwise, may afford matter for an Iliad, if we choose to ignore the critical intelligence, but we cannot get credit for common sense on the score of it. And that kind of sense should be the beginning of the literature of the sea, as of all literature.

Let us examine more cautiously, for example, that favourite book of the sea of ours, The Nigger. Remember that the barque Narcissus was property, just as is a farm, and might never have been on her beam ends but for an eagerness for more money. Now consider the attitude of her master and his officers to their charge, as Conrad posed them for our approval; regard the fortitude and skill of the men in circumstances which Conrad pictures so vividly that we shrink as from a physical contact; and then observe Donkin, that Cockney guy set up for the contempt of all stout and virtuous lovers of duty; and own up! Is it just? Do we know Donkin the Cockney as at once we know Singleton, the old man of the sea? We know we do not. Such treatment ashore drove agricultural labourers to the penal settlements of Australia. These facts, so important in any examination of the problem of conduct—and that, we know, is what the Nigger is,—are obscured by our admiration for Conrad’s noble tribute to Singleton, and for his pictures of a ship fighting the Southern Ocean.

No doubt it would suit some ship-owners if the sea could be accepted as a cheap and providential means of testing the fundamental quality of the souls of men; and obviously some men would stand the test well. But beyond noting that this would ease the labours of the Recording Angel, I can see nothing in its favour. There is a need in literature, as in politics, to clear the mind of cant. Men intrinsically may be of less importance than good ships and the august spectacle of the sea; but they ought not to be so to us.

But one could go on for a long time on such a subject as the sea in English literature, if one named merely the books and poems which to us seem to be right. There is, however, no need. One great sea story comprehends them all, as all who know Moby Dick know well enough. It is the greatest book in the language on ships and the sea, because it is more than that. For the White Whale, that mythical monster, is as elusive as the motive of a symphony of Beethoven’s. Did the whale ever exist? There is the music to prove it. The harpooners followed it, a shadow among the very stars. That is something like a whaling voyage, when the boats leave the seas to hurl a lance at the Great Bear. Other voyages must end. But the quest of Captain Ahab’s ship is without end; and what would we expect of a craft whose master soliloquises like Macbeth? Outside the epistles of St. Paul, is there a sermon in any book which is like Father Mapple’s to the folk in his chapel at New Bedford? The cross-bearings taken by Captain Ahab to find his ship’s position, to set, if he can, the right course for her, would bring his ship to a harbour no man has ever reached. And he did not reach it. Destiny sank him and his companions in the waste. Yet we know the high adventure of his phantom whaler continues in the hearts of men. That is where the Pequod sank.

Many years ago I was discussing the literature of the sea with a Fleet Street colleague, a clever and versatile man against whose volatile enthusiasms experience had taught me to guard myself well. He began to talk of Moby Dick. Talk! He soon became incoherent. He swept aside all other books of the sea with a free, contemptuous gesture. There was only one book of the sea, and there never would be another. I fear that a native caution has shut me from many good things in life, so I smiled at my friend; yet, in the way of a cautious man, I smiled at him with sound reason. I had not read the White Whale; I had only heard rumours of it. But I had read Typee and Omoo, and I knew them even better than my colleague; about whom I may point out that a brief experience on the Somme battlefield unbalanced his mind at last, and he died insane. Now Typee and its mate are brisk and attractive narratives of travel and adventure, exuberantly descriptive, lively with their honey-coloured girls and palm groves, jolly with the talk of seamen in forecastles of ships sailing waters few of us know, though we all wish we did, and full of the observation of an original mind in a tropic world that is no more. But they are not great literature. I knew perfectly well that the author of Typee was not the man to rise to that stellar altitude which moved my colleague to rapture and wonder. That was not Melville’s plane, and having read the American writer’s first two books, I thought a busy man, amid a wilderness of unread works, need not bother himself about this White Whale, for hardly a doubt it was just a whale.

I was wrong. My friend who was unbalanced by the war was right. I find it difficult now to speak of Melville’s book within measure, for I have no doubt Moby Dick goes into that small company of extravagant and generative works which have made other writers fertile, the books we cannot classify, but which must be read by every man who writes, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Tristram Shandy, and the Pickwick Papers. That is where Moby Dick is, and it is therefore as important a creative effort as America has made in her history. I would sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” if that is the proper hymn, with fervour, with the deepest sense of debt and gratitude, at any patriotic service of thanksgiving over Moby Dick. That book is one of the best things America has done since the Declaration of Independence. It justifies her revolution. I would assist another body of Pilgrim Fathers to any place on earth if on their venture depended the vitality of the seed of such a book as that. The indeterminate jungle of humanity flowers and is justified in its bibles, which carry in microcosm the fortunate future of mankind, or if there be no fortune for it in its future, then in its tragic but godlike story.

If a reader of books desires to know the truth about his understanding of English prose, whether it is natural and proper, or whether his interest in it has been but suggested by the critics and the conventions of the more popular reading of his time, like the habit of going to Church or voting at elections, there is a positive test. Let him read the book by Herman Melville about a whale. If he does not like it he should not read it. As soon as imagination begins to sport with our language, then our words, that were familiar, become strange; their import seems different; you cannot see quite through them. They suggest that they are mocking us. They seem a trifle mad. They break free from our rules and behave indecorously. They are transmuted from the solid currency into invalid hints and shadows with shifting lights and implications. They startle with suggestions of deeps around us the existence of which we had not suspected. They hover too perilously near the horizon of sanity and proved things, beyond which we venture at our peril. They become alive and opalescent, and can be terrifying with the foreshadowing of powers beyond the range of what has been explored and is understood. As in all great art, something is suggested in Melville’s book that is above and greater than the matter of the story. Upon the figures in Melville’s drama and their circumstances there fall lights and glooms from what is ulterior, tremendous, and undivulged. Through the design made by the voyage of the Pequod there is determined, as by chance, a purpose for which her men did not sign, and which is not in her charter.

But if we wish to criticize the book then we might as well try to analyse the precession of the equinoxes. The book defies the literary critics, who are not used to sperm whales. While reading Moby Dick you often feel that the author is possessed, that what he is doing is dictated by something not himself which compels him to use our accepted symbols with obliquity. You fear, now and then, that the sad and steady eye of the Ancient Mariner is on the point of flaring into a mania that may prophesy, or rave. His words go to the limit of their hold on the polite and reasonable. Yet they do not break loose. It is possible that we have not sufficient intelligence to rise to the height at which Melville was considered to be mad. After all, what is common sense? The commonest sense, Thoreau tells us, is that of men asleep, which they express by snoring; and we know that we ourselves might be thought a little queer if we went beyond the plain and verifiable noises in everybody’s language.

But who has resolved poetry into its elements? Who knows what Christabel means? And who knows why a book, which was neglected for seventy years, should be accepted to-day as though light had only just come through it? I suppose our thoughts have veered. Certainly of late years much has happened to change them; and when our thoughts change, then the apparitions change about us. We change our thoughts and change our world. We see even in Moby Dick what was invisible to the people to whom the book was first given. On a winter’s night, only a year or two ago, I was intrigued into a drawing-room in a London suburb to hear a group of neighbours, who were men of commerce, discuss this book of Melville’s. They did so with animation, and the symptoms of wonder. It could not have happened before the war. Was some unseen door now open? Were we in communication with influences that had been unknown to us? I was greatly surprised, for I knew well enough that I and they would not have been found there, ten years before, discussing such a book. The polite discussion of accepted books is all very well; but this book was dangerous. One ought not, without due consideration, to set out at night from a suburban villa to hunt a shadowy monster in the sky. Heaven alone knows where they may lead us. And my wonder was the greater when a shy stranger there, who looked more like a bank manager than a South Sea Whaler, confessed during the discussion, quite casually, that Melville’s book reminded him of Macbeth. Of course, those knocks on the castle door! That was the very thought which had struck me. I looked at that man with awe, as though I was in the wake of the White Whale itself. I left that gathering much too late of a winter’s night for comfort, and a blizzard struck us. But what is a blizzard at midnight to a wayfarer who has just had happy confirmation, an unexpected signal amid the bewildering chaos and disasters of his time and culture, that he is in the dawn of another age, and that other watchers of the sky know of more light?

VI

The home-sick palm that was dying on the hotel verandah touched with a dry finger the coat sleeve of the man next to me. He picked up the leaf and idly rolled it like a cigarette. “Pleasant here, isn’t it?” he said. His eyes wandered kindly round the assembly of wicker chairs in that glasshouse. We were nearest to the door, and could feel what little air was stirring. A woman remarkable because her lips were a crimson imposition which did not restore youth to the seamed pallor of her face, and who wore a necklace of great lumps of amber, was giving chocolates to a spaniel at the next table.

“Rum little face that dog’s got,” said the man. “Wonder what the next fad in dogs for ladies will be. That one can hardly breathe, and can’t walk.”

He was amused, and touched his fair hair very lightly, for it was as accurately paraded as—I merely guess—his own platoon would be. His moustache was neat. His chin was in good taste. His eyes went seaward, where a turquoise space faded into a haze between two vague headlands, and at once he became alert and sat upright. He lifted his binoculars and scanned the Channel. “They’re destroyers out there, aren’t they?” he asked, as interested as though he hoped that truth had appeared in the offing. He carefully focussed his glasses. “And that’s a Dreadnought, I’m sure.” Yes, they seemed to be destroyers, and the other a battle cruiser.

The saturnine yachtsman, the best bridge-player in the hotel, in white duck trousers and a reefer jacket, whose yacht had not yet arrived, joined us. He said gravely, as though confirming news that was important, but till he spoke was improbable, that they were destroyers and a battle cruiser. They were, he remarked, of the latest type of destroyer. The French had nothing so good.

The lady with the dark lips left her dog and came to look seaward. “Are they really warships? How thrilling. What are they doing?”

We did not tell her. We did not know. But that cheerful and irrepressible fellow, who often intrudes an unfortunate comment which is always followed by his own laughter, though we never speak to him, blithely answered the lady. “What are they doing? Wasting taxes,” he said, and laughed, of course.

The yachtsman, whose ship was late, turned wearily and left us, the young man with the disciplined hair wound the strap round his glasses as though he had heard nothing, and the lady went to stop the noise her dog was making, for the old fellow sitting with his nurse was glaring malignantly at the spaniel over his shoulder.

