FLIGHT.
I was really running away now. It was not retreat, but flight; useless
to pretend that I was even looking civilisation in the face.
Some instinct led me to Geneva. There would be safety, I thought, in
its balanced poetry and prose, the mountains held in check by the
tourists, the lake by the hotels.
But I had reckoned without the gentleman whose crown I had saved in the
late _mêlée_. He turned up one day on Rousseau’s Island, and hailed me
as a brother. I assured him I was but a second cousin, at the outside.
It was in vain. He led me to a remote garret in the old town, and
introduced me to a circle of blood relations in democracy, by whom,
after examination, I was received into the family.
I did not mind; only it was hard to find this sort of thing going on
everywhere.
I was evidently found to improve on acquaintance, for, one day, I was
solemnly invited to a polyglot tea party, in another garret, with a
Russian lady making the tea.
It was green tea, fortunately; else it would have been altogether too
absurdly innocent a compound for this entertainment. Everybody but
myself had done something, and I felt quite ashamed to say that I had
only stood on the steps of the Royal Exchange. My sponsor came out in
a new light; he had been first smearer of petroleum at the Ministry
of Finance, during the Commune. He assured us that no other building
burnt half so well. He laid it all on the _rez-de-chaussée_; his
colleagues wasted their stuff on the upper walls. A friend from Spain
had shot three priests in the Carthagena riots, with one discharge
of a blunderbuss. There was an offer to introduce me as one of the
gentlemen who tried to sky London Bridge, so that I might not look
strange, but I hate a false pretence. The lady at the samovar was a
student emissary, who crossed the frontier with despatches, and she
had just come back with news. She had seen the latest execution at
St. Petersburg--two of the brethren and one sister hanging up in the
falling snow, as stiff as frozen ox-tongues. There were other cheerful
reports from Rome, and from Belgrade; and one companion, who was strong
in geography, gave us a bird’s-eye of the whole woeful earth. It was
to much the same effect, only that, further afield, the dull pain of
living was oftener met by endurance than by revolt. We had five minutes
in the native quarter at Amoy, and saw an ingenious device of the needy
to qualify as mendicant cripples, by making their feet rot off. It is
something of a trade secret; but the right way is to tie a cord tightly
round the ankle, till the member mortifies. It is a living--where it
is not certain death. Next, we were with the stark naked casuals,
squatting in the streets of Pekin in winter time, while, gorged with
humanitarian learning, the lordly scholars pass. We came home by way of
Central Asia, and dropped in on the squalid poor of Smarkand lousing
among their quilted rags. The coaling coolies at Aden detained us but
a moment; and, but a moment more, the sponge divers of the Ægean, with
their lungs choked with blood, for the great law of the margin of
subsistence reaches even to the ocean bed.
Next day, I made straight for Genoa. I seemed to labour for breath on
the dry land, and to want the sweet clean sea.
There was an Italian merchantman in port, fitting out for a voyage
round the world. They had macaroni on board; and, if they had boiled
the huge cargo, they might have girdled the globe as they sailed. They
were going to take it to Ceylon and the Philippines, by way of the
Suez Canal, and then, come back by the Horn to pick up something for
the home market. I wanted a ship; they were not averse to a passenger.
Short of ballooning, it seemed the readiest way of giving Civilisation
the slip.
We sailed; and, as I just had the honour to inform you, here I am, on a
peak in the Pacific, and thirteen thousand miles away from the dome of
St. Paul’s--which, as everybody knows, is but a stone’s throw from the
Royal Exchange. For distance, I think this will do.