on windless noons, and, looking up, see a corpse swinging along head
downwards at a great speed from tree to tree, holding by its toes,
grimacing, dripping with decay. Americans, so active in this life,
rest quiet afterwards. And though every stone of Wall Street have its
separate Lar, their kind have not gone out beyond city-lots. The maple
and the birch conceal no dryads, and Pan has never been heard amongst
these reedbeds. Look as long as you like upon a cataract of the New
World, you shall not see a white arm in the foam. A godless place. And
the dead do not return. That is why there is nothing lurking in the
heart of the shadows, and no human mystery in the colours, and neither
the same joy nor the kind of peace in dawn and sunset that older lands
know. It is, indeed, a new world. How far away seem those grassy,
moonlit places in England that have been Roman camps or roads, where
there is always serenity, and the spirit of a purpose at rest, and
the sunlight flashes upon more than flint! Here one is perpetually a
first-comer. The land is virginal, the wind cleaner than elsewhere, and
every lake new-born, and each day is the first day. The flowers are less
conscious than English flowers, the breezes have nothing to remember,
and everything to promise. There walk, as yet, no ghosts of lovers in
Canadian lanes. This is the essence of the grey freshness and brisk
melancholy of this land. And for all the charm of those qualities, it
is also the secret of a European's discontent. For it is possible, at a
pinch, to do without gods. But one misses the dead.
XIV
SOME NIGGERS
"_Look at those niggers! Whose are they?" (An American Suffragist lady
on board S.S. 'Ventura,' entering Pago-Pago Harbour, Samoa, October
1913. Apropos of the Samoans.)_
I suppose that if news came that the National Gallery was burnt down,
one might feel, while hearing of the general damage, the rooms gutted or
untouched, the Rembrandts and Titians saved, harmed, or lost, a sudden
disproportionately keen little stab of wonder: "The Pisanello _St
Hubert_," or "The Patinir _Flight into Egypt_--What's happened to
_that_?" So now there must be a handful of wanderers here and there
who, among all the major conflagration and disasters of nations and
continents, have felt the tug of the question, "What of Samoa?"
The South Sea Islands have an invincible glamour. Any bar in 'Frisco
or Sydney will give you tales of seamen who slipped ashore in Samoa
or Tahiti or the Marquesas for a month's holiday, five, ten, or twenty
years ago. Their wives and families await them yet. They are compound,
these islands, of all legendary heavens. They are Calypso's and
Prospero's isle, and the Hesperides, and Paradise, and every timeless
and untroubled spot. Such tales have been made of them by men who have
been there, and gone away, and have been haunted by the smell of the
bush and the lagoons, and faint thunder on the distant reef, and the
colours of sky and sea and coral, and the beauty and grace of the
islanders. And the queer thing is that it's all, almost tiresomely,
true. In the South Seas the Creator seems to have laid Himself out to
show what He _can_ do. Imagine an island with the most perfect climate
in the world, tropical, yet almost always cooled by a breeze from
the sea. No malaria or other fevers. No dangerous beasts, snakes, or
insects. Fish for the catching, and fruits for the plucking. And
an earth and sky and sea of immortal loveliness. What more could
civilisation give? Umbrellas? Rope? Gladstone bags?.... Any one of the
vast leaves of the banana is more waterproof than the most expensive
woven stuff. And from the first tree you can tear off a long strip of
fibre that holds better than any rope. And thirty seconds' work on
a great palm-leaf produces a basket-bag which will carry incredible
weights all day, and can be thrown away in the evening. A world of
conveniences. And the things which civilisation has left behind or
missed by the way are there, too, among the Polynesians: beauty and
courtesy and mirth. I think there is no gift of mind or body that the
wise value which these people lack. A man I met in some other islands,
who had travelled much all over the world, said to me, "I have found
no man, in or out of Europe, with the good manners and dignity of the
Samoan, with the possible exception of the Irish peasant." A people
among whom an Italian would be uncouth, and a high-caste Hindu vulgar,
and Karsavina would seem clumsy, and Helen of Troy a frump.