“Only thing against this place is, one can’t get any golf,” my young friend complained, and began to hum a tune that was popular about the bandstand. He continued to look out to sea; his eyes avoided the asphalted promenade where the charabancs assembled. The beach was out of sight, but it must have been crowded, for a multitude of air-balloons swayed above it. Shrill far-off cries came from there. “Sounds as if the sea-serpent were among the girls,” said the young man. “Let’s go and look.”

We strolled over. We leaned on the iron rails of the concrete wall and looked down on the holiday-makers. The beach was sunk beneath deck chairs and recumbent forms. The incoming tide was compressing the multitude against the sea wall, and two more pleasure-seekers could have found no place down there.

“That nipper—that one in the red varnished breeches—he seems to have all the sand there is.” My friend pointed to a child with a toy bucket beneath. “Doesn’t look too golden, does it?”

Our eyes roved. “I say, look at this fellow,” pleaded my companion and nudged me. A man stood near us leaning on the rail. He was surveying the people from the cities taking their pleasure. It was a lumpy figure, in rough clothes, in old velveteen riding breeches, and leggings that were almost globular. His cap, perched well forward on a tousled black head, gave him a look of crafty loutishness. His jowl was purplish and enormous, and that morning’s razor had polished it. The light actually glinted on the health of that broad mask, which was as solid and placid as that of an animal.

“Pretty bovine, that fellow. Genuine bit of local clay all right,” my friend whispered. “Shouldn’t like to upset him, though. Look at his blessed arms!”

But I had, when they were bare. They are chestnut in colour, and swell in an extraordinary way when they haul on a seine net or a bogged wagon.

“If I knew how long it would take him to think about it I’d ask him what he thinks of this crowd. Anyhow, the poor fellow wouldn’t last five minutes in the place where these people come from.” Some joyous screams from the water appeared to confirm this. Perhaps the quick wits of the merry folk below had divined even our thoughts. The bovine face stared on, its chin projecting a pipe.

“He looks healthy enough,” commented my friend, “but the clay has got into his system. Do you think he has a rational opinion about anything? What makes him move about?” At that moment the man slowly raised his bulk, looked steadily at his pipe for some moments, then peered seawards, and went away, without a glance at us.

I saw him again some miles from the hotel, where he stood at the end of a path that led up to his farm, beside a patch of lusty hog-weed which was as tall as himself. He nodded, and grinned.

“Had enough of that place? I been back some time. Thought the wind was shifting.” He glanced up at the cirrus with his piggy eyes. “Ought to be mackerel in the bay this evening. Think I can smell ’em. Water looks like mackerel.... Are you passing Jimmy Higgs? Tell him to get the crew. Pretty good catch, unless I’m mistaken, and we’ll be the first boat.

“I’ll be along by the time you’re ready,” he said, turning away. “Got the cows to see to now.” He jerked his thumb towards the distant holiday-makers. “Nothing for them to eat unless we see to it.”

VII

The farmhouse with its outbuildings, all built of a mellowed limestone, from a little distance could have been only an exposure of the bare bones of the hillside. The group of grey structures were formless till the sun was through the mist that morning and touched the lichened roof of the house into a rectangle of orange light. That was the sign that it was a human habitation, for weathered buttresses and grey hummocks of rock are not infrequent on the slope above our walled garden by the shingle. The gaunt ribs of the earth show through its thin turf and shaggy tufts of furze and bracken. It surprises a visitor that England should look so abandoned and desolate, yet so bright and tranquil.

But desolation is not the same as darkness. The life on those steep and barren uplands is abundant; and, though useless, it evidently springs from the original fount, which seems to be as full as at the beginning. Nothing, we discovered, as we climbed to the moor, had been withheld from the bracken because it is an unprofitable crop. It was a maze, too, of the dry tracks of wild creatures, as though it were a busy metropolis the citizens of which were all absent for the day. The day now was radiant. The furze, which made vivid islands of new green and gold in wide lakes of purple, for the heather was in bloom, suggested that we have yet to learn the full meaning of profit. It was tough as well as effulgent, and hinted of staple crops for uses beyond any that figured in the news of the day. Those crops are not quoted. Perhaps we know less about markets than we thought. The morning was so good that one felt nonsensical.

Yet, as the visitor from London said to me: “What markets are you talking about? Don’t be absurd. And what good would they be to us if we knew them?” He wanted no transcendental nonsense, which was only a lazy trick to escape from the facts. Bracken and furze, in modern society, were enemies to be abolished. They were in the way. They ought to be mutton and butter. He regarded any other view of them as a fantasy, which had no validity except to the sentimental. “Of course,” he said, pausing, as we reached the height, at the surprise of broad valleys and hills beyond, “I enjoy this as much as you do. It’s a fine day, so far—though something is working up in the southwest, by the look of it.” He swept an arm of happy understanding over the peace and splendour of the earth. “All that is lovely merely because we have agreed to call it so. That’s its full title to loveliness. It does not exist in its own right. When we choose to change it into something different we shall. That right belongs to us. The dyes of those flowers come of fortuitous chemistry, and the forms of those hills of the chance of upheaval, the textures of the rocks, and the weather. We call the colours lovely and the forms of the hills noble. That is only our view of it. They are promoted to the titles we give them.” We strode on, the gods of the earth to which we could give any shape we chose. It certainly was a fine day.

He thought, indeed, this visitor, that the fact that we enjoyed a fine day was its sole justification. As to the gold of the furze, those bushes would as soon see us perish of exposure under their thorns as exhilarate us with their new gold. And we could please ourselves about it. It did not matter to the furze bushes whether we perished or admired. And those cushions of rosy heath, pendant in half-circles over a scar in the ground where white flints were set in buff-coloured earth which seemed self-luminous, what were they but an aesthetic arrangement of our own? In themselves they were nothing. They were not related to anything, except to what was in our own minds. We made them rational because we preferred them so. But the moor was not anything in reason at all. Perhaps that lovely arrangement had never been noticed before, and the chance brush-work of the next storm might obliterate the beautiful irrelevancy for ever. Then where would it be?

I had no answer to make. There is no answer to be made that is valid for all of us. The arrangement of rose, white and buff continued its irrelevant appeal, without any additional emphasis to assist its dumb case. The sun was warm. The air, when it stirred, smelt of herbs. The critic’s little daughter, who might have been listening to her seniors giving this world the reasons for its existence, she, too, made no sign. She was merely unquestionably bright and good, like the rose and gold, and smiled like the sun, without a word.

Possibly the critic was right. There was no sense in it all. Only our own well-being assured us the moorland was good; the coincidence was happy. “Wait and see what the place is like when the weather changes,” he said.

It changed. A fog drifted in from the sea. One hill-slope would be shining and its neighbour expunged. The time came when all the distant view had dissolved. The light went out of the colours. As we tried to find our way home in the growing murk it was noticeable that there were more thorns than gold to the furze. The tracks confused us. They were not made by creatures having our rational impulses. They lead nowhere. As we came round an old tumulus an object moved ahead of us. It vanished, unrecognised, in the mist. It left behind a dead rabbit. We were sorry to have missed a sight of that fox.

Its victim had only just died. Its moist eye looked up at us, apparently in bright understanding. We examined it, admired its soft, warm fur, and then we left it, in an unattractive huddle, on the turf. “We could continue our little discussion on nature,” he said, “with that murdered rabbit as a text, couldn’t we? Not so pretty as the purple heather?” He smiled while waiting for my answer.

I looked back at the victim. The critic’s little daughter was stooping over it, tenderly setting bunny in comfort under the shelter of a bush. Her compassionate figure was all I could see in the fog behind us.

VIII

What particularly attracted me, this autumn morning, was a blade of grass under the tamarisk hedge. There are not many such mornings, even in the best of years. It was as though the earth were trying to restore one’s faith completely for the winter, so that the soul should hibernate in security and repose—live through hard times, as it were, on the bounty of this gift of fat. The branches of the tamarisk, usually troubled, for they face the Atlantic, were in complete repose. Their green feathers were on young stems of shining coral. The sea was as placid as a lower sky. On some days here, even a modern destroyer, making for shelter, looks a poor little thing, utterly insignificant, an item of pathetic flotsam in a world which treats it with violent derision; indeed, the treatment is greatly worse than that, for it comes obviously of magnificent indifference to man the disturber and destroyer. It is as much as you can do to keep your glasses fixed in concern on that warship, which now and then is cruelly effaced. For our English seas are as fickle as is faith in the winds of doctrine.

But on this morning a sheldrake, diving about in five fathoms just off shore, was more noticeable than a fleet of ships would be on other days. When he dived he sent rings over the blue glass. The sea was like that. The distant cliffs were only something about which you were quite sure, yet but faintly remembered. It was easy to believe news had arrived that morning which we should all be glad to hear, and that somehow the sheldrake had heard the word already. And there was that blade of grass under the tamarisk. There were many blades of grass there, of course, but this one stood out. It topped the rest. It was arched above its fellows. Its blade, of bluish green, was set with minute beads of dew, and the angle of the sunlight was lucky. The blade was iridescent. It glittered from many minute suns. It flashed at times in a way to which grass has no right, and the flashes were of ruby and emerald. You may search up and down Bond Street with the ready money in your pocket, and you will not find anything so good. Yet I could not collect my treasure. I had to leave it where I found it. Is treasure always like that?

I abandoned it, feeling much more confident and refreshed than ever I do when a book of philosophy confirms, with irrefragable arguments, some of my private prejudices, and sat on a hummock of thyme to watch the sheldrake. Then a man of letters came and sat beside me. I did not tell him about my feast of grass. What would have been the good? I did not recall that that kind of refreshment is down in any book; for Nebuchadnezzar’s attempt on grass, we may recall, was somewhat different. We began, instead, to talk of Bond Street, or rather, of literary criticism, about which I know nothing but my prejudices; and they, possibly, were found somewhere in the neighbourhood of that street, and therefore have no relationship to the morning dew. I noticed that the critic himself seemed unsettled that morning, though whether the blue of the sky had got into his head to change the Oxford blue, or whether he, too, had been feeding on honeydew, it is not for me to say. One should never, except with a full sense of the awful implication, call another person mad; for the improvident beauty of the world, placed where we either miss it, or destroy it, might serve as evidence of the madness of God. It is possible that we may even lightly blaspheme when we call a strange fellow a little mad. Nevertheless, the critic’s words at least startled me. He was tying a knot in a stalk of thrift, and he remarked casually: “It seems to me you can bring all art down to one test.” He gave me that test, which is a passage beginning “Consider the lilies of the field.”

