Produced by Mark C. Orton, Linda McKeown and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
OLD JUNK
BY
H. M. TOMLINSON
FOREWORD BY S. K. RATCLIFFE
NEW YORK ALFRED . A . KNOPF 1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
_Second Printing August, 1920_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To
C. H. G. H.
Who saw with me so much of what is in this book_
(_Killed in action in Artois, August 27th, 1918_)
These stories of travel and chance have been selected from writings
published in various periodicals between January 1907 and April 1918,
and are arranged in order of time.
Foreword
_The author of_ OLD JUNK _has been called a legend. A colleague who
during the later stages of the war visited the western front assured me
that this was the right word by which to describe the memory left among
officers and men, not so much by his work as a war correspondent, as by
his original and fascinating character. A legend, too, he appears to be
in the newspaper world of London: but there in a different sense, by
reason of the singular contradiction between the human creature beloved
of all his fellows and the remarkable productions of his pen._
_The first thing to say about H. M. Tomlinson, the thing of which you
become acutely aware on making his acquaintance, is that he is a
Londoner. "Nearly a pure-blooded London Saxon" is his characterization
of himself. And so it is. He could have sprung from no other stock. In
person and speech, in the indefinable quality of the man, in the humour
which continually tempers his tremendous seriousness, he belongs to
London. Among the men of our time who have done creative writing I can
think of no other about whom this can be so precisely stated._
_It was in the opening years of the century that I first began to
notice his work. His name was appearing in the columns of a London
morning newspaper, since absorbed by the_ Daily News, _over articles
which, if my memory is not at fault, were mainly concerned with the
life of Thames side. They were written with extraordinary care. The man
who did them had, clearly, no competitor in Fleet Street. And he
furnishes a striking illustration of the chances and misfits of the
journalistic life. When, after some years of absence in the Far East, I
was able to fit a person to the writing which had so long attracted me,
I found H. M. Tomlinson on the regular reporting staff of a great
London newspaper. A man born for the creation of beauty in words was
doing daily turn along with the humble chronicler of metropolitan
trivialities._
_A year or two before the war the quality of his mind and of his style
was revealed in_ THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE--_a "narrative of the voyage of
the tramp steamer_ Capella, _from Swansea to Para in the Brazils, and
thence two thousand miles along the forests of the Amazon and Madeira
Rivers to the San Antonio Falls," returning by Barbados, Jamaica, and
Tampa. Its author called it merely "an honest book of travel." It is
that no doubt; but in a degree so eminent, one is tempted to say that
an honest book of travel, when so conceived and executed, must surely
count among the noblest works of the literary artist._
_The great war provided almost unlimited work for men of letters, and
not seldom work that was almost as far from their ordinary business as
fighting itself. It carried Tomlinson into the guild of war
correspondents. In the early months he represented the paper to which
for some years he had been attached, the London_ Daily News. _Later,
under the co-operative scheme which emerged from the restrictive policy
adopted by all the belligerent governments, his dispatches came to be
shared among a partnership which included the London_ Times--_as odd an
arrangement for a man like Tomlinson as could well be imagined. It
would be foolish to attempt an estimate of his correspondence from
France. It was beautiful copy, but it was not war reporting. To those
of us who knew him it remained a marvel how he could do it at all. But
there was no marvel in the fact, attested by a notable variety of
witnesses, of Tomlinson as an influence and a memory, persisting until
the dispersal of the armies, as of one who was the friend of all, a
sweet and fine spirit moving untouched amid the ruin and terror,
expressing itself everywhere with perfect simplicity, and at times with
a shattering candor._
_From France he returned, midway in the war, to join the men who, under
the Command of H. W. Massingham, make the editorial staff of the
London_ Nation _the most brilliant company of journalists in the world.
His hand may be traced week by week in many columns and especially, in
alternate issues, on the page given up to the literary_ causerie.
_To the readers of books Tomlinson is known at present by_ THE SEA
AND THE JUNGLE _alone. The war, it may be, did something to retard
its fame. But the time is coming when none will dispute its right to
a place of exceptional honour among records of travel--alongside the
very few which, during the two or three decades preceding the general
overturn, had been added to the books of the great wayfaring
companions. It is remarkably unlike all others, in its union of
accurate chronicle with intimate self-revelation; and, although it is
the sustained expression of a mood, it is extremely quotable. I choose
as a single example this scene, from the description of the_ Capella's
_first day on the Para River._
_There was seldom a sign of life but the infrequent snowy herons,
and those curious brown fowl, the ciganas. The sun was flaming on
the majestic assembly of the storm. The warm air, broken by our
steamer, coiled over us in a lazy flux.... Sometimes we passed
single habitations on the water side. Ephemeral huts of palm-leaves
were forced down by the forest, which overhung them, to wade on
frail stilts. A canoe would be tied to a toy jetty, and on the
jetty a sad woman and several naked children would stand, with
no show of emotion, to watch us go by. Behind them was the
impenetrable foliage. I thought of the precarious tenure on earth
of these brown folk with some sadness, especially as the day was
going. The easy dominance of the wilderness, and man's intelligent
morsel of life resisting it, was made plain when we came suddenly
upon one of his little shacks secreted among the aqueous roots of a
great tree, cowering, as it were, between two of the giant's toes.