The white population of Heaven, as one would expect, is very small;
but, as one wouldn't expect, it is composed of Americans, English, and
Germans. About half Germans, for it has been a German colony for some
fourteen years. But it is one of the few white 'possessions,' I suppose,
where a decent white needn't feel ashamed of himself. For, though it's
proper to deny that Germans can colonise, they have certainly ruled
Samoa very well. In some part, no doubt, the luck has been with
them--with the world--in this success. Samoa was one of their later
and wiser attempts in colonising. The first governor was Herr Solf, the
present Secretary for the Colonies, who is reputed to have started the
administration of Samoa after a careful examination of our method of
ruling Fiji, and with a due, but not complete, regard for the advice of
the chief English and American settlers in Samoa. Certainly he started
it very ably and wisely. By luck and good management those various
forces which might destroy the beauty of Samoa are almost ineffectual.
The fact that the missionaries are nearly all English puts a slight
sufficient chasm between the spiritual and civil powers, and avoids that
worst peril of these places--hierocracy. The trade of the islands is
largely a monopoly of the 'German firm,' a big affair which pays a
few people in Hamburg fabulous percentages. So smaller traders aren't
encouraged to flourish unduly; and the German firm itself is too well
fed to bother about extending. The Samoans, therefore, aren't exploited,
spiritually or commercially, as much as they might be. By such slight
chances beauty keeps a foothold in the world. The missionary's peace of
mind may require that the Samoan should wear trousers, or the trader's
pocket that he should drink gin and live under corrugated iron. But the
Government has discovered that these things are not good for the health
of the Polynesian, so the Samoan wears his _lava-lava_ and drinks his
_kava_, and lives in his cool and lovely thatched hut, and is happy.
And--final test of administration--the population is no longer
decreasing.
But I think there's more than luck or German wisdom at the bottom of the
happy condition of Samoa. Something in the very magic of the place seems
to subdue or soften the evil in men. Heaven forbid I should deny that
mean and treacherous and cruel acts of white men and brown are on
record. But as a rule the greedy or the boorish, once they settle there,
appear to mellow and grow quiet. Between this sea and sky even a trader
becomes almost a gentleman, even a Prussian almost lovable, and the very
missionaries are betrayed by beauty, and contentment takes them unaware.
Samoa has been well governed. The people have been forbidden a few
perils of civilisation, and for the rest are left pretty well to
themselves. Go up from Apia across the mountains, or round the coast,
or take a boat over to the other big island, Savaii, and you find them
living their old life, fishing and bathing and singing, and never a sign
of a white man. They are guaranteed possession of their land. They'll
sometimes complain faintly of 'taxation'--a small head-tax the
Government exacts, which compels the individual to some four or five
days' work a year. The English inhabitants themselves have had no
grumble against the Germans except that they incline to be 'too kind to
the natives'--an admirable testimonial. And traders in the Pacific
say they always get far better treatment from the customs and harbour
authorities at Apia than at the British Suva, in Fiji.
And yet the Samoans do not like the Germans. When I was there, nearly
a year ago, I was often asked, "When will Peritania (Britain) fight
Germany, and send her away from Samoa?" They have no complaint against
the Germans. They have merely a sentimental and highly flattering
preference for the English. On a recent visit of an English gunboat to
Apia, the officers were entertained at a Samoan dinner party, with music
and dances, by an eminent and very charming young princess. The princess
is a famous beauty, with the keen intelligence Samoans have if they
care, a wonderful dancer, possessed of a glorious singing voice and
a perfect knowledge of English. The party was a great success. The
princess led her guests afterwards to the flag-staff. Before anyone
could stop her, she leapt on to the pole and raced up the sixty feet
of it. That also is among the accomplishments of a Samoan princess. She
seized the German flag, tore it to pieces, brought it down, and danced
on it. So the tale is; and it is probably true. In the villages where I
stayed it was amusing how swiftly and completely the children forgot the
few words of German the Government sometimes had them taught; while
one or two common phrases, '_Morgen_,' '_gut_,' etc., were retained
as extremely good jokes by the boys and girls, occasions of
inextinguishable laughter, through the absurdity of their sound and the
very ridiculous German-ness of them....
