1913. I have told you about how the American quartette descended on us
at Saracens, and I’ve told you about my clairvoyant moment at dinner,
when I saw through them all as though an X-ray machine had been turned
on them. I don’t want to go into all the complex impressions of their
personalities and the queer, surcharged atmosphere that their minds
altogether there, created in the house, because Louise’s wretched mind
dominated them all for me as the evening went on, just as her voice
drowned their voices and her tragedy eclipsed their little troubles.
Phyllis and Binky may have been under a strain; no doubt they were. Pat
may have been uncomfortable, though I don’t believe he was. Claire,
undoubtedly, drew a certain sinister satisfaction from Phil’s
helplessness. But all those things scarcely count at all compared to the
dreadful tension stretched over Louise and Jim. I had a feeling of
something drawn round them, very tight, enclosing them in a space like
the inside of a balloon, where the gases of their misery and distrust
swelled to bursting. And the final act was just the bursting of a bubble
that had been strained too long. And it seems, now, scarcely more
important in the sum total of the world’s tragedy than the bursting of a
toy balloon, buyable for a penny, and in competition with the roar of
armaments, scarcely more noisy.
[Illustration: Mary Borden]
And yet, if we are immortals, all of us, then it was, of course, much
more than that, and the amount of pain that was mine afterward, and the
cowardly giving in to the hopeless boredom of life that resulted from
it, all that will be balanced up against me, I suppose. I suppose my
giving in to Ruffles, when I knew there was nothing in it, will be laid
up against me. I don’t know. I don’t care very much. It’s so difficult
to decide whether that sort of thing really matters. To my father it
would matter so terribly, and to Binky it would—it did—matter so little.
I could never tell from his manner whether he accepted it in knowledge
or was altogether unaware. But it’s curious that Louise should have
accused me of the thing that hadn’t happened and was not going to,
because my father came to see us.
OCTOBER[7]
_By Robert Bridges_
April adance in play
met with his lover May
where she came garlanded.
The blossoming boughs o’erhead
were thrill’d to bursting by
the dazzle from the sky
and the wild music there
that shook the odorous air.
Each moment some new birth
hasten’d to deck the earth
in the gay sunbeams.
Between their kisses dreams:
And dream and kiss were rife
with laughter of mortal life.
But this late day of golden fall
is still as a picture upon a wall
or a poem in a book lying open unread.
Or whatever else is shrined
when the Virgin hath vanished;
Footsteps of eternal Mind
on the path of the dead.
“LETTERS OF A JAVANESE PRINCESS”[8]
_By Louis Couperus_
When the letters of Raden Adjeng Kartini were published in Holland, they
aroused much interest and awakened a warm sympathy for the writer. She
was the young daughter of a Javanese Regent, one of the “princesses” who
grow up and blossom in sombre obscurity and seclusion, leading their
monotonous and often melancholy lives within the confines of the
Kaboepatin, as the high walled Regent’s palaces are called.
The thought of India, or as we now say, perhaps more happily, Java, had
a strange fascination for me even as a child. I was charmed by the weird
mystery of its stories which frightened even while they charmed me.
Although I was born in Holland, our family traditions had been rooted in
Java. My father began his official career there as a Judge, and my
mother was the daughter of a Governor General, while my older brothers
had followed their father’s example and were officials under the
Colonial Government.
At nine years of age I was taken to the inscrutable and far off land
round which my early fancy had played; and I passed five of my school
years in Batavia. At the end of those five years I felt the same charm
and the same mystery. The thought of Java became almost an obsession. I
felt that while we Netherlanders might rule and exploit the country, we
should never be able to penetrate its mystery. It seemed to me that it
would always be covered by a thick veil, which guarded its Eastern soul
from the strange eyes of the Western conqueror. There was a quiet
strength “Een Stille Kracht”[9] unperceived by our cold business-like
gaze. It was something intangible, and almost hostile, with a silent,
secret hostility that lurked in the atmosphere, in nature and above all,
in the soul of the natives. It menaced from the slumbering volcanoes,
and lay hidden in mysterious shadows of the rustling bamboos. It was in
the bright, silver moonlight when the drooping palm trees trembled in
the wind until they seemed to play a symphony so gentle and so
complaining that it moved me to my soul. I do not know whether this was
poetic imagination ever prone to be supersensitive, or in reality the
“Quiet Strength,” hidden in the heart of the East and eternally at war
with the spirit of the West. It is certainly true that the Javanese has
never been an open book to the Netherlander. The difference of race
forms an abyss so deep that though they may stand face to face and look
into each other’s eyes, it is as though they saw nothing.