Those brown babies on the jetties never cheered us. They watched
us, serious and forlorn. Alongside their primitive huts were a few
rubber trees, which we knew by their scars. Late in the afternoon
we came to a large cavern in the base of the forest, a shadowy
place where at last we did see a gathering of the folk. A number of
little wooden crosses peeped above the floor in the hollow. The
sundering floods and the forest do not always keep these folk from
congregation, and the comfort of the last communion._
_If the reader is also a writer, he will feel the challenge of that
passage--its spiritual quality, its rhythm, its images. And he will
know what gifts of mind, and what toil, have gone to its making._
OLD JUNK _is not, in the same organic sense, a book. The sketches and
essays of which it is composed are of different years and, as a glance
will show, of a wide diversity of theme. The lover of the great book
will be at home with the perfect picture of the dunes, as well as with
the two brilliantly contrasted voyages; while none who can feel the
touch of the interpreter will miss the beauty of the pieces that may be
less highly wrought._
_As to Tomlinson's future I would not venture a prediction.
Conceivably, when the horror has become a memory that can be lived with
and transfused, he may write one of the living books enshrining the
experience of these last five years. But, just as likely he may not. I
subscribe, in ending this rough note, to a judgment recently delivered
by a fellow worker that among all the men writing in England today
there is none known to us whose work reveals a more indubitable sense
of the harmonies of imaginative prose._
S. K. RATCLIFFE.
_New York, Christmas, 1919._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD BY S. K. RATCLIFFE 11
I. THE AFRICAN COAST 21
II. T HE CALL 47
III. OLD JUNK 58
IV. BED-BOOKS AND NIGHT-LIGHTS 65
V. TRANSFIGURATION 75
VI. THE PIT MOUTH 80
VII. INITIATION 86
VIII. THE ART OF WRITING 92
IX. A FIRST IMPRESSION 100
X. THE DERELICT 107
XI. THE VOYAGE OF THE _Mona_ 118
XII. THE LASCAR'S WALKING-STICK 136
XIII. THE EXTRA HAND 144
XIV. THE SOU'-WESTER 152
XV. ON LEAVE 157
XVI. THE DUNES 165
XVII. BINDING A SPELL 174
XVIII. A DIVISION ON THE MARCH 179
XIX. HOLLY-HO! 185
XX. THE RUINS 195
XXI. LENT, 1918 201
OLD JUNK
I. The African Coast
I
She is the steamship _Celestine_, and she is but a little lady. The
barometer has fallen, and the wind has risen to hunt the rain. I do not
know where _Celestine_ is going, and, what is better, do not care. This
is December and this is Algiers, and I am tired of white glare and
dust. The trees have slept all day. They have hardly turned a leaf. All
day the sky was without a flaw, and the summer silence outside the
town, where the dry road goes between hedges of arid prickly pears, was
not reticence but vacuity. But I sail tonight, and so the barometer is
falling, and I do not know where _Celestine_ will take me. I do not
care where I go with one whose godparents looked at her and called her
that.
There is one place called Jidjelli we shall see, and there is another
called Collo; and there are many others, whose names I shall never
learn, tucked away in the folds of the North African hills where they
come down to the sea between Algiers and Carthage. They will reveal
themselves as I find my way to Tripoli of Barbary. I am bound for
Tripoli, without any reason except that I like the name and admire
_Celestine_, who is going part of the journey.
But the barometer, wherever I am, seems to know when I embark. It
falls. When I went aboard the wind was howling through the shipping in
the harbour of Algiers. And again, _Celestine_ is French, and so we can
do little more than smile at each other to make visible the friendship
of our two great nations. A cable is clanking slowly, and sailors run
and shout in great excitement, doing things I can see no reason for,
because it is as dark and stormy as the forty days.
Algiers is a formless cluster of lower stars, and presently those stars
begin to revolve about us as though the wind really had got the sky
loose. The _Celestine_ is turning her head for the sea. The stars then
speed by our masts and funnel till the last is gone. Good-bye, Algiers!
_Celestine_ begins to curtsy, and at last becomes somewhat hysterical.
At night, in a high wind, she seems but a poor little body to be out
alone, with me. Tripoli becomes more remote than I thought it to be in
the early afternoon, when the French sailor talked to me in a cafe
while he drank something so innocently pink that it could not account
altogether for his vivacity and sudden open friendship for a shy alien.
He wanted me to elope with _Celestine_. He wanted to show me his
African shore, to see his true Mediterranean. I had travelled from
Morocco to Algiers, and was tired of tourist trains, historic ruins,
hotels, Arabs selling picture-postcards and worse, and girls dancing
the dance of the Ouled-Nails to the privileged who had paid a few
francs to see them do it. I had observed that tranquil sea; and in
places, as at Oran, had seen in the distance terraces of coloured rock
poised in enchantment between a blue ceiling and a floor of malachite.
That sea is now on our port beam. It goes before an inshore gale, and
lifts us high, turns us giddy with a sudden betrayal and descent; and
does it again, and again. Africa has vanished. Where Algiers probably
was there are but several frail stars far away in the dark that soar in
a hurry, and then collapse into the deep and are doused.