Perhaps we had better not. Perhaps a consideration which began with a lily might tarnish, if it were allowed, more than the glory of wise kings. To begin with such a challenge to one’s opinions is unwise, because it would not allow the consequent argument a chance to find approval for the things we most admire. But evidently those lilies of the field were of importance to the commentator who once begged his fellow-men to consider them, or objects so common by the wayside could not have been marked by him in favour. He so exalted those common weeds that they diminished, though that was not their aim, the cherished national tradition of a great monarch. Is that an approach to a just criticism of art? It may be so. After that accidental discovery of the wasted treasure behind me it was impossible to reject at once so disastrous a theory. I am almost prepared to believe there may be something in it. It is possible that scientific critics, who judge by fixed criteria of analysis and comparison, and who are startled as much by a show of life in a book as an anatomist would be if the corpse moved under his knife, had better regard it; unless, like the girl in melodrama, they would prefer to take the wrong turning. I heard a farmer the other day calling this a bad year. But what did he want? If he had climbed out of his fields to where the young green and gold of the furze was among the purple heather he would have seen that the fount of life was just as full as ever.

Seaward there is only light, and the smoke of a distant steamer low down. The westerly gales have ceased at last, as if there were no more reason to bring ships home to a land that not long ago was populous, but now is not. The smoke of that steamer in the southwest remains as a dark blur, the slowly fading memory of a busy past, long after she must have lifted another landmark. In all the wide world, from the beach as it is to-day, that distant trace of smoke is the only sign of human activity.

In the frail shine of this autumn morning, reminiscent and tranquil, the broad ridge of shingle, miles long, the product of centuries of storms, appears unsubstantial. There are, on its summit and terraces, mirages of blue pools and lakes where no water can be. No breakers explode on it to-day. The sea is a rigid mirror. The high downs behind the shingle, that have been dark with an antiquity of heather, tumuli, and frowning weather, are happily released to the sky, and are buoyant as though raised by an inner glow.

Not many days in the year are like this. Two, or three? And the resemblance of our own coast to a southern shore is now remarkable. The old wall of the steading behind the beach is not merely whitewashed. That wall’s brightness this morning might be, like moonshine, the assurance of what once stood there. Only the dark feathers of tamarisk above it pretend to substance, and they are drowsy after the buffeting of a wild summer, and bend asleep over the wall. That secluded place has grown familiar to me, but on a day like this, with the strong smell of decaying sea litter—long cables of pulse have been laid along the shingle by continual hard weather—and my footsteps the only sound, I approach that wall as if it were an undiscovered secret on an unfrequented strand of the Tortugas. No need to go out of England for adventure. Adventure is never anywhere unless we make it. Chance releases it; some unexpected incidence of little things. The trouble is to know it in time, when we see it. If we are not ready for it, then it is not there.

This morning I had the feeling that I was much nearer that fellow in the round barrow above the steading, whoever he used to be, than ever I felt on a glum day. Such autumn light as this is mocking. When the weather is overcast the tumulus is deeply sundered by time, but a September sun makes yesterday of it. Almost hidden in the fig-wort and hemp-agrimony of a dry ditch behind the shingle is a rusty globe, a dead mine of the war, and from an embankment above it I picked out a flint arrowhead; or rather, to-day’s odd and revealing shine betrayed it to me there. But in the gay and mocking light of such a morning both weapons belong to the same time in man’s short history. They were used in the same war. They will be separate from us, and both will become equally ancient, when we are of another mind and temper. When will that be? We may have to maintain ourselves in such light as this, regardless of the weather.

For what this oblique light makes clear is that there is a life and a tendency which goes on outside our own, and is indifferent to our most important crises. It is not affected by them. No doubt it affects us; but we do not often surmise that. It is lusty and valid, and we may suppose that it knows exactly what it is about. We may be too proud in our assurance that this other life has a less authentic word about its destiny than has been given to us. At sunrise to-day, on the high ridge of the shingle which rose between me and the sea, six herons stood motionless in a row, like immense figures of bronze. They were gigantic and ominous in that light. They stood in another world. They were like a warning of what once was, and could be again, huge and threatening, magnified out of all resemblance to birds, legendary figures which closed vast gulfs of time at a glance and put the familiar shingle in another geological epoch. When they rose and slowly beat the air with concave pinions I thought the very Heaven was undulating. With those grotesque black monsters shaking the sky, it looked as though man had not yet arrived. Anyhow, he was a mere circumstance—he could come and go—but a life not his persisted, and was in closer accord with whatever power it is that has no need to reckon time and space, but alters seas and continents at leisure.

VII. THE PLACE WE KNOW BEST

It is an ancient notion that the earth never forgets any of our thoughts and acts. When we leave home not to return, it bears us in mind. Man has long entertained this strange and disturbing thought. The old metaphysicians, who could always come to any conclusion they desired, hinted the same opinion, that we leave an impress on the air; or something as substantial as that. And why should we deny it? It would be unreasonable to expect a seal upon the invisible to be discernible, and just as unreasonable to deny its existence because it could not be seen. We cannot declare our record is not there; but it will never be apprehended by insensitive souls, we may safely assume, any more than the Absolute, or the other unseen abstractions which seem to shrink from the coarse contact of our senses. We may not expect a memory haunting a place to reveal itself even when our mood is right, and the hour. It may not be sought, we are told. Like Truth, it cannot be proved. It comes when we are not looking for it. It is never more precise than a sudden doubt, a wonder apparently unprovoked, a surmise which abruptly checks our well-ordered activities.

Well, it is a novel kind of ghost story, and perhaps it has as much in it as most ghost stories, for it was a sceptic who declared sadly that the trouble with a ghost is that there is no ghost. We know there are many people who do not rejoice in the thought that we leave no lasting impression on our circumstances. They do not consider the greater responsibility a certainty of this memory of earth for its children would put upon us. How we should have to sublimate even our emotions, if we would give an admirable impression! The nascent terror at the bare suggestion of it reminds us that the experience is not uncommon, on entering a strange room, or looking at an empty landscape, to feel there the shadow of an abiding but inexplicable remembering. We never know why. Mr. de la Mare, in his poem The Listeners, has given this sense of the memory of an old and abandoned house; and it would be as wrong to smile at the delicate intuitions of a poet because they are too subtle as to deny the revolutionary reasoning of Einstein because his argument moves on a plane beyond our attainment. It is unfortunately natural for us to limit the possibilities of the universe, the depth of its mystery, to what we are able to make of it; for the things we do not know can exist for us only when we do know them and so may admit they are there. When we declare we see clearly all there is to be seen it seldom occurs to us that, even then, we may be but confessing to a partial blindness.

It is true that the real mystery of the ghosts is not that they startle us but that they do not. Not worth the trouble? Perhaps they are aware we will maintain a vague belief in their presence only so long as they do not show themselves. I myself find it easy to accept Mr. de la Mare’s Listeners, but not the pair of evil souls who appear in Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. I have always felt that we ought not to have been allowed to see those maleficent spirits, and that it was a defect in the story, a concession to our crudity, that they were ever produced by their author as substance for his case. For we may suppose that anything so imponderable as a memory the impassive earth retains of the past will suggest itself only to the lucky, who may make of their luck what they will. Most probably they will give their good fortune a false interpretation. But what opportunities the notion offers! What entertaining history could be made of it, if there were anyone to write it! What poetry, if we were poets!

There is my own London suburb. After a walk round it, which would take too much time, and would be very wearying, we might estimate that, counting even its invisible shadows, it is not more than fifty years old. The taxpayers there have some right to suppose that they know the best and worst of it. It is an uproar of trams and motor-traffic in the midst of hotels, restaurants, and ornate drapers’ shops. An alien might suppose we devoted our whole lives to the buttoning and unbuttoning of clothes and getting something to eat, until he saw the gilded stucco in an Oriental style of architecture, the minarets and domes, of our many picture palaces; for, after all, we have our intellectual excitements, and the newsboys at the street-corners are anxious that we should never grow listless.

It would be foolish to deny it. Our suburb seems raw and loud. Yet in recent years it acquired an area where a shower of bombs fell from an airship. History at last? No, we have some history which is earlier than the airship, though less remarkable. We have some scholarly local insistence on Clive, who went to school near, and on Ruskin, whose grandmother kept a public-house near the High Street. We have a Fellmongers’ Yard, and a Coldharbour Lane, a tavern which can claim a Tudor reference, and a building, mainly of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and known to us as the Old Palace. Naturally, Queen Elizabeth slept there. She did in most places. Here, however, she really did sleep, and her most unqueenly ingratitude to her anxious host, expressed when she departed, is on record. We delight in the irregular mass of the Old Palace, with its little colony of rooks in the trees beside it; yet our delight in it comes, I think, because its memories of Tudor archbishops are associated, as we pass it, with the singing and the play of our neighbours’ children, for the Palace to-day is a school of theirs. We think more fondly of the children than of the old ecclesiasts. They give us something more beautiful to think about. Yet—the doubt is insistent—though we know well enough our libraries are full of the solemn nonsense which historians have made of their illusions and prejudices, is there a phantom more misleading than the visible Fata Morgana of our own day, our own illusion, which men of affairs call Things as They Are? For what are they? Dare we say we know more about them than we know of the Pyramids, the Cretans, and the wanderings of the Polynesians? Is the last comment on it all the laughter of children?

Our suburb seems so raw. It has been reduced to figures on a chart, which the Town Hall will supply. But I have long had a suspicion that it has secrets which it is not sharing with such latecomers as we are. This feeling has come over me, with chilling irrelevance, when I have been passing our parish church late at night. Nobody knows when a church first stood here, but it had a priest in 986. Late at night, our own suburb suggests oddly that it is not ours, that its real existence is in a dimension unknown to its sleeping citizens. I have wondered then whether it was possible to write the history of any place, of any time. Can we ever do more than make a few suggestive speculations? Perhaps the most important happenings are always omitted; the words with which we record an air-raid may not touch them. I know that the history of my own little street, during the few years of the war, could never be written, and if it were written it would be unbelievable. For no man could so translate my street of those years for all to see its significance, unless his imagination were like a morning sun which rose to reveal the earth that night had obscured. Our street doors are closed forever upon what happened behind them in those years. Unless their history is written on the invisible air, then it is lost.