I wish I were there again. It is a country, and a life, that bind the
heart. There is a poem:
"I know an island,
Lovely and lost, and half the world away;
And there, 'twixt lowland and highland,
Lies a pool, rich with murmur and scent and glimmer,
And there my friends go, all the radiant day,
Each golden-limbed and flower-crowned laughing swimmer,"
--and so on. It tells how ugly and joyless by comparison the fellow's
own country sometimes seems, filled with money-making and fogs and such
grey things:
"Evil, and gloom, and cold o' nights in my land;
But,--I know an island
Where Beauty and Courtesy, as flowers, blow."
So it goes, with a jolly return on the rhyme. But the whole poem is a
bad one. Still, the man felt it, the magic. It is a magic of a different
way of life. In the South Seas, if you live the South Sea life, the
intellect soon lapses into quiescence. The body becomes more active, the
senses and perceptions more lordly and acute. It is a life of swimming
and climbing and resting after exertion. The skin seems to grow more
sensitive to light and air, and the feel of water and the earth and
leaves. Hour after hour one may float in the warm lagoons, conscious, in
the whole body, of every shred and current of the multitudinous
water, or diving under in a vain attempt to catch the radiant
butterfly-coloured fish that flit in and out of the thousand windows
of their gorgeous coral palaces. Or go up, one of a singing
flower-garlanded crowd, to a shaded pool of a river in the bush, cool
from the mountains. The blossom-hung darkness is streaked with the
bodies that fling themselves, head or feet first, from the cliffs around
the water, and the haunted forest-silence is broken by laughter. It is
part of the charm of these people that, while they are not so foolish
as to 'think,' their intelligence is incredibly lively and subtle, their
sense of humour and their intuitions of other people's feelings are
very keen and living. They have built up, in the long centuries of
their civilisation, a delicate and noble complexity of behaviour and of
personal relationships. A white man living with them soon feels his
mind as deplorably dull as his skin is pale and unhealthy among those
glorious golden-brown bodies. But even he soon learns to _be_ his body
(and so his true mind), instead of using it as a stupid convenience
for his personality, a moment's umbrella against this world. He is
perpetually and intensely aware of the subtleties of taste in food,
of every tint and line of the incomparable glories of those dawns and
evenings, of each shade of intercourse in fishing or swimming or dancing
with the best companions in the world. That alone is life; all else is
death. And after dark, the black palms against a tropic night, the smell
of the wind, the tangible moonlight like a white, dry, translucent mist,
the lights in the huts, the murmur and laughter of passing figures, the
passionate, queer thrill of the rhythm of some hidden dance--all this
will seem to him, inexplicably and almost unbearably, a scene his heart
has known long ago, and forgotten, and yet always looked for.
And now Samoa is ours. A New Zealand Expeditionary Force took it. Well,
I know a princess who will have had the day of her life. Did they see
Stevenson's tomb gleaming high up on the hill, as they made for that
passage in the reef? Did Vasa, with his heavy-lidded eyes, and that
infinitely adorable lady Fafaia, wander down to the beach to watch them
land? They must have landed from boats; and at noon, I see. How hot they
got! I know that Apia noon. Didn't they rush to the Tivoli bar--but I
forget, New Zealanders are teetotalers. So, perhaps, the Samoans gave
them the coolest of all drinks, _kava_; and they scored. And what dances
in their honour, that night!--but, again, I'm afraid the _houla-houla_
would shock a New Zealander. I suppose they left a garrison, and went
away. I can very vividly see them steaming out in the evening; and the
crowd on shore would be singing them that sweetest and best-known of
South Sea songs, which begins 'Good-bye, my Flenni' ('Friend,' you'd
pronounce it), and goes on in Samoan, a very beautiful tongue. I hope
they'll rule Samoa well.