But here is le Capitaine. There is no need, of course, to be anxious
for _Celestine_. If her master is not a sailor, then all the signs are
wrong. He looks at me roguishly. Ah! His ship rolls. But the mistake,
it is not his. What would I have? She was built in England. _Voila!_
He is a little dark man, with quick, questioning eyes, and hair like a
clothesbrush. His short alert hair, his raised and querulous eyebrows,
his taut moustaches, and a bit of beard that hangs like a dagger from
his under lip, give him the appearance of constant surprise and
fretfulness. When he is talking to me he is embarrassingly playful--but
I shall show him presently, with fair luck, that my inelastic Saxon
putty can transmute itself, can also volatilise in abandonment to
sparkling nonsense; yet not tonight--not tonight, monsieur. He is so
gay and friendly to me whenever he sees me. But when one of the staff
does that which is not down in the book, I become alarmed. Monsieur
bangs the table till the cruet-stoppers leap out, and his eyes are
unpleasant. Yes, he is the master. He rises, and shakes his forefinger
at the unfortunate till his hand is a quivering haze and his speech a
blast. "Ou--e--e--eh!" cries the skipper at last, when the unfortunate
is on the run.
He has an idea I cannot read the menu, so when an omelette is served he
informs me, in case I should suppose it is a salad. He makes helpful
farmyard noises. There is no mistaking eggs. There is no mistaking
pork. But I think he has the wrong pantomime for the ship's beef,
unless French horses have the same music as English cows. After the
first dinner, I was indiscreet enough to refuse the cognac with the
coffee. "Ah!" he chided, smiling with craft, and shaking a knowing
finger at me. He could read my native weakness. I was discovered.
"Viskee! You 'ave my viskee!" A dreadful doubt seized me, and I would
have refused, but repressed my panic, and pretended he had found my
heart.
He rose, and shouted a peremptory order. A little private cabinet was
opened. A curious bottle was produced, having a deadly label in red,
white, and green. "Viskee!" cried the captain in exultation. (My God!)
"Aha!" said the reader of my hidden desire, pouring out the tipple for
which he imagines I am perishing in stoic British silence. "Viskee!" I
drain off, with simulated delight, my large dose of methylated spirit.
Not for worlds would I undeceive the good fellow, not if this were
train-oil. He laughs aloud at our secret insular weakness. He knows it.
But he is our very good friend.
All is not finished with the whisky. Out comes the master's English
Grammar, for he is wishful to know us better before I leave him. And he
shall. To this Frenchman I determine to be nobler than I was made. I
think I would teach him English all the way to Cochin-China. He writes
in his notebook, very slowly, while his tongue comes out to look on, a
sentence like this: "The nombres Francaise, they are most easy that the
English language." Then I put him right; and then he rises, reaches his
hands up to my shoulders, looks earnestly in my eyes, and la-las my
National Anthem. It may please God not to let me look so foolish as I
feel while I wait for the end of that tune; but I doubt that it does.
II
Early next morning we arrived at Bougie, to get an hour's peace with
the arm of the harbour thrown about my poor _Celestine_. The deck of a
Grimsby trawler discharging fish in the Humber on a wet December
morning is no more desolating than was the look of _Celestine_ under
the mountains of Bougie; and Bougie, if you have a memory for the
coloured posters, is in the blue Mediterranean. But do I grumble? I do
not. With all the world but slops, cold iron, and squalls of sleet, I
prefer _Celestine_ to Algiers.
Most likely you have never heard of the black Mediterranean. It is
usual to go there in winter, and write about it with a date-palm in
every paragraph, till you have got all the health and enjoyment there
is in the satisfaction of telling others that while they are choosing
cough cures you are under a sunshade on the coral strand. The truth is,
the Middle Sea in December can be as ugly as the Dogger Bank. There
were some Arab deck passengers on our coaster. One of them sat looking
at a deck rivet as motionless as a fakir, and his face had the
complexion of a half-ripe watermelon. His fellow-sufferers were only
heaps of wet and dirty linen dumped in the lee alley-way. It was bad
enough in a bunk, where you could brace your knees against the side,
and keep moderately still till you dozed off, when naturally you were
shot out sprawling into the lost drainage wandering on the erratic
floor. What those Arabs suffered on deck I cannot tell you. I never
went up to find out. At Bougie they seemed to have left it all to
Allah, with the usual result. It was clear, from a glance at those
piles of rags, that the Arab is no more native to Algeria than the
Esquimaux. I was much nearer home than the Arabs. That shining coast
which occasionally I had surprised from Oran, which seemed afloat on
the sea, was no longer a vision of magic, the unsubstantial work of
Iris, an illusionary cloud of coral, amber, and amethyst. It was the
bare bones of this old earth, as sombre and foreboding as any ruin of
granite under the wrack of the bleak north.
As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for bright
sunlight. They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their
white walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between
the styes. Their lissom and statuesque inhabitants become softened and
bent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were ashamed
to live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so well in
sunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle. They have not that
equality with the storm which makes the Sussex beech and oak, heavily
based and strong-armed, stand with a look of might and roar at the
charges of the Channel gale. By this you will see that Bougie must wait
until I call that way again. From the look of the sky, too, there is no
doubt we are in for a spell of the kind of weather I never expected to
meet in Africa. I was a stranger there, but I knew the language of
those squadrons of dark clouds driving into the bay.