For this unreasonable certainty I can offer no evidence more substantial than the last train home, and moonlight on the trees and battlements of the church, and the silence, and a gargoyle leering down at me from a porch. He might have been caught in the act of sardonic comment on what was passing below, out of a fuller knowledge, and a longer life. I can bring myself to believe that the gargoyle does not grin at me at night without reason. He knows something. He always did. But what is it? Why should he make me wonder whether I really know my own street? One comes home at midnight, with the mind revolving round London’s latest crisis; and for a wonder my suburb does not share the excitement of the city. It is sunk in an immemorial quiet. The church and the Old Palace might be the apparition of what was beyond us and above the anxieties which make our time spin so fast. It is not their time. Our contemporary bricks and mortar have assumed a startling look of venerable and meditative dignity. Our familiar place is free to compose itself in solitude, for we have withdrawn from it, noisy children who have gone to bed. It looks superior to me, when I surprise it at such a time, but it does not betray its knowledge. It spares no more than the ironic comment of the gargoyle.

I think I can guess a little of what is behind that imp’s grimace. Opposite to my house is a wall. It has no history. It is but a matured wall, and its top is hoary with lichens and moss. This year’s leaves are now littering the ground below. But I have seen our young men assemble there, and march off for the Yser. This year’s leaves are damp and sere on the path by the wall where the young men shuffled off in the ominous quiet of that forgotten winter dawn. But what do the new people in our street see when they gaze across to that old red brickwork on a bright autumn morning? There the dead leaves are. What is history? One may guess why the ancient imp by the church porch has that grin when chance wayfarers late at night look up, and find he is watching them pass. Does he know where they are going, and why, and is he grinning over his secret?

VIII. DROUGHT

The pond at the end of the row of cottages was reduced to little more than a margin of yellow mud, tough as putty. The mud framed an oval of green slime, which might have been solid, for several tin cans were resting on it, unable to sink. The cottages were hoary with the dust of constant motor-traffic, and the small strip of paled ground in front of each was a desert in which nothing but a few tall hollyhocks survived.

The market-gardener, whose tanned face made his beard as delicate as snow, and gave his pale blue eyes a disconcerting beauty, stood at the gate to the gardens just beyond the pond. Over the gardens, held aloft so that the passengers on the motor-buses from London could see it, was a new notice-board announcing that freehold building plots were for sale.

A stack of bricks was dumped on the potatoes near the notice-board. The gardener saw that I had observed this novelty in the village, and turned his head and glanced that way. He crinkled his eyes at the bricks in ironical disfavour. “That’s the first lot,” he said. “Can’t be stopped now. Better look round if you want to remember us. Wonderful how things move, once they start. One time, nothing much along here but farm wagons. Now you must hurry, crossing this here road. Specially Sundays. London ain’t far away now.”

“It never was very far, was it?”

“It was all right where it was. I never thought,” he mumbled, “that anyone ’ud want to live here, except us folks. I almost wish I’d guessed it long ago. Might have bought this field. Never gave it a thought. Rent was cheap. I could only think of the green stuff, and that’s how we get caught, attending to one thing. You city folks are too quick.”

“No, we’re not. It’s the years that are quick. We get hurried along and pushed out, and most of the time we don’t know where we are.”

“Well. Maybe. But here you are. Seems as though them motor-buses blasted even the taters. ’Tisn’t only the dry summer. Everything lost heart after they put up that notice-board there. This place is different.”

The old man took off his cap and put it on again. “Well, you come in and have a cup of tea, on the way down. Don’t go to the village hall and ask the young ’uns whether they like the difference. Sometimes I fancy the motors have served them like the taters.”

At the end of the market gardens, where the contractors are assembling their material, a footpath passes some recent villas built in the Tudor style, with black planks, to represent timber work, embedded in cement, and begins a long ascent of the open downs. Above the last house you can see the upward track dwindle in the distance to a white thread, which is occasionally lost to sight. And, beyond, where that thread vanishes, a wood is a dark crown to the downs, but so remote, so near to the glaring sky, that the eye says it is inaccessible.

The lower slopes of the upland have been worn by the holiday-makers. The relics of the last week-end picnic littered the dry grass. Nobody was in sight then. Nothing moved, except the air over the warm ground in the distance: the down, a light inflation of chalk, vast and still, might have been quivering under its spell. At least there was a hint of its eager and tremulous spirit under the iron control of its enchantment. You thought, when watching it, that you might presently see the earth change more rapidly, and that dilation increase or collapse. For the chalk country, with its faint hues and its clean rondures, gives a curious sense of buoyancy and volatility. That high and distant clump, that dark raft of trees, could be sweeping forward on an immense green billow. It might slither over and vanish.

Above the litter of the picnic-makers the hill rose at a sharper angle. The dry herbage was as slippery as ice. That sharp slope appeared to be a barrier to the holiday folk. Their tide does not rise above it. Above that escarpment the life of the valley never flows; and, looking down from it, the market gardens in the valley bottom, with the tiny mark which was a notice-board adding insult to the injury of the potatoes in a dry season, were seen to be the less significant. They were of no extent. The village itself, even with the bright red rectangles of the villas which betrayed its growth, was obviously incidental. Above the escarpment, too, the wild crops on the down were superior to anything which afflicts cabbages. They knew nothing of a drought. As a cooling breeze passed over the body of the hill the silky herbage stirred like long brown fur. The skin of the earth was soft and healthy. It smelt of thyme and marjoram.

And the wood, that raft on the crest of the billow of chalk, was reached at last. No drought was there. There was an outer wild of the smaller trees, guelder, wayfarer’s tree, white beam, holly, cornel and alder buckthorn, bound together with wild clematis, and brambles that sounded like dynamos with a multitude of bees. Inside the wood, wherever there was a clearing in the timber on a slope, the colours of the wild flowers fell away in a cascade. That seclusion might have been tranquil and confident with a knowledge kept secret from the fearful and anxious. Its life sang and hummed in innumerable tiny voices. It will last a long time, and it will not need to change. A yew kept a space for itself, a twilight area through which fell rods of light. One side of the yew was splashed by the sun, and then the sooty trunk was seen to be of madder and myrtle green. Its life, though ancient, could not have been more robust. In the shade of it a company of hover-flies were at play, as though they had been doing that from the beginning, and would do it forever. They poised motionless or slightly undulated, and gyrated sideways and vanished, to reappear instantly in the same place, atoms joyous and sure in a changeless world. Sometimes one of them was caught in a beam of light and then that morsel of life became a bubble of gold in the air. It went out. It appeared again. It could shine when it pleased.

The ship of trees was actually afloat. Its course was set high in the tides of the ether. It only seemed motionless. The murmuring of its secret power could be heard, if you listened for it.

IX. A RIDE ON A COMET

In the beginning, I know there was nothing more unusual in the things about me than a motor-car standing by the entrance to a dull, palatial, and expensive hotel on the Devon coast. The time was near midnight. The world was only the hotel lights and the moan of the sea. I had been to an enthusiastic political meeting; so my complete adhesion, at first, to common clay, is proved. There was another town, thirty miles away in the dark of the moors, and thither would we go, if it could be done. I did not think it could, though I did not think much about it, being too tired.

Standing near the car, which had a nose like a torpedo, was a young man; what resembled a young man. I must be careful, for I had never seen the fellow by daylight, and am now uncertain whether or not he could be seen by daylight. He was pulling on great fur gloves and, speaking quietly with suspicious modesty, he stinted nothing of his ability to get to any old place in these islands before the next dawn. He spoke with the calm certitude of a god who takes the sunward hemisphere of this earth in one glance, and takes that side of it which is lost to mortals sleeping there at night as but a span of his thumb in the stars.

I asked him if he had ever been on this road before, for a doubt of the omnipresence of this dubious man prompted me. I knew what hills and bad places, even by day, lay between me and the town where I fain would be. “I expect so,” he murmured, as though disguising his voice; “I expect so, some time or another.” The matter then dropped. I asked no more questions. There were no more to ask, except concerning those exactions of time and space which mortals never question. With the soft indifference of the sleepy mind, I was willing to believe that some time or another, in eternity, the timeless being beside me had included in his planetary orbits this bit of country. His wheels had taken this ugly length of night road, which awed a pedestrian mortal like me, in a single revolution, while belated wayfarers there, horror-stricken, had listened open-mouthed (backs up against the hedge-banks) to the swift diminuendo of earthquake and eclipse.

Yet I lifted my tired eyes for a glance at this young man to catch, if it were there, an unguarded hint of his inhuman origin. There was but a half-smile on his lean face, which should have warned me, but did not. He stood by the black bulk of his impassive chariot. A tremor did come over me; and so, while my homely feet were still planted indubitably on good mother earth, I looked about me there for the last time. Nothing stirred. There was nothing unusual; no omen, no portent. Earth was deeply embedded and asleep in night. It seemed so certain (and here I turned to my charioteer again to see his face) that, from where I stood, the other town was as sundered from me as one of the asteroids. Its glint was too remote in the void to be seen. Suddenly then I became awake and afraid, and would have pushed the Tempter from me, saying that I’d find a bed where I was for the night. But I was given no time to speak.

“Get in,” said the uncertain smile; and I dropped into the soft cloud of his immaterial car. What had only looked like a dim carriage instantly shook with the suppressed dynamics of many horses, and shot a vast ray into the night, as might have been expected from a comet. The smile slipped in beside me. He moved his hand swiftly. We got off the earth.

If any abroad there at that late hour saw a meteor falling, tail first, athwart the North Devon hills, they would have been surprised to know there was one mortal man astride that flying light, conscious, too, of his mortality, and wondering how deep his bones would be found when the aerolite was dug out afterwards by the curious. From my stellar seat—we flew low down over the earth—what I saw on my right hand was the huge shadow of a hill, with the thin bright rind of the new moon just above it. Very little below us was the shine of our comet, revealing a pale road pouring past, a road which made flying leaps upward at us, but never touched us. There was also a luminous, pale-green haze, streaming in the wind which roared past. I think it was hedges. It went by in never-ceasing undulations. We were always about to tear through it, but miraculously it avoided us. The paring of moon remained above the high shadow on the right. Sometimes the transparent apparitions of trees shaped before us; we were skimming the dark planet too close. Sometimes we were so low in our flight that we had to dive, roaring, under their lower ghostly branches, and soared when through them into the silence of the outer dark again.