AN UNUSUAL YOUNG MAN
Some say the Declaration of War threw us into a primitive abyss of
hatred and the lust for blood. Others declare that we behaved very well.
I do not know. I only know the thoughts that flowed through the mind
of a friend of mine when he heard the news. My friend--I shall make no
endeavour to excuse him--is a normal, even ordinary man, wholly English,
twenty-four years old, active and given to music. By a chance he was
ignorant of the events of the world during the last days of July. He was
camping with some friends in a remote part of Cornwall, and had gone on,
with a companion, for a four-days' sail. So it wasn't till they beached
her again that they heard. A youth ran down to them with a telegram:
"We're at war with Germany. We've joined France and Russia."
My friend ate and drank, and then climbed a hill of gorse, and sat
alone, looking at the sea. His mind was full of confused images, and
the sense of strain. In answer to the word 'Germany,' a train of vague
thoughts dragged across his brain. The pompous middle-class vulgarity of
the building of Berlin; the wide and restful beauty of Munich; the taste
of beer; innumerable quiet, glittering _cafes_; the _Ring_; the swish
of evening air in the face, as one _skis_ down past the pines; a certain
angle of the eyes in the face; long nights of drinking, and singing,
and laughter; the admirable beauty of German wives and mothers;
certain friends; some tunes; the quiet length of evening over the
Starnberger-See. Between him and the Cornish sea he saw quite clearly
an April morning on a lake south of Berlin, the grey water slipping
past his little boat, and a peasant-woman, suddenly revealed against
apple-blossom, hanging up blue and scarlet garments to dry in the sun.
Children played about her; and she sang as she worked. And he remembered
a night in Munich spent with a students' _Kneipe_. From eight to one
they had continually emptied immense jugs of beer, and smoked, and sung
English and German songs in profound chorus. And when the party broke up
he found himself arm-in-arm with the president, who was a vast Jew, and
with an Apollonian youth called Leo Diringer, who said he was a poet.
There was also a fourth man, of whom he could remember no detail.
Together, walking with ferocious care down the middle of the street,
they had swayed through Schwabing seeking an open _cafe_. Cafe Benz was
closed, but further up there was a little place still lighted, inhabited
by one waiter, innumerable chairs and tables piled on each other for the
night, and a row of chess-boards, in front of which sat a little bald,
bearded man in dress-clothes, waiting. The little man seemed to them
infinitely pathetic. Four against one, they played him at chess, and
were beaten. They bowed, and passed into the night. Leo Diringer recited
a sonnet, and slept suddenly at the foot of a lamp-post. The Jew's
heavy-lidded eyes shone with a final flicker of caution, and he turned
homeward resolutely, to the last not wholly drunk. My friend had
wandered to his lodgings, in an infinite peace. He could not remember
what had happened to the fourth man....
A thousand little figures tumbled through his mind. But they no longer
brought with them that air of comfortable kindliness which Germany had
always signified for him. Something in him kept urging, "You must hate
these things, find evil in them." There was that half-conscious agony of
breaking a mental habit, painting out a mass of associations, which he
had felt in ceasing to believe in a religion, or, more acutely, after
quarrelling with a friend. He knew that was absurd. The picture came
to him of encountering the Jew, or Diringer, or old Wolf, or little
Streckmann, the pianist, in a raid on the East Coast, or on the
Continent, slashing at them in a stagey, dimly-imagined battle.
Ridiculous. He vaguely imagined a series of heroic feats, vast
enterprise, and the applause of crowds....
From that egotism he was awakened to a different one, by the thought
that this day meant war and the change of all things he knew. He
realised, with increasing resentment, that music would be neglected.