The northern sky was full of their gloomy keels. There were intervals
when the full expanse of Bougie Bay became visible, with its concourse
of mountains crowded to the shore. At the base of the dark declivities
the combers were bursting, and the spume towered on the gale like grey
smoke. Out of the foam rose harsh rubble and screes to incline against
broken precipices, and those stark walls were interrupted by mid-air
slopes of grass which appeared ready to avalanche into the tumult
below, but remained, livid areas of a dim mass which rose into dizzy
pinnacles and domes, increasing the tumbling menace of the sky. A fleet
of clouds of deep draught ran into Africa from the north; went aground
on those crags, were wrecked and burst, their contents streaming from
them and hiding the aerial reef on which they had struck. The land
vanished, till only Bougie and its quay and the _Celestine_ remained,
with one last detached fragment of mountain high over us. That, too,
dissolved. There was only our steamer and the quay at last.
I thought our master would not dare to put out from there, but he cared
as little for the storm as for the steward. His last bales were no
sooner in the lighters than he made for Jidjelli. But Jidjelli daunted
even him. The nearer we got, the worse it looked. My own feeling was
that the gathering seas had taken charge of our scallop, a cork in the
surf, and were pitching her, helpless, towards terrible walls built of
night out of a base of thunder and bursting waters. I gripped a rail,
and saw a vague range of summits appear above the nearing walls and
steadily develop towards distinction. Then the howling gale began to
scream, the ceiling lowered and darkened, and merged with the rocks,
reducing the world but to our _Celestine_ in the midst of near flashes
of white in an uproar. When presently a little daylight came into chaos
to give it shape again, there was an inch of hail on our deck, and the
mountains had been changed to white marble. We saw a red light burn low
in the place where Jidjelli ought to be, a signal that it was
impossible to enter. Our skipper put about.
That is all I know of Jidjelli, and all I wanted to know on such an
evening. The sound of the surf on the rocks was better to hear when it
was not so close. We followed that coast all night while I lay awake,
shaking to the racing of the propeller; and I blessed the unknown
engineers of the North Country who took forethought of nights of that
kind when doing their best for _Celestine_; for, though bruised, I
still loved her above Algiers and Timgad. She had character, she had
set her course, and she was holding steadily to it, and did not pray
the uncompassionate to change its face.
III
For more than a week we washed about in the surf of a high, dark coast
towards Tunis. We might have been on the windward side of Ultima Thule.
Supposing you could have been taken miraculously from your fogs and
midday lamps of London, and put with me in the _Celestine_, and told
that that sullen land looming through the murk could be yours, if you
could guess its name, then you would have guessed nothing below the
fortieth parallel.
No matter; when you were told, you would have laughed at your loss. Now
you understood why it was called the Dark Continent. It looked the home
of slavery, murder, rhinoceroses, the Congo, war, human sacrifices, and
gorillas. It had the forefront of the world of skulls and horrors,
ultimatums, mining concessions, chains, and development. Its rulers
would be throned on bone-heaps. You will say (of course you will say)
that I saw Africa like that because I was weary of the place. Not at
all. I was merely looking at it. The feeling had been growing on me
since first I saw Africa at Oran, where I landed. The longer I stay,
the more depressed I get.
This has nothing to do with the storm. This African shadow does not
chill you because you wish you were home, and home is far away. It does
not come of your rare and lucky idleness, in which you have to do
nothing but enjoy yourself; generally a sufficient reason for
melancholy, though rarely so in my own case. No, Africa itself is the
reason. There is an invisible emanation from its soil, the aura of evil
in antiquity. You cannot see it, at first you are unaware it is there,
and cannot know, therefore, what is the matter with you. This haunting
premonition is different from mere wearying and boredom. It gets worse,
the longer you stay; it goes deeper than sadness, it descends into a
conviction of something that is without hope, that is bad in its
nature, and unrepentant in its arrogant heart. When you have got so far
down you have had time to discover what that is which has put you so
low. The day may be radiant, the sky just what you had hoped to find in
Africa, and the people in the market-place a lively and chromatic
jangle; but the shadow of what we call inhumanity (when we are trying
to persuade ourselves that humanity is something very different) chills
and darkens the heart.
Yet the common sky of North Africa might be the heaven of the first
morning, innocent of knowledge that night is to come. It is not a hard
blue roof; your sight is lost in the atmosphere which is azure. The sun
more than shines; his beams ring on the rocks, and glance in colours
from the hills. From a distance the flowers on a hill slope will pour
down to the sea in such a torrent of hues that you might think the arch
of the rainbow you saw there had collapsed in the sun and was now rills
and cascades. The grove of palms holding their plumes above a white
village might be delicate pencillings on the yellow sheet of desert.
The heat is a balm. The shadows are stains of indigo on the roads and
pale walls.
IV
One day we found Sfax. I went ashore at Sfax, interested in a name
quite new to me. The guide-book did not even mention it; perhaps it was
not worth while; no ruins, mummies, trams or hotels there, of course.
Maybe it was only the name of a man, or a grass, or a sort of
phosphate. Sfax! Well, anyhow, I had long wished for Africa, anywhere
in Africa, and here I was, not eager to get home again, but not
disinclined. What I had seen of it so far was a rather too frequented
highway opposite the coast of Europe--a complementary establishment.
Progress had macadamised it. Commerce and its wars had graded and
uniformed and drilled its life. Its silent people marched in ranks, as
it were, along mapped roads foredoomed, and its mills went round. Its
life was expressed for export. It was on the way to Manchester and
success. Of all the infernal uses to which a country can be put there
is none like development. Let every good savage make incantation
against it, or, if to some extent he has been developed, cross himself
against the fructification of the evil. As for us whites, we are
eternally damned, for we cannot escape the consequences of our past
cleverness. The Devil has us on a complexity of strings, and some day
will pull the whole lot tight. But Sfax! Had I escaped? Was there a
chance?
I found a city wall, a huge battlement, ancient and weathered, like an
unscalable cliff, and going through its gate was entering the shadows
of a cave. Out of the glare of the sun I went into the gloom of deep,
narrow, and mysterious passages. The sun was only on the parapets and
casements, which leaned towards each other confidentially, and left
only a ragged line of light above. These alley-ways were crowded with
camels, asses, and strange men. An understanding and sneering camel in
a narrow passage will force you to take what chance there is of escape
in desecrating a mosque, while Moslems watch you as the only Christian
there, or of going under its slobbering mouth and splay feet. It does
not care which.
It was market-day for Sfax. There were little piles of vivid fruit
beside white walls where a broad ray of sunlight found them. There were
silversmiths at work, tent-makers, and the makers of camel harness. The
tanners had laid skins for us to walk over. There were exotic smells. I
went exploring the crooked turnings with an indifference which was
studied. I was getting an interesting time, but was distinctly
conscious of eyes, a ceaseless stream of eyes that floated by, watchful
though making no sign. Several times I found myself jostled with some
roughness. It occurred to me that I had heard on the ship that Sfax was
the only town which had offered resistance to the French; its men have
a fine reputation throughout Tunisia, which they do something now and
then to maintain, in consequence. They certainly appeared a sturdy and
virile lot. They were not listless, like the Arabs of Algeria, who have
nothing to show for themselves but the haughty and aloof bearing of the
proud but beaten.
Having discovered that the enemy was vulnerable though strong, the men
of Sfax go through the day now with the directed activity of those who
once had got the worst of it, but have a hope of doing better next
time. They gave me a lively and adventurous scene. They moved with
silent and stealthy quickness. Their eyes glanced sideways from under
their cowls. Their hands were hidden under their jibbahs. A few of them
stared with the hate of the bereft. It is not possible to face
everybody in a press which moves in all directions, and I was the only
European who was there.
Passing a mosque, where I noticed the Moslems had attempted, but had
not completed, the obliteration of some representations of birds,--so
the mosque was once, evidently, a place where other gods had been
worshipped,--I hesitated, wishing to look closer into this curiosity,
but recollected myself, and was passing on. An Arab in the turban of
one who had been to Mecca was squatting cross-legged on the old marble
pavement outside the mosque, and I just took in that he was a fine
venerable fellow with an important beard, with a look of wisdom and
experience in his steady glance from under the strong arches of his
eyebrows that made me wish I knew Arabic, and could squat beside him,
and gossip of the wide world. As I turned he said quietly, "Good day!"
Now I thought perhaps I was bewitched, but turned and looked at him.
"How are you?" he asked. At that moment, when his eyes looking upward
had a smile of understanding mischief, and in such an alien city as
Sfax, I was prepared to declare there is but one God and Mahomet is His
prophet. For that sort of thing comes easy to me; and would have been
quite true, as far as it went. Then I went back to him, and fearing
that after all I might be addressing but the parrot which had already
exhausted its vocabulary, I tried it on him: "Shall I take my boots off
here, father, or may I sit down with you?"
"Sit down," he said.
He was a man of medicine. He sold there prophylactics against
small-pox, adultery, blindness, the evil eye, sterility, or any other
trouble which you thought threatened you. If a man feared for the
faithfulness of his spouse, it seems Father the Hadj could secure it
with a charm, and so allow him to spend the night elsewhere in perfect
enjoyment and content. That is what the quiet old cynic told me, and
invited me to inspect his display of amulets and fetishes, coloured
glass tablets with Arabic inscriptions, and a deal of stuff which
looked unreasonable to me, articles the holy man either could not or
would not resolve into sense.
His English, which he had learned as a shipping agent for the pilgrim
traffic, soon reached its narrow limits, to my sorrow. When it left
common objects and we wished to compare our world (for there is no
doubt he was an experienced and understanding elder who knew to within
a little what he might expect of his God and of his fellows), we were
left smiling at each other, and had to guess the rest. Yet at least the
bazaar could witness this good Moslem of age and admitted wisdom
sitting opposite a dubious Christian in a companionable manner; and
there was that testimony to my advantage. They even watched him draw
his finger across his throat in serious and energetic pantomime, and
saw me nod in grave appreciation, when he was trying to make me
understand what was his sympathy for the Christian conquerors of Sfax.
I went outside the landward gate of the city, and looked out over the
level of brilliant sand which stretched out from there to Lake Tchad.