Once we alighted on earth, just brushing it in a swoop on the upslope of a hill, and then rolled up gently in a great light. It was then that, instead of flying luminous streaks, I could see stones and clods, rooted trees and hedges growing where they stood, and they all looked like handpainted scenery by limelight. We reached the hill-top, the smile beside me gave a demoniac hoot, and we shot out into space like a projectile, falling sheer to the nether stars. My hair rose on end in the upward rush of wind. I had had about enough of it. If we hit another body in the sky larger than ourselves....

It seems to me someone on the meteor gave a loud cry—probably it was this deponent—for by our light I saw we were rushing at the earth again. So close did we go that we almost struck a cluster of white houses. It was a near thing. We missed them all, luckily, for we hit the place at the open end of a street, and so shot through and out, just below the roofs. I heard a scream there as the pallid walls reeled past us. The thing beside me hooted in derision. What did that smile care for the fears of mortals at awful portents in their village at night?

At last I did not care, but in a mad and lawless mood, giving my soul to anarchy, began to enjoy it. Far ahead and below us in the dark sky there was a constant group of delicate stars, like the Pleiades, and I noticed that they grew in brightness and increased in numbers; and presently, beyond doubt, they were rushing at us. In a few seconds our meteor was in the cluster of them, missing them all again—our luck was astonishing—but before we got through them the motor stopped. There was a policeman standing under a hotel sign, and that hotel was mine. I got out of the car, crossed myself reverently, and turned to see what had brought me there. But the road was empty.

X. REGENT’S PARK

It is not so amusing as it used to be to watch lions and tigers in cages. We are beginning to feel that it is an unlucky plight for a respectable tiger to be pent within boards and iron bars while kind ladies throw biscuits and the gentleman with them smiles; for we know what would happen to the smile and the biscuits if the tiger were in the woods and coughed slightly not far away. There would be less beauty in the entertainment, it is true, if the Zoölogical Gardens maintained choice examples in cages of vitriol-throwers, child-beaters, market riggers, war-makers, spies, agents-provocateurs, and so on. Regent’s Park would have to be extended to hold so large and varied an exhibition of wild beasts. The most beautiful of murderers could never be compared for shape and grace with a good lion or jaguar. It may be said, therefore, that there is a subtle flattery in our caging of the finer and more dignified creatures.

We should find no pleasure in looking upon a caged sneak-thief, though certainly we keep them in cages, when we catch them; but the lion, I have been assured, is almost invariably a perfect gentleman who prefers not to quarrel and fight, and will leave the presence of the other animal with a gun if he can do so with delicacy and honour. Perhaps it is excusable in us that we should enjoy looking upon so noble a creature in safety. I have heard him, when he was in a cage, quietly swearing while gazing into the distance and a Bank Holiday crowd was staring at him; and even the most uncharitable of Christians could forgive him his bad language in such circumstances. And I have heard the tiger, when he was not in a cage, cough in the place where there was no Bank Holiday crowd, and at night; and I learned then that the mind of man does not feel so proud as it does at other times.

The lion, of course, knows nothing of the quantum theory; but perhaps most of our Privy Councillors are as innocent. If the test were made of most of us; if we were removed from the benefit of the accumulated knowledge of humanity, our knowledge which is kept growing, for love usually, by a few superior minds, we should not know how to make a fire without the matches of which we had been deprived. On the whole, probably we flatter the depth of that abyss between ourselves and the lower animals; and for the wolf who runs up and down his cage sullenly ignoring our overtures, and behaving as though we do not exist, we are beginning to feel there is something to be said.

I suppose it is too soon to say that for the dogfish and the conger eel. The darkened corridors and the silence of the New Aquarium at the Zoölogical Gardens, and the eerie light there of an existence beyond us in which undulating forms suggest that life may have meanings outside our understanding, are so salutary that you hear hardly a sound from the visitors. They move about, speaking in whispers, as though in the presence of the awful. I heard a boy laugh there, but even that was subdued; and we may expect, of course, to hear the chuckle of a boy on the Judgment Day. The boy laughed while he was watching a crab with claws like grappling irons walk on the sea floor of the Aquarium. It went craftily, on its toes, and not straightforwardly, but sideways, as though its aim were evil. A turbot was flat on the sand, pretending to be the floor, but the crab put a hook on him. The turbot started; but the crab went straight on to the back of the fish. The boy laughed at the obvious surprise of both of them, which showed in a frantic eruption. But even the laugh was uncanny, for it broke out unexpectedly in an inhuman privacy which might have been the antechamber to the unspeakable.

Only an irreverent boy would find anything funny in such a place. There is no comic element, that we know of, under water. It is not surprising that visitors to the Aquarium are subdued, or that they feel pity for the few sea-birds which happen to be exiled there from the day. That pity shows the difference. Pity for birds in a great aviary is rare, and maybe it is unnecessary. That is a matter in which we should consult the birds, if ever we doubt our own generous hearts. But sorrow for birds confined to a dungeon in the dim light and silence where eels and octopuses are at home is instant and right. In a reverse way that sorrow proves that the theatrical effect of the new Aquarium is good. It is good. It is marred only by the presence of those birds, which is forced and unnatural.

The recesses of the tanks, where antennæ are seen vibrating or exploring in the shadows, when the eye is accustomed to the hyaline indistinction, where sinuous figures are seen in apparition, or a pair of jaws that picture soulless destiny itself gulp spasmodically and incessantly, somehow challenge the soul in a way impossible to the most terrible lion. With what respect one stares at that inert and leathery length, the lungfish, for he is the link between the sea-bottom dark from which came all life, and those hill-tops which life now regards as suitable for select villas. It was fortunate for our speculative builders that somehow, when it was left stranded in drying mud, the ancestor of the lungfish was able to fashion his swimming bladder into an organ which made him independent of gills, and equipped him for a life in the sun, though it was only a suspended life. See what has come of it!

It is not only the silence and the twilight of the Aquarium which are impressive, but the sense that no more than plate glass separates us from a frightful gulf of time. And consider the fascination of the octopus! Could there be anything more sinister than the cold stare of the eyes surmounting that bulging stomach? Yet watch it shoot through the water and alight upon a rock, tentacles and all, with a flowing grace never equalled by a young lady practising a courtesy for the Court. That, however, only adds to its attraction, curiously enough; because attractive it is, for a reason so natural in mankind, and yet so obscure and difficult to define, that to look for it might take us into the Antarctic of philosophy. I found the largest audience of the Aquarium at the tank of the octopus, patiently waiting for what satisfaction, joy, terror, horror, consternation, or what not, it could bestow. It is useless for the ladies to protest that they love the Angel fish better, or any of the banded and prismatic tropical forms of the Amazon or the coral reefs. I saw very few people at the tanks where those opalescent or enamelled creatures were proving that our finest artists in the fantasies of decoration are bunglers. No. The superior audiences were for the octopus, for the grotesque and carnivorous spinosities, and for the conger eel.

XI. A DEVON ESTUARY

I

It was decided that someone must stand by the boat. There was an uncertainty about the tide, and there might be a need to moor her elsewhere. The other two members of the crew did not propose a gamble to decide which one of the three of us should stay with her while the other two went into the town. I was told off as watchman, at once and unanimously, and it was clear that in this the rest of the crew knew they were doing the orderly thing. Their decision was just. It was I who was to be left. It is the lot of the irresolute to get left, though sometimes the process is called the will of God. The boat, with me in it, was abandoned. The two of us had to make the most of each other for an indefinite time.

Perhaps the boat, being a boat of character and experience, had no confidence in her protector, because after a spell of perfect quietude, in which I thought she slept, without warning she began to butt the quay wall impatiently. She was irritably awake. But I was not going to begin by showing docile haste when a creature named Brunhilda demanded my attention so insistently. Instead, I leisurely filled my pipe and lit it, took half-a-dozen absent-minded draws at it, and then went forward idly and lengthened the mooring-line. The boat fell asleep again at once.

Our line was fast to a ring-bolt which possibly was in the old stonework of that quay wall when the ships which moored there were those that made of a voyage to America a new and grand adventure. That ring-bolt was rust, chiefly. Its colour was deep and rich. With the sun on it, the iron circle on its stem might have been a strange crimson sea-flower pendent from the rock over the tide. A precipitous flight of unequal steps ran from the top of the quay down its face to the water. The steps continued under the water, but I don’t know how far. They dissolved. Of the submerged steps I could not count below the sixth, and even the fourth and fifth were dim in a submarine twilight. The tread of the midway step, which was near my face and just below it, was uncertain whether it ought to be above water or sunk. Sometimes, when I looked that way, it was under a few inches of glass, but as I looked the glass would become fluid and pour noiselessly from it. Once when the glass covered it I noticed an olive-green crab was on the step, set there, as it were in crystal. When he darted sideways it seemed unnatural, and as if he were alive and free. It was when he moved that I began to suspect that many affairs, an incessant but silent business of life, were going on around me and under the boat.

The water was as still and clear as the air. It seemed but little denser. It was only the apparition of water. It was tinted so faint a beryl that I know when my fingers touched it only because it was cold, and the air was hot. When first I glanced overside it was like peering into nothing, or at least at something just substantial enough to embody shadows. So I enjoyed the boat, which was tangible. The bleached woodwork of the little craft had stored the sun’s heat. Perhaps, though, it was full of the heat of past summers, even of the tropics, and its curious smells were memories of many creeks and harbours. It had been a ship’s boat. In its time it may have been moored to mangrove roots. It had travelled far. I don’t know when I enjoyed a pipe so much. The water was talking to itself under the boat. We were sunk three fathoms below the top of the quay, out of sight of the world. I could see nothing living but a scattered area of sea-birds resting on the tide. One of the birds, detached from his fellows, a black-headed gull, was so close that the pencilled lines of his plumage were plain. He cocked an eye at me enquiringly. He came still closer, of his own will or through the will of the tide—there was no telling—and we stared frankly at each other; and I think I may believe he admitted me as a member of whatever society he knows. Not a word was said, nor a sign made, but something passed between us which gave everything a value unfamiliar but, I am confident, more nearly a right value. This made me uncertain as to what might happen next. I felt I was the discoverer of this place. It was doubtful whether it had ever been seen before. I had accidentally chanced upon its reality. As to those stone steps, I had been up and down them often enough in other years, but I had the feeling they were new to me this morning, that they turned to me another and an unsuspected aspect. It was in such a moment that I first saw the crab at my elbow, and when he darted sideways it was as if he were moved by a secret impulse outside himself, the same power which moved the gull towards me, and which pulled the water off the step.