The Javanese woman of noble birth is even more impenetrable. The life of
a Raden Adjeng or a Raden Adjoe is a thing apart. Even the Dutch
officials and rulers of the country know nothing of the lives of these
secluded “princesses,” as we like to call the wives and daughters of the
Regents, though they themselves lay no claim to a title which in Europe
ranks so high.
Suddenly a voice was heard from the depths of this unknown land. It rose
from behind the high protecting wall that had done its work of
subjection and concealment through the ages. It was gentle, like the
melodious song of a little bird in a cage—in a costly cage it is true,
and surrounded by the tenderest care, but still in a cage that was also
a prison. It was the voice of Raden Adjeng Kartini, which sounded above
the walls of the close-barred Kaboepatin. It was like the cry of a
little bird that wanted to spread its wings free in the air, and fly
towards life. And the sound grew fuller and clearer, till it became the
rich voice of a woman.
She was shut in by aristocratic traditions and living virtually
imprisoned as became a young “princess” of Java; but she sang of her
longing for life and work and her voice rose clearer and stronger. It
penetrated to the distant Netherlands, and was heard there with wonder
and with delight. She was singing a new song, the first complaint that
had ever gone forth from the mysterious hidden life of the Javanese
woman. With all the energy of her body and soul she wanted to be free,
to work and to live and to love.
Then the complaint became a song of rejoicing. For she not only longed
to lead the new life of the modern woman, but she had the strength to
accomplish it, and more than that, to win the sympathy of her family and
of her friends for her ideals. This little “princess” lifted the
concealing veil from her daily life and not only her life, her thoughts
were revealed. An Oriental woman had dared to fight for feminism, even
against her tenderly loved parents. For although her father and mother
were enlightened for noble Javanese, they had at first strongly opposed
her ideas as unheard of innovations.
She wanted to study and later to become a teacher to open a school for
the daughters of Regents, and to bring the new spirit into their lives.
She battled bravely, she would not give up; in the end she won.
Raden Adjeng Kartini freed herself from the narrow oppression of
tradition, and the simple language of these letters chants a paean “From
Darkness into Light.”[10] The mist of obscurity is cleared away from her
land and her people. The Javanese soul is shown simple, gentle, and less
hostile than we Westerners had ever dared to hope. For the soul of this
girl was one with the soul of her people, and it is through her that a
new confidence has grown up between West and the East, between the
Netherlands and Java. The mysterious “Quiet Strength” is brought into
the light, it is tender, human and full of love and Holland may well be
grateful to the hand that revealed it.
This noble and pure soul was not destined to remain long upon earth. Had
she lived, who knows what Raden Adjeng Kartini might not have
accomplished for the well being of her country and her people; above
all, for the Javanese women and the Javanese child. She was the first
Regent’s daughter to break the fixed tradition in regard to marriage; it
was customary to give the bride to a strange bridegroom, whom she had
never seen, perhaps never even heard of, until her wedding day. Kartini
chose her own husband, a man whom she loved, but her happy life with him
was cut short by her early death.
It is sometimes granted to those whom the gods love to bring their work
to fruition in all the splendour of youth, in the springtime or the
summer of their lives. To have worked and to have completed a great
task, when one is young, so that the world is left richer for all
time—is not that the most beautiful of all the gifts of the gods?
APRIL’S CHARMS[11]
_By William H. Davies_
When April scatters coins of primrose gold
Among the copper leaves in thickets old,
And singing skylarks from the meadows rise,
To twinkle like black stars in sunny skies;
When I can hear the small woodpecker ring
Time on a tree for all the birds that sing;
And hear the pleasant cuckoo, loud and long—
The simple bird that thinks two notes a song;
When I can hear the woodland brook, that could
Not drown a babe, with all his threatening mood:
Upon whose banks the violets make their home,
And let a few small strawberry blossoms come;
When I go forth on such a pleasant day,
One breath outdoors takes all my care away;
It goes like heavy smoke, when flames take hold
Of wood that’s green and fill a grate with gold.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER V[12]
By this time, it was plain, Thimble and Thumb had found something to
raise them to the window-hole, for Nod, as he glanced up, saw half of
both their astonished faces (one eye of each) peering in at the window.