What a voyage! What a lure! Perhaps there is no more perilous journey
on earth than that, and if a traveller would vanish into the past, into
such Oriental countries as the voyagers of Hakluyt saw with wonder,
then to leave Sfax, and go across country to the Niger, would equal
what once came of fooling with the arcana of the Djinn. Though, after
all, one would like to emerge again, to tell the tale to the children;
and the whole dubiety of it is in that last difficulty. It is almost
certain the magic would be too powerful.
About the bright yellow sea of the desert which came up to the high
cliffs of the town, the squatting camels made dark hummocks. Strings of
donkeys converged on the city gate bearing water-pots and baskets of
charcoal. Sometimes a line of camels swayed outwards through the crowd,
disappeared among the shrines, going south. Watching such a caravan go
was the same as watching a ship leave port.
By the wayside was a huckster. He banged a tomtom till he had gathered
a crowd from the loose concourse of men who had come long journeys with
esparto grass, or gums and ostrich plumes, and much else from the
secret region inland. He was selling cotton shirts, and was an
entertaining villain. By the corners of his mouth his humour was leery.
He did not laugh, but his grimaces were funny. The variegated crowd and
that huckster was too enticing, and forgetting I had not seen one of my
own kind since leaving the ship, and that my face among those black and
brown masks was as loud as the tomtom, I mingled my outrageous tourist
tweeds with the graceful folds of the robes. The huckster kept glancing
at me, and from grave side-long glances that crowd of men went to the
extraordinary length of grim smiles. Suddenly I recognized the trick of
that Arab cheapjack. It may be seen at work in Poplar, my native parish
to which the ships come, when a curious and innocent Chinaman joins the
group about the fluent quack in the market place.
As soon as dignity permitted I passed on, and my dignity did not keep
me waiting for any length of time.
Uncertain, and not a little nervous, I wandered among some plantations
of olives and false peppers, where the domes of the tombs floated like
white bubbles on the foliage. Here an Arab beckoned to me, and told me
he had been watching me for some time--for he was an English medical
missionary in disguise--and warned me that these gardens and shrines
were quite the wrong place to wander in alone. It appears that only a
few days since the flame of insurrection flashed down the bazaar,
licked up a few French soldiers who happened to be there, and had
almost got a hold before the garrison appeared and doused it. He took
me to his house, with its windows heavily barred, for there his
predecessor had been murdered. (If this could happen at the
starting-place for Lake Tchad, then let the idea go.)
From the flat roof of the doctor's house I smelt the dung of ages,
fought with legions of flies, and looked down on a large quadrangle of
hay and stable muck, where camels had carefully folded themselves on
the ground, and chewed reflectively, their eyes half closed; and large
drowsy asses mechanically fanned their ears at the loathly swarms. The
missionary surmised that the caravanserai below was the perfect
reflection of one we had heard more about, which was once at Bethlehem.
The square was enclosed with flat-roofed stables, and it being a busy
time they were all occupied. The first one, immediately below us, was
filled with a family of Kabyles, which consisted chiefly of a
magnificent virago of a wife, tattooed, with a fine gold ring in her
nostrils, who seemed to have a trying life with her mild and
contemplative old husband. She had more children than one could count
without giving the matter that close attention which might be
misinterpreted. She cradled them in the manger every night. Loud as her
voice was, though, I could almost hear the old man smile as he walked
away from her. They had two contemptuous camels who never lifted an
eyelid when she raised her voice to them, but chewed calmly on, with
faces turned impassively towards the New Jerusalem of camels, where
viragoes are not; and several resigned asses who appeared to have
handed their souls back to their Maker, because souls are but extra
trammels in this place of sorrow.
Next door to them was a regular tenant who bred goats, and fed them out
of British biscuit-tins. Beyond them the stable was occupied by a party
of swarthy ruffians who had arrived with a cargo of esparto grass. In
the far corner, a family, crowded out, had been living for weeks under
a structure of horrible rags. Smoke, issuing from a dozen seams, gave
their home the look of a smouldering manure heap.
V
You probably know there are place-names which, when whispered
privately, have the unreasonable power of translating the spirit east
of the sun and west of the moon. They cannot be seen in print without a
thrill. The names in the atlas which do that for me are a motley lot,
and you, who see no magic in them, but have your own lunacy in another
phase, would laugh at mine. Celebes, Acapulco, Para, Port Royal,
Cartagena, the Marquesas, Panama, the Mackenzie River, Tripoli of
Barbary. They are some of mine. Rome should be there, I know, and
Athens, and Byzantium. But they are not, and that is all I can say
about it.
Why give reasons for our preferences? How often have our preferences
any reason? Maybe some old scoundrel of an ancestor who made a fortune
(all lost since) as a thief on the Spanish main, whispers Panama to me
when my mind is tired. Others may make magic with Ostend, Biarritz, or
Ancoats; and they are just as lucky as the man who obtains the spell by
looking at the Dry Tortugas on the map.