I looked overside to see whether this power were visible, and what it was like. There were six feet of water between me and the wall, and its surface was in the shadow of the boat; but the sunlight, at the same time, passed under the keel of the boat, so between my craft and the wall I could see to a surprising illuminated depth. The steps that were submarine were hung with algæ; near the surface of the water their fronds were individual and bright, but they descended and faded into mystery and the half-seen. Some of the larger shapes far below, whatever they were, seemed to be in ambush under the boat, and what they were waiting for in a world so dim, removed, and strange, I preferred not to consider, on a fine day. Those lurking forms, which might have been nether darkness itself becoming arborescent wherever sunlight could sink down to it and touch its unfashioned murk into what was lifelike, were eternally patient and still, as confident as things may be which wait in the place where we are told all life began. Midway between the keel of the boat and that lower gloom a glittering little cloud was suspensory. Each atom of it in turn caught a glint of sunlight, and became for an instant an emerald point, a star in the fathoms. But I was not the first to detect that shoal of embryonic life. A pale arrow shot upwards from the shadows at the cloud, which instantly dispersed. That quick sand-eel missed his shot.

That cloud was alive; the water and the dark forest below were populated. The impulse which kept the water moving on and off the step—by now it was using another step for its play, for the tide was falling—continued to shoot flights of those silver arrows into the upper transparency. They flew out of the shadows into the light and were back again quicker than the eye could follow them; and as casually as though they had known this sort of thing for æons, the morsels of life suspended in the upper light parted and vanished, to let the arrows through; then, as by magic, the glittering morsels reformed their company in the same place. No number of darting arrows could destroy their faith in whatever original word they once had been and the quay wall a vitreous hemisphere, a foot across. It had a pattern of violent hieroglyphics in the centre of its body. Its rim was flexible, and in regular spasms it contracted and expanded, rolling the medusa along. The creature darkened as it rolled into the shadow of the boat. It sank under me and was suddenly illuminated, like a moon, as it entered the radiance beneath. It was while watching it that I noticed in the water some tinted gold.

There drifted into the space between the boat sparks which I was ready to believe came of the quality of the sea itself, for I could see the water was charged with a virtue of immense power. When the jellyfish had gone I watched one of those glims, for it was not doused at once, but merely changed its colour. It moved close to the boat. The sparkling came from a globe of pure crystal, which was poised in the current on two filaments. The scintillating globe, no larger than a robin’s egg, floated along in abandon in the world below my boat, sometimes bright in elfish emerald, and then changing to shimmering topaz. Scores of these tiny lamps were burning below, now that my eyes were opened and were sensible of them. They had been suddenly filled, I suppose, by the power which pulsed the algæ, which had turned the medusa into a bright planet, shot the arrows, opened my own intelligence, and given sentience to the other atoms of drifting life. The water was constellated with these little globes changing their hues, and I remembered then that Barbellion once said a ctenophore in sunlight was the most beautiful thing in the world....

There was a shout above me. The crew had returned. It demanded to know whether I was tired of waiting.

II

We pushed out the boat, and four oars shattered the mirror and the revelation. Above the quay the white houses appeared, mounting a quick incline in chalk-like strata. They did not reach the ridge of the hill. The ridge was a wood dark against a cloud. Downstream, at the end of the ridge, our river is met by another. They merge and turn to go to sea. They become a gulf of confused currents and shoals in an exposed region of sandy desert, salting, and marsh, which ends seaward in the usual form of a hooked pebble bank. Beyond the bank and the breakers is a bay enclosed by two great horns of rock, thirty miles apart. The next land westward, straight out between the headlands, is America. A white stalk of a lighthouse stands amid the dunes, forlorn and fragile in that bright wilderness, a lamp at our door for travellers.

But we went upstream. The tide here, however, penetrates into the very hills. The exposed coils of roots and the lower overhanging branches of oaks in precipitous valleys, which in aspect are remote from the coast, are submerged daily, and shelter marine crustacea; the fox-gloves and ferns are just above the crabs. Yet where we grounded our boat, six miles from the lighthouse, the western ocean was as distant a thought as Siberia. On this still midsummer afternoon our lonely creek was the conventional picture of the tropics, silent, vivid, and far. The creek—or pill, as the natives of the west country call it in their Anglo-Saxon—is, like all the best corners of the Estuary, uninhabited and unvisited. Perhaps the common notion of the tropics, a place of superb colours, with gracious palms, tree-ferns, and vines haunted by the birds of a milliner’s dream, originated in the stage scenery of the Girls from Ko-ko and other equatorial musical comedies, to which sailors have always given their hearty assent. That picture has seldom been denied. What traveller would have the heart to do it? The sons of Adam continue to hope that one day they may return to the garden, and it would be cruel to warn them that this garden cannot be entered through the Malay Straits or by the Amazon or Congo. We ought to be allowed, I think, to keep a few odd illusions in a world grown so inimical to idle dreaming. For the jungle in reality is rather like mid-ocean where there is no help. The sea is monstrously active, but the jungle is no less fearful because it is quiet and still. It is not variously coloured. It has few graces. Once within its green wall, that metallic and monotonous wall, the traveller becomes daunted by a foreboding gloom, and a silence older than the memories of Rheims and Canterbury. The picture is not of Paradise, but of eld and ruin. You see no flowers, and hear no nightingales. Sometimes there is a distant cry, prompted, it might be guessed, by one of the miseries which Dante witnessed in a similar place. Yet whatever beings use equatorial forests for their purgatory, they remain discreetly hidden; Dante there could but peer into the shadows and listen to the agony of creatures unknown. The grotesque shapes about him would mock him with aloof immobility, and Dante presently would go mad. He would never write a poem about his experiences. I saw this when reading Bates’ Naturalist again, while the crew of the Brunhilda gathered driftwood in a Devon creek to make a fire for tea. Bates does little to warn a reader that the forest of the Amazon is not a simple exaggeration of Jefferies Pageant of Summer. And what a book, I saw then, a man like Bates could have made of such a varied world as our Estuary. The range of life in this littoral, from the heather of the moors to the edge of the pelagic shelf where the continental mass of Europe drops to the abyss—a range, in places, of no more than ten miles—has not yet had its explorer and its chronicler. Yet I never saw in days of travel in the equatorial forest such hues and variety of form as were held in the vase formed by the steep sides of our little west-country combe. A cascade of rose, purple, yellow, white and green, was held narrowly by those converging slopes of bracken and oak scrub. That descent of colour was in movement, too, as a tumult would be, with the abrupt and ceaseless leaping and soaring of numberless red admiral, clouded yellow, peacock, fritillary and white butterflies. On the foreshore, where a tiny stream emerged from this silent riot, a cormorant on a pile was black and sentinel. Kingfishers passed occasionally, streaks of blue light. It was the picture of the tropics, as popularly imaged, but it was what travellers seldom see there.

III

If there is a better window in the world than my portlight in Burra I do not know it. I look out on space from that opening in the topworks of a village which at night is amid the stars and in daylight is at sea. My cubicle is shady, but the light outside may be bright enough to be startling when of a morning it wakes me. I sit up in bed, wondering whether our ship is safe. The portlight seems too high and bright. The eyes are dazzled by the very chariot-spokes of Apollo, and ocean can be heard beneath me, vast and sonorous. The senses shrink, for they feel exposed and in danger. But all is well. Our ship that is between the sky and the deep has weathered more than two thousand years, and no more has happened to it than another fine day. Burra has not run into the sun.

From my bed to-day the first thing I saw was a meteor flaming alongside us. But my window kept pace with it. The speed of the streaming meteor was terrific, but it could not pass us. Soon the meteor was resolved into the gilded vane of a topmast; I understood that a strange ship had come in. Nothing but time was passing my window. Yet still I had no doubt that the light in the east beyond the ship’s vane, ascending splendid terraces of cloud to a choir which, if empty, was so monitory that one felt trivial and unprepared beneath it for any announcement by an awful clarion, was a light to test the worth of a dark and ancient craft like Burra. I listened for sounds of my fellow-travellers. They were silent. There was an ominous quiet, as if I were the first to know of this new day.

Then I just heard some subdued talk below, and the sounds of a boat moving away. As the speakers drew apart they called aloud. Yeo was off to fish by the Middle Ridge. The shipyard began its monody. One hears the shipyard only when its work begins. That means we are all awake. Those distant mallets continue in a level, confident chant, the recognised voice of our village. But by the time breakfast is over the fact that Burra is still building ships is no more remarkable than the other features of the Estuary; the ears forget the sound. Only if it ceased should we know that anything was wrong. For a minute or two no doubt we should wonder what part of our life had stopped. But the hammering has not ceased here since the first galley was built, which was before even the Danes began to raid us. The Danes found here, we have been told, seafarers as stout as themselves, with ships as good as their own, and got the lesson that, if quiet folk always acted with such fierce promptitude and resolution when interfered with, then this would be an unlucky world for pirates.

Yet have no fear. I am not going to write a history of Burra. There was a time when I would have begun that history with no more dubiety than would a man an exposition of true morality. But the more we learn of a place the less is our confidence in what we know of it. We understand at last that the very stones mock our knowledge. They have been there much longer. I do feel fairly certain, however, that absolute truth is not at the bottom of any particular well of ours. This village, which stands round the base of the hill where the moors decline to the sea and two rivers merge to form a gulf of light, is one I used to think was easily charted. But what do I know of it? The only certainty about it to-day is that it has a window which saves the trouble of searching for a better. Beyond that window the clouds are over the sea. The clouds are on their way. The waters are passing us. So, when I look out from my portlight to learn where we are, I can see for myself there may be something in that old legend of a great stone ship on an endless voyage. I think I may be one of its passengers. For where is Burra? I never know. The world I see beyond the window is always different. We reach every hour a region of the sky where man has never been before, so the astronomers tell us, and my window confirms it. Ours is a celestial voyage, and God knows where. So I dare not assume that I have the knowledge to write up the log-book of Burra. I should very much like to meet the man who could do it. We certainly have a latitude and longitude for the aid of commercial travellers and navigators who want our address, and it is clear that they too, as they seem able to find us so easily, must be keeping pace with us; that they are on the same journey as ourselves to the same distant and unknown star; but when one night I ventured to hint this surmise, as a joke, to an experienced sailor who came in for a pipe with me, he said he had never heard of that particular star; all the stars he knew were named. He said it was easy for him to lay a course for Burra, anyhow, and to keep it, just by dead reckoning. Besides—he pointed out—how could a man learn his whereabouts from a star he didn’t know and couldn’t see? Yes; how could he? But it is no joke. That old mariner had never heard of the perilous bark which some men have to keep pumped watertight, and to steer in seas beyond all soundings by a star whose right ascension can be judged only by inference, and by faith that is sometimes as curiously deflected as is any compass.