He waved his lean little arms, and their faces vanished.
“Why do you wave your long thumbs in the air?” said the old Gunga
uneasily.
“I wave to Tishnar,” said Nod, “who watches over her wandering Princes,
and will preserve them from thieves and cunning ones. And as for your
filthy green-weed soup, how should a Mulla-mulgar soil his thumbs with
gutting fish? And as for the Water-midden’s song, _that_ I cannot teach
you, nor would I teach it you if I could, Master Fish-catcher. But I can
catch fish with it.”
The old Gunga squatted close on his stool, and grinned as graciously as
he could. “I am poor and growing old,” he said, “and I cannot catch fish
as once I could. How is that done, O Royal Traveller?”
BURBANK WITH A BAEDEKER; BLEISTEIN WITH A CIGAR[13]
_By T. S. Eliot_
_Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire—nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera
fumus—the gondola stopped, the old place was there, how charming its
grey and pink—goats and monkeys, with such hair too!—so the countess
passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented
her with a cabinet, and so departed._
Burbank crossed a little bridge
Descending at a small hotel;
Princess Volupine arrived,
They were together, and he fell.
Defunctive music under sea
Passed seaward with the passing bell
Slowly: the God Hercules
Had left him, that had loved him well.
The horses, under the axletree
Beat up the dawn from Istria
With even feet. Her shuttered barge
Burned on the water all the day.
But this or such was Bleistein’s way:
A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese.
A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canalotto.
The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs. The boatman smiles,
Princess Volupine extends
A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand
To climb the water-stair. Lights, lights,
She entertains Sir Ferdinand
Klein. Who clipped the lion’s wings
And flea’d his rump and pared his claws;
Thought Burbank, meditating on
Time’s ruins, and the seven laws.
FROM
“WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD”[14]
_By E. M. Forster_
Harriet, meanwhile, had been coughing ominously at the drop-scene, which
presently rose on the grounds of Ravenswood, and the chorus of Scotch
retainers burst into cry. The audience accompanied with tappings and
drummings, swaying in the melody like corn in the wind. Harriet, though
she did not care for music, knew how to listen to it. She uttered an
acid “Shish!”
“Shut it,” whispered her brother.
“We must make a stand from the beginning. They’re talking.”
“It is tiresome,” murmured Miss Abbott; “but perhaps it isn’t for us to
interfere.”
Harriet shook her head and shished again. The people were quiet, not
because it is wrong to talk during a chorus, but because it is natural
to be civil to a visitor. For a little time she kept the whole house in
order, and could smile at her brother complacently.
Her success annoyed him. He had grasped the principle of opera in
Italy—it aims not at illusion but at entertainment—and he did not want
this great evening-party to turn into a prayer-meeting. But soon the
boxes began to fill, and Harriet’s power was over. Families greeted each
other across the auditorium. People in the pit hailed their brothers and
sons in the chorus, and told them how well they were singing. When Lucia
appeared by the fountain there was loud applause, and cries of “Welcome
to Monteriano!”
“Ridiculous babies!” said Harriet, settling down in her stall.
“Why, it is the famous hot lady of the Apennines,” cried Philip; “the
one who had never, never before—”
“Ugh! Don’t. She will be very vulgar. And I’m sure it’s even worse here
than in the tunnel. I wish we’d never—”
Lucia began to sing, and there was a moment’s silence. She was stout and
ugly; but her voice was still beautiful, and as she sang the theatre
murmured like a hive of happy bees. All through the _coloratura_ she was
accompanied by sighs, and its top note was drowned in a shout of
universal joy.
So the opera proceeded. The singers drew inspiration from the audience,
and the two great sextettes were rendered not unworthily. Miss Abbott
fell into the spirit of the thing. She, too, chatted and laughed and
applauded and encored, and rejoiced in the existence of beauty. As for
Philip, he forgot himself as well as his mission. He was not even an
enthusiastic visitor. For he had been in this place always. It was his
home.
Harriet, like M. Bovary on a more famous occasion, was trying to follow
the plot. Occasionally she nudged her companions, and asked them what
had become of Walter Scott. She looked round grimly. The audience
sounded drunk, and even Caroline, who never took a drop, was swaying
oddly. Violent waves of excitement, all arising from very little, went
sweeping round the theatre. The climax was reached in the mad scene.