When I set out from Newport on this voyage, I did not expect to see
Tripoli of Barbary. We have never considered the possibility that our
favourite place-names really do stand for stones that have veritable
shapes and smells under a sun which comes and goes daily. Nor was my
steamer exactly the sort of craft which could, by the look of her, ever
attain to the coast of Barbary. What would a steamer know about it? She
would never fetch the landfall of a dream. I was not surprised,
therefore, when she fetched Tripoli quite wrong; not the place at all
for which I was looking on the southern horizon. But then, she was but
taking crockery there, in crates; and crockery is less vulnerable, is
rough freight, compared to a fancy. The crockery, however, got to its
Tripoli quite safely.
We anchored; and there was Tripoli, standing round a little bay, with
its buildings, variously coloured, crowded to the west, and slender
minarets standing as masts over the flat decks of the houses. I landed
at a narrow water-gate, and the Turkish officials regarded me as though
I had come to remove the country. When I wished to embark again, these
curious people in uniform were even more serious than when I arrived.
After a long hesitation, permission was given me niggardly to leave
Tripoli, and my ship's boatmen pointed out the urgent need to supply a
certain rowboat in the bay with that morsel of paper. To lose that tiny
document would have a shocking result, for a warship was in the bay to
support the rowboat. We passed that warship. Some day a hilarious
traveller will tear his document into fragments, and that warship will
fire at him, and sink. The system here, a mere tabulation of fear and
suspicion, those reflexes of evildoers who have the best of reasons to
be jealous of their neighbours, is protective exclusiveness in its
perfect flower, and perhaps it would be better to be really dead than
to live under it as a warm, law-abiding corpse.
I should guess that, with a slight magnification to make the object
plainer, there are three soldiers to each worker in North Africa. On
from Oran the gaudy fellow in uniform has been very conspicuous, the
most leisured and prosperous of the inhabitants, and one came
unwillingly to the conclusion that it is more profitable to smoke
cigarettes in a country than to grow corn in it. As for Tripoli, its
uniformed protectors hide the protected; but perhaps its natives have
learned how to live by killing one another. It is possible I have not
divined the more subtle ways of God's providence.
Tripoli, like other towns oh these shores, looks as though it were
sloughing away. Where stones fall, there they lie. In the centre of the
town is a marble triumphal arch in honour of Marcus Aurelius. Age would
account for much of its ruin, but not all; yet it still stands cold,
haughty, austere, though decrepit, in Tripolitan mud, with mean stucco
and plaster buildings about it. The arch itself is filled in, and is
used as a dwelling. Its tenant is a greengrocer, and the monument to
Marcus Aurelius has an odour of garlic; but it need not be supposed
that that was specially repugnant to me. How could the white marble of
Marcus, to say nothing of a warmer philosophy no less austere, be
acceptable to our senses unless translated, with a familiar odour of
garlic, by modern greengrocers? I shall think more of Tripoli of
Barbary in future, when looking back at it through a middle-aged pipe,
when the chains have got me at last.
_January 1907._
II. The Call
When the train left me at Clayton Station, the only passenger to
alight, its hurried retreat down the long straight of converging
metals, a rapidly diminishing cube, seemed to be measuring for me the
isolation of the place. Clayton appeared to be two railway platforms
and a row of elms across an empty road. After the last rumble of the
train, which had the note of a distant cry of derision, there closed in
the quiet of a place where affairs had not even begun. It was raining,
there was a little luggage, I did not know the distance to the village,
and the porter had disappeared. A defective gutter-spout overhead was
the leaking conduit for all the sounds and movement of the countryside.
Then I saw a boy humped into the shelter of a shrub which leaned over
the station fence. He was reading. Before him was a hand-cart lettered
"Humphrey Monk, Grocer and General Dealer, Clayton." The boy wore
spectacles which, when he looked at me, magnified his eyes so that the
lad seemed a luminous and disembodied stare. I saw only the projection
of his enlarged gaze. He promised to take my luggage to Clayton. I
walked through three miles of steady rain to the village, by a stretch
of marshland so hushed by the nearness of the draining sky that the
land might have been what it seemed at a little distance: merely a
faint presentment of fields solvent in the wet. Its green melted into
the outer grey at a short distance where rows of elms were smeared.
There was nothing beyond.
This old village of Clayton is five miles inland from Clayton-on-Sea,
that new and popular resort hardened with asphalt and concrete, to
which city folk retire for a change in the summer. During the winter
months many of the shops of the big town are closed till summer brings
the holiday-makers again. The porticoes of the abandoned premises fill
with street litter, old paper, and straws. The easterly winds cut the
life out of the streets, the long ranks of automatic machines look out
across the empty parade, and rust, and the lines of the pier-deck
advance desolately far into the wind and grey sea, straight and
uninterrupted. It is more than barren then, Clayton-on-Sea, for man has
been there, builded busily and even ornately, loaded the town with
structures for even his minor whims in idleness; and forsaken it all.
So it will look on the Last Day. The advertisements clamour pills and
hair-dye to a town which seems as if the Judgment Day has passed and
left the husk of life. So I was driven to the original Clayton, the
place which gave the name, the little inland village that did, when I
found it, show some signs of welcome life. It was a clump of white
cottages in a vague cloud of trees. It had some chimneys smoking, there
was a man several fields away, and a dog sitting in a porch barked at
me. Here was a little of the warmth of human contiguity.