When taking bearings from my window, merely to get the time of day, I can see the edge of the quay below and a short length of it. That gives promise enough that Burra is of stout substance, and rides well. A landing-stage, a sort of stone gangway, is immediately under the window. Whoever comes aboard or leaves us, I can see them. At low tide these stone stairs go down to a shingle beach where ketches and schooners rest on their bilges, their masts at all angles. Corroded anchors and chains lie littered about. In summer-time I smell tar and marine dissolution. Morning and those stairs connect us with the fine things that the important people are doing everywhere. Open boats with lug sails bring gossips and the news from the other side of the water, and on market-day bring farmers and their wives with baskets of eggs, chickens, butter, and vegetables, and perhaps a party of tourists to gaze at us curiously and sometimes with disparagement. Few objects look so pleasant as a market-basket nearly full of apples, and with some eggs on top. Yet it is well to admit, and here I do it, that there are visitors who call Burra a dull and dirty little hole.

At low tide these stone stairs go down to a
shingle beach—

Indeed, there is no telling how even my window in Burra will take a man. Once I brought a friend to sit with me, so that he could watch the ferry and the boats, the dunes on the far sides, and the clouds. I thought, with him as look-out astern, he could tell me when a ship came down river, and I could warn him when I saw a vessel appear at the headland (out of nowhere, apparently), and stand in for the anchorage. What more could he want? But he said the place was dead. He complained that nothing happened there.

I don’t know what he wanted to happen there. It gives me enough to think about. I always feel that plenty is happening to me as I watch those open boats. When a Greek vase is the equal of one of them in grace it is the treasure of a national museum. But our men can build such craft in their spare hours. The human mind, confused still and thick with the dregs of the original mud, has clarified itself to that extent. It would not be easy to prove that man has made anything more beautiful than one of our boats. Its lines are as delicate and taut as a dove’s. It is quick and strong, and it is so poised that it will change, when going about, as though taken by a sudden temerarious thought; and then in confidence it will lift and undulate on a new flight. The balance and proportions of its body accord with all one desires greatly to express, but cannot. In that it is something like music. The deep satisfaction to be got from watching a huddle of these common craft, vivacious but with wings folded, and tethered by their heads to the landing-stairs, each as though eagerly looking for the man it knows, will send me to sleep in a profound assurance that all is well. For they seem proper in that world beyond my window, where there is the light and space of freedom. The tide is bright with its own virtue. The range of sandhills across the Estuary is not land, nothing that could be called soil, but is a promise, faint but golden, far in the future. You know that some day you will land there. But there is plenty of time for that. There is no need to hurry. It is certain the promise is for you. One may sleep.

After dark, like a fabulous creature, Burra vanishes. There is little here then, except an occasional and melancholy sound. I have for companionship at the window at night only a delicate star-cluster, low in the sky, which is another village on the opposite shore. Maybe Burra too, is a star-cluster, when seen from the other stars, and from that distance perhaps appears so delicate as to make its indomitable twinkling wonderful on a windy night. There are a few yellow panes here after sunset, and they project beams across the quay, one to make a hovering ghost of a ship’s figure-head, and another to create a lonely bollard—the last relic of the quay—and another to touch a tiny patch of water which is lively, but never flows away, perhaps because the Estuary has vanished and it has nowhere to go. It prefers to stay in the security of the beam till morning.

Now it is curious, but after dark, when our place has disappeared except for such chance fragments, and when to others we can be but a few unrelated glints among the other stars, that Burra is most populous, warm, and intimate. I see it then for what it is, a vantage for a few of us who know each other, and who are isolated but feel secure in the unseen and hitherto untravelled region of space where the sun has abandoned us. All around us is bottomless night. Our nearest neighbour is another constellation.

IV

I have learned at Burra that we townsfolk know nothing of the heavens. There are only wet days in the city, and fine. The clouds merely pass over London. They cross the street, and are gone. They cast shadows on us, they make the place dark, they suggest, with a chill, that there are powers beyond our borders over which even the elders of the city have no jurisdiction. The day is fine again and we forget our premonition; it was only the weather.

The motor-buses are all numbered and their routes are known, but the clouds are visitations, unannounced and inexplicable; warnings, which we disregard, that in truth we do not know where our city is. We cannot distinguish one cloud from another, because the narrow measure of heaven for each street allows us but an arc of a celestial coast, or one summit of a white range; before that high continent has more than suggested its magnitude we see the bus we want, or go down a side-turning.

Doubtless the meagre outlook of this imprisonment from the heavens must have its effect upon us. Our eyes go no more to the sky than they do to the hills. We have acquired, if we have not inherited, the characteristic of downcast eyes. Where there is no horizon there may be work, but no hope, and so we begin to see the way to account for the cynical humour of the Cockney. We say, in friendly derision, that they who look upwards more than can be justified by the rules of our busy community are star-gazers. When we look up, it is not to the hills, but to a post-office clock or the name of a street. The city has length and breadth, but no height, for the greater the elevation of its buildings, the lower its inhabitants sink.

But in this Estuary I have changed that view of the world for one that is flooded with light. The earth, I can see, is a planet, a vast reflector. We look up and out from Burra, in the morning, to learn what is stored in the sky; and if there is a moon we look to the heavens at night to judge how the men at sea will fare, while we sleep. For the clouds here plainly rule our affairs; or they are the heralds of the powers which rule us. The clouds take the light of the sun, and translate it into the character of our luck. On a bright morning over this bay, when the happy and careless imagine that all is well, the wind will begin to back. We are not at once aware of the reason for it, but the colours fade from the earth and from one’s spirit. The light dims. The uplands, which had been of umber and purple, become that shadow of desolation from which men seek refuge. Scud like gusts of livid smoke blows in swiftly from the southwest over the hills. The clouds which follow it are dark and heavy, and so low that they take the ground, roll over and burst. The uplands vanish. The sea grows bleak and forbidding, and the cliffs, with their crags and screes, turn into a prospect of downfall and ruin.

Yet when the wind is easterly, then the polish of the bay is hardly tarnished, the clouds are high and diaphanous veils, and there is no horizon, for sea and sky are merged as one concavity of turquoise. When the morning is of easterly weather and still, the sea floor about the boat is distinct in several fathoms, and the mind floats so buoyantly and confidently midway in space that it feels there is no human problem which could not be solved by a happy thought.

One afternoon the wind had been cool, for it came from the north of north-west; then, long before its hour, the sun vanished behind a veil. The wind fell with the sun. The world was without a movement, except for the languid and distant glinting of the breakers on the bar. The sea had the burnish of dull metal. The distant headlands were but faint outlines, and they might have been poised aloft, for there was as much light under them as above them. A steamer was passing from one headland to another, but whether it was sailing the heavens to another planet, or was going to America, it was hard to say. There were no clouds. There was only a vague light which was both sea and sky. In this indeterminate west, where the sun would then have been setting, was a group of small islands of pearl, not marked on the chart, where no islands ought to have been seen. They were too lofty and softly luminous to be of this earth; they floated in a threatening cobalt darkness. The day was a discernible presence, but it was ghostly; and I wish I could guess its origin, and why it stood over us, pale and silent, while we waited fearfully for a word that did not come.

V

On the shore of the dunes, which are across the Estuary from Burra, few boats ever ground. There are shoals, and a conflict of tides and currents, and then the surf. And why should a boat put over? Nothing is there but the lighthouse and the sand. Nor is it easy to approach it from the habitable land to the east, for after a long and devious journey by ferry and road to avoid the arm of the sea, you come first to a difficulty of marsh and dyke, and then to the region of the dunes. That journey takes all the best of the daylight, for you could not hurry if you knew every yard of the way, which nobody does; and then, once caught in the brightness and silence of the desert of sandhills, the need to hurry is forgotten.

It is one of the days with a better light when your boat grounds on that shore. You may begin to walk the beach along the firm wet sand by the breakers, but you cannot keep to it. Something which calls, some strange lump among the flotsam stranded on the upper beach, draws you towards the sandhills. It looked, you imagined, like a man asleep, with a dark blanket over him; but it proved to be only a short length of a ship’s spar covered with bladder-wrack. There is no returning then. Once you reach that line of rubbish it is the track you follow, the message you try to read. A baffling story, though, made of words from many stories, separated, partly erased, muddled by the interruption of storms, and woven irrelevantly into one long serpentining sentence which extends to the point where the shore goes round a corner; and from there, when you reach that point, continues to the next. It is made of shells, derelict trees, bushes which have drifted from shores only a botanist could guess, boards and fragments of wrecks, yarn and rope, bottles, feathers, carapaces of crabs and sea-urchins, and corks, all tangled with pulse into an interminable cable. Sometimes it runs through the black ribs of an old wreck.

Perhaps, after the seaweed, there are more corks in its composition than anything else. The abundance of corks on this desert shore, for they are to be found at the head of every miniature combe of the sandhills, most of them old and bleached, but some so fresh that it is easy to read the impress of the vintners on their seals, suggests that man’s most marked characteristic is thirst. If one went by the evidence on this beach, then thirst is the chief human attribute. In this life we might be occupied most of the time in drinking from bottles. Examples of the bottles are here, too. The archæologists of the future will find our enduring bottles and corks in association, and they will discover, by experiment, that the corks often fit the bottles, and they will deduce that both were used, in all probability, in conjunction. But for what reason? Nothing will have been left in the bottles for the archæologists but dirt. We occasionally look on to-day while a learned man, from fragmentary evidence, creates a surprising picture of the past. I feel I should enjoy coming back, several thousand years hence, to hear another learned creature, a table before him covered with the shards and corks of our years—one almost perfect example has the mysterious word BOLS cast on it—explain to his fascinated audience what he feels sure, from the relics before him, on which he has spent the best years of his life, the mysterious folk of our own age were like.

We can be fairly sure not much evidence of our own age will remain by then. What will survive us will be the oddest assortment of rubbish; but the pertinacious corks will be there. The British Museum will have gone. It will be impossible to refer to the London Directory. No Burke will exist. All the files of our newspapers, with their lists of honours, will have perished. What will our age be called? Not the Age of Invention, of the Great War, of Reconstruction, or anything else that is noble and inspiriting; for not a vestige of a democratic press, an aeroplane, a motor-car, or a wireless set will remain. There will be only corks and bottles.