Lucia, clad in white, as befitted her malady, suddenly gathered up her
streaming hair and bowed her acknowledgment to the audience. Then from
the back of the stage—she feigned not to see it—there advanced a kind of
bamboo clothes-horse, stuck all over with bouquets. It was very ugly,
and most of the flowers in it were false. Lucia knew this, and so did
the audience; and they all knew that the clothes-horse was a piece of
stage property, brought in to make the performance go year after year.
None the less did it unloose the great deeps. With a scream of amazement
and joy she embraced the animal, pulled out one or two practicable
blossoms, pressed them to her lips, and flung them into her admirers.
They flung them back, with loud melodious cries, and a little boy in one
of the stage-boxes snatched up his sister’s carnations and offered them.
“Che carino!” exclaimed the singer. She darted at the little boy and
kissed him. Now the noise became tremendous. “Silence! silence!” shouted
many old gentlemen behind. “Let the divine creature continue!” But the
young men in the adjacent box were imploring Lucia to extend her
civility to them. She refused, with a humorous, expressive gesture. One
of them hurled a bouquet at her. She spurned it with her foot. Then,
encouraged by the roars of the audience, she picked it up and tossed it
to them. Harriet was always unfortunate. The bouquet struck her full in
the chest, and a little billet-doux fell out of it into her lap.
“Call this classical!” she cried, rising from her seat. “It’s not even
respectable! Philip! take me out at once.”
DOROTHY EASTON’S “THE GOLDEN BIRD”[15]
_By John Galsworthy_
The sketch is, I take it, commonly supposed to be the easiest form that
a writer can use, and the bad sketch probably is. The good sketch, on
the other hand, is about the hardest, for there is no time to go wrong,
or, rather, in which to recover if one does go wrong. Moreover, it
demands a very faithful objectivity, and a rare sensitiveness of touch.
The good sketcher does not bite off more than he or she can chew, does
not waste a word, and renders into writing that alone which is
significant. To catch the flying values of life, and convey them to
other minds and hearts in a few pages of picture may seem easy to the
lay reader, but is, I do assure him, mortal hard.
The sketches in this, the first book of a young writer, are so really
good, that they should require no preliminary puff. But the fact is that
the reading public in America and England get so few good sketches,
indeed so few volumes of sketches at all, that even the best work of
this kind has unfairly little chance.
If I know anything and I am not alone in my opinion, the writer of this
book has a sympathetic apprehension of life, and a perfection in
rendering it which is altogether out of the common. Those readers who
want not snapshots but little pictures, entirely without preciosity,
extraordinarily sensitive and faithful, and never dull, because they
have real meaning and truth, will appreciate this volume.
Those who don’t know the southern countryside of England, and the
simpler people thereof, will make a real acquaintanceship with it
through some of these unpretentious pages. And the French sketches,
especially, by their true flavour of French life, guarantee the writer’s
possession of that spiritual insight without which art is nothing worth.
I will beat the drum no more; for if the reader likes not this mental
fare, no noise of mine will make him.
—_Foreword to “The Golden Bird.”_
WAR AND THE SMALL NATIONS[16]
_By Kahlil Gibran_
Once, high above a pasture, where a sheep and a lamb were grazing, an
eagle was circling and gazing hungrily down upon the lamb. And as he was
about to descend and seize his prey, another eagle appeared and hovered
above the sheep and her young with the same hungry intent. Then the two
rivals began to fight, filling the sky with their fierce cries.
The sheep looked up and was much astonished. She turned to the lamb and
said,
“How strange, my child, that these two noble birds should attack one
another. Is not the vast sky large enough for both of them? Pray, my
little one, pray in your heart that God may make peace between your
winged brothers.”
And the lamb prayed in his heart.
[Illustration: Kahlil Gibran]
A FIRST REVIEW[17]
_By Robert Graves_
_Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys
Are here discreetly blent;
Admire, you ladies, read, you boys,
My Country Sentiment._
But Kate says, “Cut that anger and fear,
True love’s the stuff we need!
With laughing children and the running deer,
That makes a book indeed.”
Then Tom, a hard and bloody chap,
Though much beloved by me,
“Robert, have done with nursery pap,
Write like a man,” says he.
