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.