When night came, and the village was but a few chance and unrelated
lights, there was the choice between my bedroom and the taproom of the
inn where I lodged. In the bedroom, crowning a chest of drawers, was a
large Bible, and on the wall just above was a glass case of shabby
sea-birds, their eyes so placed that they appeared to be looking up
from Holy Writ with a look of such fatuous rapture that one's idea of
immortality became associated with bodies dusty, stuffed, and wired.
(Oh, the wind and the rain!) Yet there was left the bar-parlour; and
there, usually, was a dim lamp showing but a table with assorted empty
mugs, a bar with bottles and a mirror, but nobody to serve, and a
picture of Queen Victoria in her coronation robes.
There was but one other light in Clayton which showed sanctuary after
dark for the stranger. It was in Mr. Monk's shop. His shop at least had
its strange interests in its revelation of the diverse needs of
civilized homes, for Mr. Monk sold everything likely to be wanted
urgently enough by his neighbours to make a journey to greater Clayton
prohibitive. In one corner of his shop a young lady was caged, for it
was also the post office. The interior of the store was confused with
boxes, barrels, bags, and barricades of smaller tins and jars, with
alleys for sidelong progress between them. I do not think any order
ever embarrassed Mr. Monk. Without hesitation he would turn, sure of
his intricate world, from babies' dummies to kerosene. There were cards
hanging from the rafters bearing briar pipes, bottles of lotion for the
hair of schoolchildren, samples of sauce, and stationery.
His shop had its own native smell. It was of coffee, spices, rock-oil,
cheese, bundles of wood, biscuits, and jute bags, and yet was none of
these things, for their separate flavours were so blended by old
association that they made one indivisible smell, peculiar, but not
unpleasant, when you were used to it. I found Mr. Monk's barrel of soda
quite a cherishable seat on a dull night, for the grocer's lamp was
then the centre of a very dark world. Around it and beyond was only the
blackness and silence of vacuity. And the grocer himself, if not busy,
would give me his casual and valuable advice on the minor frailties of
the human, and they seemed as engaging and confusing in their
directness as a child's; for Mr. Monk was large and bland, with a pale,
puffy, and unsmiling face, and only betrayed his irony with a slow wink
when he was sure you were not deceived. He knew much about the gentry
around, those bored and weary youths in check coats, riding breeches,
and large pipes, and the young ladies in pale homespun costumes who had
rude and familiar words to all they judged were their equals, and were
accompanied invariably by Aberdeen terriers.
One evening I spoke to Mr. Monk of his boy. The boy, I said, seemed a
strange little fellow. Mr. Monk, in his soiled, white apron, turned on
me, and said nothing at first, but tapped his bald head solemnly.
"Can't make him out," he said. "I think this is where it is"--and
pressed a fat thumb against his head again. "But you have to put up
with any boy you can get here." He sighed. "The bright kids go. Clear
out. There's nothing fer 'em here but farm labour an' the poor rate. I
don't know how the farmers about here could make a do of it if we
didn't pay rates to keep their labourers from dying off. My boys get
fed up. Off they go, 'nd I doan' blame 'em. One of 'em's in a racin'
stable now, doin' well. Another's got a potman's job London somewhere.
Doin' well. But the kid I've got now, he'll stop. No ginger in that
boy. Can't see anything five minutes off, either. Must be under his
nose, and your finger shouting at it. He's got a cloudy mind. Yet he's
clever, in his way. There's the door-mat of the shop. As soon as any
one puts a foot on that mat, the clock in my kitchen strikes two. All
his fake. But he does rile the customers. Silly young fool. If there's
two parcels to deliver, it's the wrong one gets first chance."
In a land where discovery had not gone beyond the blacksmith's forge
and the arable fields, a native boy who had turned a door-mat into a
watchdog was an interesting possibility. There the boy was at that
moment, stepping off his responsive mat, ill-clad, the red nose of his
meagre face almost as evident as his magnified stare of surprised
inquiry, and his mouth open. Mr. Monk chaffed him. I spoke with some
seriousness to him, but he was shy, and gave no answer except some
throat noises. Yet presently he ceased to rub a boot up and down one
leg, and became articulate. He mumbled that he knew the telegraph
instrument too. ("Oho!" said Mr. Monk, looking interested. "You do, do
yer? What about learning not to leave Mrs. Brown's parcel at Mrs.
Pipkin's?") Had I ever been to London, the boy asked, his big eyes full
on my face. Had I ever seen a Marconi station? I talked to him, perhaps
unwisely, of some of the greater affairs. He said nothing. His mouth
remained open and his stare full-orbed.
There was one grey, still Sunday when it was not raining, the grey sky
being exhausted, and I met the grocer's boy a little distance from the
village, sitting on a fence, reading. The boy closed his book when he
saw me, but not before I had noticed that the volume was open at a page
showing one of those highly technical diagrams of involved machinery
which only the elect may read. I took the book--it was a manual of
civil engineering--and asked questions with some humility; for before
the man who understands the manipulating of metals and can make living
servants for himself out of pipes, wheels, and valves, I stand as would
a primitive or an innocent and confiding girl before the magician who
interprets for them oracles. With the confidence of long familiarity
and the faint hauteur of shyness he explained some of the diagrams in
which, at that moment, he was interested.