And he wouldn't be able, for example, to camp out. He might have to
volunteer for military training and service. Some of his friends would
be killed. The Russian ballet wouldn't return. His own relationship with
A----, a girl he intermittently adored, would be changed. Absurd, but
inevitable; because--he scarcely worded it to himself--he and she and
everyone else were going to be different. His mind fluttered irascibly
to escape from this thought, but still came back to it, like a tethered
bird. Then he became calmer, and wandered out for a time into fantasy.
A cloud over the sun woke him to consciousness of his own thoughts; and
he found, with perplexity, that they were continually recurring to two
periods of his life, the days after the death of his mother, and the
time of his first deep estrangement from one he loved. After a bit he
understood this. Now, as then, his mind had been completely divided
into two parts: the upper running about aimlessly from one half-relevant
thought to another, the lower unconscious half labouring with some
profound and unknowable change. This feeling of ignorant helplessness
linked him with those past crises. His consciousness was like the light
scurry of waves at full tide, when the deeper waters are pausing and
gathering and turning home. Something was growing in his heart, and he
couldn't tell what. But as he thought 'England and Germany,' the word
'England' seemed to flash like a line of foam. With a sudden tightening
of his heart, he realised that there might be a raid on the English
coast. He didn't imagine any possibility of it _succeeding_, but only
of enemies and warfare on English soil. The idea sickened him. He was
immensely surprised to perceive that the actual earth of England held
for him a quality which he found in A----, and in a friend's honour, and
scarcely anywhere else, a quality which, if he'd ever been sentimental
enough to use the word, he'd have called 'holiness.' His astonishment
grew as the full flood of 'England' swept him on from thought to
thought. He felt the triumphant helplessness of a lover. Grey, uneven
little fields, and small, ancient hedges rushed before him, wild
flowers, elms and beeches, gentleness, sedate houses of red brick,
proudly unassuming, a countryside of rambling hills and friendly copses.
He seemed to be raised high, looking down on a landscape compounded of
the western view from the Cotswolds, and the Weald, and the high land
in Wiltshire, and the Midlands seen from the hills above Prince's
Risborough. And all this to the accompaniment of tunes heard long ago,
an intolerable number of them being hymns. There was, in his mind, a
confused multitude of faces, to most of which he could not put a
name. At one moment he was on an Atlantic liner, sick for home, making
Plymouth at nightfall; and at another, diving into a little rocky pool
through which the Teign flows, north of Bovey; and again, waking,
stiff with dew, to see the dawn come up over the Royston plain. And
continually he seemed to see the set of a mouth which he knew for his
mother's, and A----'s face, and, inexplicably, the face of an old man
he had once passed in a Warwickshire village. To his great disgust, the
most commonplace sentiments found utterance in him. At the same time he
was extraordinarily happy....
My friend, who has always, though never very passionately, believed
himself a most unusual young man, rose to his feet. Feeling a little
frightened, and more than a little unwell--for he is a person of quiet
mental habits--he wandered down the hill. He kept slowly moving his
head, like a man who wishes to dodge a pain. I gather that he was
conscious of few definite thoughts till he reached the London train. He
kept remembering, unwillingly, a midnight in Carnival-time in Munich,
when he had seen a clown, a Pierrot, and a Columbine tip-toe delicately
round the deserted corner of Theresien-strasse, and vanish into the
darkness. Then he thought of the lights on the pavement in Trafalgar
Square. It seemed to him the most desirable thing in the world to mingle
and talk with a great many English people. Also, he kept saying to
himself--for he felt vaguely jealous of the young men in Germany and
France--"Well, if Armageddon's _on_, I suppose one should be there." ...
Of France, he tells me, he thought little. The French always seemed to
him people to be respected, but very remote; more incomprehensible than
the Japanese, more, even, than the Irish. Of Russia, less. She meant
nothing to him except a sense of hysteria and vague evil which he had
been given by some of her music and literature. He thought often and
heavily of Germany. Of England, all the time. He didn't know whether he
was glad or sad. It was a new feeling.