_Hate and Fear are not wanted here,
Nor Toys nor Country Lovers,
Everything they took from my new poem book
But the flyleaf and the covers._
JOE WARD[18]
_By E. W. Howe_
I was lately making a little automobile journey and met Joe Ward, a
high-priced man. We were passing through the town of Centerville and
stopped a moment to inquire the road to Fairview.
It happened that the man we addressed was Joe Ward himself, who said he
was just about to leave for Fairview and would show us the way if we
would give him a ride.
So he sat beside the driver and turned round and told us about the farms
we passed. He knew every farmer on the way; how his crops were turning
out and many other interesting facts, for this man was a clerk in the
New York Store in Centerville and had been so employed nine years.
When we came to a crossroad he would say “Straight ahead” or “Turn to
the right” to the driver and then tell us something of interest about
his work in the New York Store. It seemed he was a very popular clerk;
so popular, indeed, that the proprietor of the Boston Store, the
principal opposition, had long wanted him.
“But I said to him frankly,” Joe Ward explained, “if you get me you’ll
have to pay a man’s wages. I’m no cheap skate. I was born over on Cow
Creek and no citizen of that neighbourhood would think of going to
Centerville without trading with me.”
“Here,” I thought, “is a very high-priced man.”
[Illustration: Robert Graves]
[Illustration: J C Squire]
I began wondering how much would induce him to leave the New York Store.
And he proceeded to tell us—he couldn’t keep a secret.
“Besides the pull I have on Cow Creek, my grandfather is the leading
farmer out the Fairview way and everybody knows I control the best trade
round Fairview. So I says to Persinger, of the Boston Store: ‘If you get
me you’ll get the best, but you’ll have to pay me. I’m human like
everybody else; if you pay me I’ll work for you and do you all the good
I can, but we might as well understand each other first as last—if you
get me you’ll have to pay me. I’m no amateur. If you get me you’ll have
to pay me twelve dollars a week.’”
But it developed before we reached the next town that Persinger, of the
opposition store, wouldn’t stand an innovation like that, so Joe Ward
got out at Fairview and said he was going back next morning to resume
his work at the New York Store.
DOC ROBINSON
I have noticed that the people take as much delight in praising a
worthless man as they take in abusing a respectable one. People say Doc
Robinson, the town drunkard, was once a noted surgeon in London; that he
was engaged to a beautiful young lady of New York, but gave her up
because his parents objected, and thus went to the dogs; that he has the
best education of any man in town; that he is a man of fine intellect;
that he is a younger son of a titled family in England, and that when
his brother dies he will become a duke.
I looked Doc up and discovered that the only notable thing that ever
happened in his life was that he attended a veterinary college in
Canada, where he was born on a farm and where he lived until he came to
this country to make horse liniment, the basis of which, alcohol, he
sweetened and drank, and thus became a drunkard.
JOHN DAVIS
A travelling man yesterday gave John Davis, the grocer, a twenty-cent
cigar. John Davis has been selling cigars at his grocery store and
smoking twenty years—and a good cigar made him sick.
CONCERNING “A LITTLE BOY LOST”
_A Letter from W. H. Hudson_[19]
_Dear Mr. Knopf_:
Your request for a Foreword to insert in the American reprint of the
little book worries me. A critic on this side has said that my Prefaces
to reprints of my earlier works are of the nature of parting kicks, and
I have no desire just now to kick this poor innocent. That evil-tempered
old woman, Mother Nature, in one of her worst tantrums, has been
inflicting so many cuffs and blows on me that she has left me no energy
or disposition to kick anything—even myself.
The trouble is that I know so little about it. Did I write this book?
What then made me do it?
In reading a volume of Fors Clavigera I once came upon a passage which
sounded well but left me in a mist, and it relieved me to find a
footnote to it in which the author says: “This passage was written many
years ago and what I was thinking about at the time has quite escaped my
memory. At all events, though I let it stand, I can find no meaning in
it now.”
Little men may admire but must not try to imitate these gestures of the
giants. And as a result of a little quiet thinking it over I seem able
to recover the idea I had in my mind when I composed this child’s story
and found a title for it in Blake. Something too of the semi-wild spirit
of the child hero in the lines:
“Naught loves another as itself ...
And, father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little birds
That pick up crumbs about the door.”
There nature is, after picking up the crumbs to fly away.