“For the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy....” Yet it does seem unfair that of all the proud memories of these resounding days, nothing may persist but our corks and bottles. Another interruption of ice may creep down from the Pole, as has happened before; as indeed happened once to the undoing of a previous race of men. Its rigours increase, but so gradually that men are hardly aware that anything is happening. They say to each other at last, “The summers seem very short.” The cheerful Press of that day, true to its function of maintaining the spirit of the people, never mentions Winter, never speaks of the cold, but always turns its pages to the south, where most of the sun is.

Nevertheless that does not thaw the ice. It still creeps south. The habit of a week-end at a cottage is presently forgotten. Unalienable rights and privileges become buried under inexorable glaciers that know nothing of our sounder economic arguments. And, in the end, maybe the ball of St. Paul’s is dropped as an erratic block from the bottom of an iceberg to form a fossil in the ooze of a southern sea, to puzzle we may not guess what earnest investigator living in an ameliorated clime and time.

That ice retreats again, and the haunts and works of our age are exposed, as were those of Magdalenian man. And what have we been able to guess about him? Very little; but he did, we are sure, use implements having enduring parts of flint and bone. It is fairly certain that if he were aware that we judged him by his flints, he would be a little grieved. And it would be too bad if the trifles, which our butlers discarded with a flourish during our dinners were all that survived for the future to see of us. Why, that archaeologist of a time to come may not even deduce that we employed butlers.

VI

The rain had ceased, but the quay of Burra offered no other benefit. I was down there before dawn. Morning had not come, but I suppose the downpour had washed some of the dark out of the night, for all the quay was plain. It was not the quay I knew, but its wan spirit; and the vessels moored to it were ghosts, the faint impress of dead ships on a world that now just retained a memory of them. There was no sound. There were only phantoms in a pallor. Perhaps it had ceased to rain because rain would be too substantial for a bodyless world. The irregular pools on the quay were not water, but descents to the profound. Rain would at once enlarge them till the quay dissolved and became as the Estuary, and as the sky, for both sea and sky were nothing. They were the depth of the future, in which were hints of what some day might see the sun.

I felt I ought not to be there. There was no telling whether I was too soon or too late, whether I was the first man, or the last. I doubted that hush, and that dim appearance about me. When the air did stir, it was as if it were the breath of death, and the earth were the body of death. Then I made up my mind. It was no use going to sea, as I had intended. I would go back to bed. At that moment there were footsteps, and the quay at once became solid. Two black figures approached, the size of men. One of them put his foot into a great hole in the quay, and he did not vanish instantly, but made a splash and an exclamation. That voice certainly was something I knew. The other man laughed quietly, the familiar satiric comment which comes of resignation to fate. We were all going to sea, as far as the Foreland.

That cape is the western horn to the bay, and nobody goes there, except sailors who die because they see the loom of it, or hear its warning, too late. The Foreland to the people of Burra is like the clouds. It is part of their own place, but it is unapproachable. At times it is missing. In some winds it will evaporate; though usually at sunset it shapes again, high, black, and fantastic, the end of the land to the west, and as distant and sombre as the world of the sagas. Is it likely, then, that one would ever think of a voyage to it? That cape, which one sees either because the light is at the right incidence, or because one is dreaming, might be no more than a thought turned backward to vague antiquity; to Ultima Thule, where the sun never rises now, but where it is always evening twilight. It would have no trees. It would be a desolation of granitic crags, mossed and lichened, and the seas below would be sounding doom, knowing that even the old gods were dead. It was not likely that we could credit such a voyage; yet the truth is we had assembled for it, and because of a promise made carelessly with an ancient mariner in a tavern on the previous afternoon. What, on such a morning, and in such a place, was such a promise? As intangible as was our quay when I first saw it that morning, and no more matter than the Foreland itself, which is always distant, and then is gone.

Yet here we were. We had met before dawn, for that very voyage, because of an indifferent word spoken yesterday. The bar, too, would have to be crossed. The bar! Besides, we were getting most unreasonably hungry, and so could not smoke; and this induced the early morning temper, which is vile, and would be worse than the early morning courage but for the fact that that sort of courage is unknown in man, never rising to more than a bleak and miserable fortitude.

Charon hailed us from below the quay. He had with him a nondescript attendant. We embarked for his craft, which he said was anchored in midstream. We recognised him as our sailor of yesterday, though now there was something glum and ominous about him. He had no other word for us, but rowed steadily, and looked down his beard. His bark was like himself, when, still in resignation to what we had asked for, we boarded her. She was flush-decked, her freeboard was about eighteen inches, she had no bulwarks—to tell the truth, she was but a very barge, with that look of stricken poverty which is the sure mark of the usefulness of the merely industrious. She would float, I guessed, if not kept too long in seas that washed her imperfect hatch-covers. She would sail her distance, if the wind did not force her over till the water reached the rent in her deck. She could carry thirty tons of stone; and, in fair weather, with reckless men, thirty-five tons. She had a freeboard, I repeat, of one foot six inches, now she was light, and peering through the interstices of her hatch-boards I could see her kelson, and note that though she did not leak like a basket she was doing her best. We were going to the Foreland to gather stones for the ballast of ships. Absurd and desperate enterprise! We could hear faint moaning, when attentive. That was the voice of the bar, three miles away.

The skipper and his man hoisted the mainsail, and we three manned the windlass, working in link by link a cable without end, till we were automata going up and down indifferent to both this life and the life to come. The barge gave a little leap as the anchor cleared.

The foresail was set. We drifted sideways round the hill. The silent houses, with white faces, looked at us one by one. We found a little wind, and the barge walked off past the lighthouse, which still was winking at us. There came a weighty gust; the gear shook and banged, but held taut. Off she went.

Burra was behind us. Before us was a morose grey void. The bay apparently was only space, uncreated, unlighted; though in the neighbourhood of our barge we noticed there was the beginning of form in that dim and neutral world. Long leaden mounds of water out of nowhere moved inwards past us, slow and heavy, lifting the barge and dropping her into hollows where her sails shook, and spilled their draught. We three grasped stays, and peered outwards into the icy vacancy, wondering whether this was the free life, whether we were enjoying it, whether we wanted to go to the Foreland, and how long this would last. In the east there formed a low stratum of gold. Some of the leaden mounds were now burnished, or they glinted with precious ore. When the light broadened the air seemed to grow colder, as though day had sharpened the arrows of the wind.

The hollow murmur from the bar increased to an intermittent plunging roar, and presently we fell into that noise. The smother stood the barge up, and stood her down, and drenched the mainsail to the peak. But it was only in play. We were worth nothing worse. We were allowed to go by, and one of us pumped the wash out of her, for the play had been somewhat rough.

In the long swell of the bay our movements became rhythmic, and we settled down quietly in a long reach. A vault of blue had shaped over us. The Foreland was born into the world. It looked towards the new day, and was of amber; but over the moors to the north-east the rain-clouds, a gathering of sullen battalions, challenged the dawn with an entrenched region of gloom. Yet when the sun arose and looked straight at them, they went. It was a good morning. Now we could see all the bay, coloured and defined in every hanging field, steep, and combe. The waters danced. The head of the skipper appeared at the scuttle—only one at a time could get into our cabin—and he had a large communal basin of tea, and a loaf speared on a long knife.

The Foreland, to which for hours our work seemed to bring us no nearer, which had been mocking the efforts to approach it of an obstinate little ship with a crew too stupid to realise that efforts to reach an enchanted coast were futile, suddenly relented. It grew higher and tangible. At last we felt that it was drawing us, rather too intimately, towards its overshadowing eminence. The nearer it got, the greater grew my surprise that in a time long past man had found the heart to put off in a galley, to leave what he knew, and to stand in to an unknown shore, if it offered no more than our cape. The apparition of the Foreland was as chill as the shadow in the soul of man. It appeared to have some affinity with that shadow. Though monstrous and towering, it seemed buoyant and without gravity, an image of original and sombre doubt. Above our mast, when I looked up, earthquakes and landslides were impending, arrested in collapse. But I thought they were quivering, as though the arrest were momentary. That vast mass seemed based on rumblings, shouts, and hollow shadows. Our craft still moved in, projected forward on vehement billows, past black jags in blusters of foam, and then anchored with calamity suspended above. Our ship heaved and fell on submarine displacements. The skipper and his man went below.

When they reappeared they were naked. It was a good and even necessary hint. We got into the boat, and pulled towards a beach which was a narrow shelf at the base of a drenched wall. The rocks which flanked that little beach were festooned with weeds, and sea growths hung like curtains before the night of caves. Somehow there the water was stilled, and all but one of us leaped into it. One man remained in the boat.

The ocean was exploding on steeples and tables of rock. It formed domes green and shining over submerged crags. The midday sun gave the foam the brilliance of an unearthly light. The shore looked timeless, but it smelt young. The sun was new in heaven.

And what were those ivory figures leaping and shouting in the surf? As I watched them in that light a doubt shook me. I began to wonder whether I knew that little ship, and those laughing figures, and that sea. Who were they? Where was it? When was it?

THE END

Transcriber’s note

Hyphenation was standardized where appropriate.

In this version, page numbers in the List of Illustrations reflect the position of the illustration in the original text, but links point to current position of illustrations.

Spelling has been retained as originally published except for the changes below:

Page 63: “recruitment of orang-utans” | “recruitment of orangutans”
Page 91: “draws its toils tighter” | “draws its coils tighter”
Page 162: “whose volatile enthusiams” | “whose volatile enthusiasms”
Page 243: “space, uncreate, unlighted” | “space, uncreated, unlighted”
Page 245: “hung like curtains befor” | “hung like curtains before”

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Table of Contents

- GIFTS OF FORTUNE
- CONTENTS
- ILLUSTRATIONS
- GIFTS OF FORTUNE
- I. SOME HINTS FOR THOSE ABOUT TO TRAVEL
- II. OUT OF TOUCH
- III. ELYSIUM
- IV. THE RAJAH
- V. THE STORM PETREL
- VI. ON THE CHESIL BANK
- VII. THE PLACE WE KNOW BEST
- VIII. DROUGHT
- IX. A RIDE ON A COMET
- X. REGENT’S PARK
- XI. A DEVON ESTUARY
- Transcriber’s note
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE