Produced by Susan Skinner, Peter Vachuska, Chuck Greif and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
WAITING FOR
DAYLIGHT
* * * * *
_BOOKS BY H. M. TOMLINSON_
THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE
OLD JUNK
LONDON RIVER
WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT
* * * * *
THE FIRST PRINTING OF THIS BOOK CONSISTS
OF TWENTY-ONE HUNDRED COPIES,
OF WHICH TWO THOUSAND ARE FOR SALE.
THIS IS NUMBER
669
* * * * *
WAITING FOR
DAYLIGHT
By H. M. TOMLINSON
NEW YORK . ALFRED . A . KNOPF . MCMXXII
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.
_Published May, 1922_
_Set up, electrotyped and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y._
_Paper furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y._
_Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y._
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
* * * * *
To
MY WIFE
* * * * *
CONTENTS
I. IN YPRES 3
II. A RAID NIGHT 12
III. ISLANDS 24
IV. TRAVEL BOOKS 28
V. SIGNS OF SPRING 31
VI. PROSE WRITING 36
VII. THE MODERN MIND 40
VIII. MAGAZINES 44
IX. THE MARNE 49
X. CARLYLE 56
XI. HOLIDAY READING 58
XII. AN AUTUMN MORNING 65
XIII. NEWS FROM THE FRONT 74
XIV. AUTHORS AND SOLDIERS 80
XV. WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT 88
XVI. THE NOBODIES 96
XVII. BOOKWORMS 112
XVIII. SAILOR LANGUAGE 115
XIX. ILLUSIONS 120
XX. FIGURE-HEADS 127
XXI. ECONOMICS 133
XXII. OLD SUNLIGHT 135
XXIII. RUSKIN 140
XXIV. THE REWARD OF VIRTUE 147
XXV. GREAT STATESMEN 149
XXVI. JOY 152
XXVII. THE REAL THING 162
XXVIII. LITERARY CRITICS 170
XXIX. THE SOUTH DOWNS 175
XXX. KIPLING 182
XXXI. A DEVON ESTUARY 188
XXXII. BARBELLION 194
XXXIII. BREAKING THE SPELL 200
WAITING FOR
DAYLIGHT
I. In Ypres
JULY, 1915. My mouth does not get so dry as once it did, I notice, when
walking in from Suicide Corner to the Cloth Hall. There I was this summer
day, in Ypres again, in a silence like a threat, amid ruins which might
have been in Central Asia, and I, the last man on earth, contemplating
them. There was something bumping somewhere, but it was not in Ypres, and
no notice is taken in Flanders of what does not bump near you. So I sat
on the disrupted pedestal of a forgotten building and smoked, and
wondered why I was in the city of Ypres, and why there was a war, and why
I was a fool.
It was a lovely day, and looking up at the sky over what used to be a
school dedicated to the gentle Jesus, which is just by the place where
one of the seventeen-inchers has blown a forty-foot hole, I saw a little
round cloud shape in the blue, and then another, and then a cluster of
them; the kind of soft little cloudlets on which Renaissance cherubs
rest their chubby elbows and with fat faces inclined on their hands
consider mortals from cemetery monuments. Then dull concussions arrived
from heaven, and right overhead I made out two German 'planes. A
shell-case banged the _pave_ and went on to make a white scar on a wall.
Some invisible things were whizzing about. One's own shrapnel can be
tactless.
There was a cellar near and I got into it, and while the intruders were
overhead I smoked and gazed at the contents of the cellar--the wreckage
of a bicycle, a child's chemise, one old boot, a jam-pot, and a dead cat.
Owing to an unsatisfactory smell of many things I climbed out as soon as
possible and sat on the pedestal again.
A figure in khaki came straight at me across the Square, its boots
sounding like the deliberate approach of Fate in solitude. It stopped and
saluted, and said: "I shouldn't stay 'ere, sir. They gen'ally begin about
now. Sure to drop some 'ere."
At that moment a mournful cry went over us, followed by a crash in
Sinister Street. My way home! Some masonry fell in sympathy from the
Cloth Hall.
"Better come with me till it blows over, sir. I've got a dug-out near."
We turned off into a part of the city unknown to me. There were some
unsettling noises, worse, no doubt, because of the echoes behind us; but
it is not dignified to hurry when one looks like an officer. One ought to
fill a pipe. I did so, and stopped to light it. I paused while drawing at
it, checked by the splitting open of the earth in the first turning to
the right and the second to the left, or thereabouts.
"That's a big 'un, sir," said my soldier, taking half a cigarette from
behind his ear and a light from my match; we then resumed our little
promenade. By an old motor 'bus having boards for windows, and War Office
neuter for its colour, but bearing for memory's sake on its brow the
legend "Liverpool Street," my soldier hurried slightly, and was then
swallowed up. I was alone. While looking about for possible openings I
heard his voice under the road, and then saw a dark cavity, low in a
broken wall, and crawled in. Feeling my way by knocking on the dark with
my forehead and my shins, I descended to a lower smell of graves which
was hollowed by a lighted candle in a bottle. And there was the soldier,
who provided me with an empty box, and himself with another, and we had
the candle between us. On the table were some official documents under a
shell-nose, and a tin of condensed milk suffering from shock. Pictures of
partly clad ladies began to appear on the walls through the gloom. Now
and then the cellar trembled.
"Where's that old 'bus come from?" I asked.
"Ah! The pore old bitch, sir," said the soldier sadly.
"Yes, of course, but what's the matter with her?"
"She's done in, sir. But she's done her bit, she has," said my soldier,
changing the crossing of his legs. "Ah! little did she think when I used
to take 'er acrorse Ludget Circus what a 'ell of a time I'd 'ave to give
'er some day. She's a good ole thing. She's done 'er bit. She won't see
Liverpool Street no more. If medals wasn't so cheap she ought to 'ave
one, she ought."
The cellar had a fit of the palsy, and the candle-light shuddered and
flattened.
"The ruddy swine are ruddy wild to-day. Suthin's upset 'em. 'Ow long will
this ruddy war last, sir?" asked the soldier, slightly plaintive.
"I know," I said. "It's filthy. But what about your old 'bus?"
"Ah! what about 'er. She ain't 'arf 'ad a time. She's seen enough war to
make a general want to go home and shell _peas_. What she knows about it
would make them clever fellers in London who reckon they know all about
it turn green if they heard a door slam. Learned it all in one jolly old
day, too. Learned it sudden, like you gen'ally learn things you don't
forget. And I reckon I 'adn't anything to find out, either, not after
Antwerp. Don't tell me, sir, war teaches you a lot. It only shows fools
what they didn't know but might 'ave guessed.
"You know Poperinghe? Well, my trip was between there an' Wipers,
gen'ally. The stones on the road was enough to make 'er shed nuts and
bolts by the pint. But it was a quiet journey, take it all round, and
after a cup o' tea at Wipers I used to roll home to the park. It was
easier than the Putney route. Wipers was full of civilians. Shops all
open. Estaminets and nice young things. I used to like war better than a
school-boy likes Sat'd'y afternoons. It wasn't work and it wasn't play.
And there was no law you couldn't break if you 'ad sense enough to come
to attention smart and answer quick. Yes, sir.
"I knew so little about war then that I'm sorry I never tried to be a
military expert. But my education was neglected. I can only write picture
postcards. It's a pity. Well, one day it wasn't like that. It dropped on
Wipers, and it wasn't like that. It was bloody different. I wasn't
frightened, but my little inside was.
"First thing was the gassed soldiers coming through. Their faces were
green and blue, and their uniform a funny colour. I didn't know what was
the matter with 'em, and that put the wind up, for I didn't want to look
like that. We could hear a gaudy rumpus in the Salient. The civvies were
frightened, but they stuck to their homes. Nothing was happening there
then, and while nothing is happening it's hard to believe it's going to.
After seeing a Zouave crawl by with his tongue hanging out, and his face
the colour of a mottled cucumber, I said good-bye to the little girl
where I was. It was time to see about it.
"And fact is, I didn't 'ave much time to think about it, what with
gettin' men out and gettin' reinforcements in. Trip after trip.
"But I shall never have a night again like that one. Believe me, it was
a howler. I steered the old 'bus, but it was done right by accident. It
was certainly touch and go. I shouldn't 'ave thought a country town, even
in war, could look like Wipers did that night.
"It was gettin' dark on my last trip, and we barged into all the world
gettin' out. And the guns and reinforcements were comin' up behind me.
There's no other road out or in, as you know. I forgot to tell you that
night comin' on didn't matter much, because the place was alight. The sky
was full of shrapnel, and the high-explosives were falling in the houses
on fire, and spreading the red stuff like fireworks. The gun ahead of me
went over a child, but only its mother and me saw that, and a house in
flames ahead of the gun got a shell inside it, and fell on the crowd that
was mixed up with the army traffic.
"When I got to a side turning I 'opped off to see how my little lady was
getting on. A shell had got 'er estaminet. The curtains were flying in
little flames through the place where the windows used to be. Inside, the
counter was upside down, and she was laying with glass and bottles on the
floor. I couldn't do anything for her. And further up the street my
headquarters was a heap of bricks, and the houses on both sides of it on
fire. No good looking there for any more orders.
"Being left to myself, I began to take notice. While you're on the job
you just do it, and don't see much of anything else except out of the
corner of the eye. I've never 'eard such a row--shells bursting, houses
falling, and the place was foggy with smoke, and men you couldn't see
were shouting, and the women and children, wherever they were, turning
you cold to hear 'em.
"It was like the end of the world. Time for me to 'op it. I backed the
old 'bus and turned 'er, and started off--shells in front and behind and
overhead, and, thinks I, next time you're bound to get caught in this
shower. Then I found my officer. 'E was smoking a cigarette, and 'e told
me my job. 'E gave me my cargo. I just 'ad to take 'em out and dump 'em.
"'Where shall I take 'em, sir?'
"'Take 'em out of this,' says he. 'Take 'em anywhere, take 'em where you
like, Jones, take 'em to hell, but take 'em away,' says he.
"So I loaded up. Wounded Tommies, gassed Arabs, some women and children,
and a few lunatics, genuine cock-eyed loonies from the asylum. The
shells chased us out. One biffed us over on to the two rear wheels, but
we dropped back on four on the top speed. Several times I bumped over
soft things in the road and felt rather sick. We got out o' the town with
the shrapnel a bit in front all the way. Then the old 'bus jibbed for a
bit. Every time a shell burst near us the lunatics screamed and laughed
and clapped their hands, and trod on the wounded, but I got 'er goin'
again. I got 'er to Poperinghe. Two soldiers died on the way, and a
lunatic had fallen out somewhere, and a baby was born in the 'bus; and me
with no conductor and no midwife.
"I met our chaplain and says he: 'Jones, you want a drink. Come with me
and have a Scotch.' That was a good drink. I 'ad the best part of 'arf a
bottle without water, and it done me no 'arm. Next morning I found I'd
put in the night on the parson's bed in me boots, and 'e was asleep on
the floor."
II. A Raid Night
SEPTEMBER 17, 1915. I had crossed from France to Fleet Street, and was
thankful at first to have about me the things I had proved, with their
suggestion of intimacy, their look of security; but I found the once
familiar editorial rooms of that daily paper a little more than
estranged. I thought them worse, if anything, than Ypres. Ypres is within
the region where, when soldiers enter it, they abandon hope, because they
have become sane at last, and their minds have a temperature a little
below normal. In Ypres, whatever may have been their heroic and exalted
dreams, they awake, see the world is mad, and surrender to the doom from
which they know a world bereft will give them no reprieve.
There was a way in which the office of that daily paper was familiar. I
had not expected it, and it came with a shock. Not only the compulsion,
but the bewildering inconsequence of war was suggested by its activities.
Reason was not there. It was ruled by a blind and fixed idea. The
glaring artificial light, the headlong haste of the telegraph
instruments, the wild litter on the floor, the rapt attention of the men
scanning the news, their abrupt movements and speed when they had to
cross the room, still with their gaze fixed, their expression that of
those who dreaded something worse to happen; the suggestion of tension,
as though the Last Trump were expected at any moment, filled me with
vague alarm. The only place where that incipient panic is not usual is
the front line, because there the enemy is within hail, and is known to
be another unlucky fool. But I allayed my anxiety. I leaned over one of
the still figures and scanned the fateful document which had given its
reader the aspect of one who was staring at what the Moving Finger had
done. Its message was no more than the excited whisper of a witness who
had just left a keyhole. But I realized in that moment of surprise that
this office was an essential feature of the War; without it, the War
might become Peace. It provoked the emotions which assembled civilians in
ecstatic support of the sacrifices, just as the staff of a corps
headquarters, at some comfortable leagues behind the trenches, maintains
its fighting men in the place where gas and shells tend to engender
common sense and irresolution.
I left the glare of that office, its heat and half-hysterical activity,
and went into the coolness and quiet of the darkened street, and there
the dread left me that it could be a duty of mine to keep hot pace with
patriots in full stampede. The stars were wonderful. It is such a
tranquillizing surprise to discover there are stars over London. Until
this War, when the street illuminations were doused, we never knew it. It
strengthens one's faith to discover the Pleiades over London; it is not
true that their delicate glimmer has been put out by the remarkable
incandescent energy of our power stations. There they are still. As I
crossed London Bridge the City was as silent as though it had come to the
end of its days, and the shapes I could just make out under the stars
were no more substantial than the shadows of its past. Even the Thames
was a noiseless ghost. London at night gave me the illusion that I was
really hidden from the monstrous trouble of Europe, and, at least for one
sleep, had got out of the War. I felt that my suburban street, secluded
in trees and unimportance, was as remote from the evil I knew of as
though it were in Alaska. When I came to that street I could not see my
neighbours' homes. It was with some doubt that I found my own. And there,
with three hours to go to midnight, and a book, and some circumstances
that certainly had not changed, I had retired thankfully into a fragment
of that world I had feared we had completely lost.
"What a strange moaning the birds in the shrubbery are making!" my
companion said once. I listened to it, and thought it was strange. There
was a long silence, and then she looked up sharply. "What's that?" she
asked. "Listen!"
I listened. My hearing is not good.
"Nothing!" I assured her.
"There it is again." She put down her book with decision, and rose, I
thought, in some alarm.
"Trains," I suggested. "The gas bubbling. The dog next door. Your
imagination." Then I listened to the dogs. It was curious, but they all
seemed awake and excited.
"What is the noise like?" I asked, surrendering my book on the antiquity
of man.
She twisted her mouth in a comical way most seriously, and tried to mimic
a deep and solemn note.
"Guns," I said to myself, and went to the front door.
Beyond the vague opposite shadows of some elms lights twinkled in the
sky, incontinent sparks, as though glow lamps on an invisible pattern of
wires were being switched on and off by an idle child. That was shrapnel.
I walked along the empty street a little to get a view between and beyond
the villas. I turned to say something to my companion, and saw then my
silent neighbours, shadowy groups about me, as though they had not
approached but had materialized where they stood. We watched those
infernal sparks. A shadow lit its pipe and offered me its match. I heard
the guns easily enough now, but they were miles away.
A slender finger of brilliant light moved slowly across the sky, checked,
and remained pointing, firmly accusatory, at something it had found in
the heavens. A Zeppelin!
There it was, at first a wraith, a suggestion on the point of vanishing,
and then illuminated and embodied, a celestial maggot stuck to the round
of a cloud like a caterpillar to the edge of a leaf. We gazed at it
silently, I cannot say for how long. The beam of light might have pinned
the bright larva to the sky for the inspection of interested Londoners.
Then somebody spoke. "I think it is coming our way."
I thought so too. I went indoors, calling out to the boy as I passed his
room upstairs, and went to where the girls were asleep. Three miles,
three minutes! It appears to be harder to waken children when a Zeppelin
is coming your way. I got the elder girl awake, lifted her, and sat her
on the bed, for she had become heavier, I noticed. Then I put her small
sister over my shoulder, as limp and indifferent as a half-filled bag. By
this time the elder one had snuggled into the foot of her bed, resigned
to that place if the other end were disputed, and was asleep again. I
think I became annoyed, and spoke sharply. We were in a hurry. The boy
was waiting for us at the top of the stairs.
"What's up?" he asked with merry interest, hoisting his slacks.
"Come on down," I said.
We went into a central room, put coats round them, answering eager and
innocent questions with inconsequence, had the cellar door and a light
ready, and then went out to inspect affairs. There were more searchlights
at work. Bright diagonals made a living network on the overhead dark. It
was remarkable that those rigid beams should not rest on the roof of
night, but that their ends should glide noiselessly about the invisible
dome. The nearest of them was followed, when in the zenith, by a faint
oval of light. Sometimes it discovered and broke on delicate films of
high fair-weather clouds. The shells were still twinkling brilliantly,
and the guns were making a rhythmless baying in the distance, like a
number of alert and indignant hounds. But the Zeppelin had gone. The
firing diminished and stopped.
They went to bed again, and as I had become acutely depressed, and the
book now had no value, I turned in myself, assuring everyone, with the
usual confidence of the military expert, that the affair was over for the
night. But once in bed I found I could see there only the progress
humanity had made in its movement heavenwards. That is the way with us;
never to be concerned with the newest clever trick of our enterprising
fellow-men till a sudden turn of affairs shows us, by the immediate
threat to our own existence, that that cleverness has added to the peril
of civilized society, whose house has been built on the verge of the pit.
War now would be not only between soldiers. In future wars the place of
honour would be occupied by the infants, in their cradles. For war is not
murder. Starving children is war, and it is not murder. What treacherous
lying is all the heroic poetry of battle! Men will now creep up after
dark, ambushed in safety behind the celestial curtains, and drop bombs on
sleepers beneath for the greater glory of some fine figment or other. It
filled me, not with wrath at the work of Kaisers and Kings, for we know
what is possible with them, but with dismay at the discovery that one's
fellows are so docile and credulous that they will obey any order,
however abominable. The very heavens had been fouled by this obscene and
pallid worm, crawling over those eternal verities to which eyes had been
lifted for light when night and trouble were over dark. God was dethroned
by science. One looked startled at humanity, seeing not the accustomed
countenance, but, for a moment, glimpsing instead the baleful lidless
stare of the evil of the slime, the unmentionable of a nightmare....
A deafening crash brought us out of bed in one movement. I must have been
dozing. Someone cried, "My children!" Another rending uproar interrupted
my effort to shepherd the flock to a lower floor. There was a raucous
avalanche of glass. We muddled down somehow--I forget how. I could not
find the matches. Then in the dark we lost the youngest for some eternal
seconds while yet another explosion shook the house. We got to the
cellar stairs, and at last there they all were, their backs to the coals,
sitting on lumber.
A candle was on the floor. There were more explosions, somewhat muffled.
The candle-flame showed a little tremulous excitement, as if it were one
of the party. It reached upwards curiously in a long intent flame, and
then shrank flat with what it had learned. We were accompanied by
grotesque shadows. They stood about us on the white and unfamiliar walls.
We waited. Even the shadows seemed to listen with us; they hardly moved,
except when the candle-flame was nervous. Then the shadows wavered
slightly. We waited. I caught the boy's eye, and winked. He winked back.
The youngest, still with sleepy eyes, was trembling, though not with
cold, and this her sister noticed, and put her arms about her. His mother
had her hand on her boy's shoulder.
There was no more noise outside. It was time, perhaps, to go up to see
what had happened. I put a raincoat over my pyjamas, and went into the
street. Some of my neighbours, who were special constables, hurried by.
The enigmatic night, for a time, for five minutes, or five seconds (I do
not know how long it was), was remarkably still and usual. It might have
been pretending that we were all mistaken. It was as though we had been
merely dreaming our recent excitements. Then, across a field, a villa
began to blaze. Perhaps it had been stunned till then, and had suddenly
jumped into a panic of flames. It was wholly involved in one roll of fire
and smoke, a sudden furnace so consuming that, when it as suddenly
ceased, giving one or two dying spasms, I had but an impression of flames
rolling out of windows and doors to persuade me that what I had seen was
real. The night engulfed what may have been an illusion, for till then I
had never noticed a house at that point.
Whispers began to pass of tragedies that were incredible in their
incidence and craziness. Three children were dead in the rubble of one
near villa. The ambulance that was passing was taking their father to the
hospital. A woman had been blown from her bed into the street. She was
unhurt, but she was insane. A long row of humbler dwellings, over which
the dust was still hanging in a faint mist, had been demolished, and one
could only hope the stories about that place were far from true. We were
turned away when we would have assisted; all the help that was wanted
was there. A stranger offered me his tobacco pouch, and it was then I
found my rainproof was a lady's, and therefore had no pipe in its
pocket.
The sky was suspect, and we watched it, but saw only vacuity till one
long beam shot into it, searching slowly and deliberately the whole
mysterious ceiling, yet hesitating sometimes, and going back on its path
as though intelligently suspicious of a matter which it had passed over
too quickly. It peered into the immense caverns of a cloud to which it
had returned, illuminating to us unsuspected and horrifying possibilities
of hiding-places above us. We expected to see the discovered enemy boldly
emerge then. Nothing came out. Other beams by now had joined the pioneer,
and the night became bewildering with a dazzling mesh of light. Shells
joined the wandering beams, those sparks of orange and red. A world of
fantastic chimney-pots and black rounds of trees leaped into being
between us and the sudden expansion of a fan of yellow flame. A bomb! We
just felt, but hardly heard, the shock of it. A furious succession of
such bursts of light followed, a convulsive opening and shutting of
night. We saw that when midnight is cleft asunder it has a fiery inside.
The eruptions ceased. Idle and questioning, not knowing we had heard the
last gun and bomb of the affair, a little stunned by the maniacal
rapidity and violence of this attack, we found ourselves gazing at the
familiar and shadowy peace of our suburb as we have always known it. It
had returned to that aspect. But something had gone from it for ever. It
was not, and never could be again, as once we had known it. The security
of our own place had been based on the goodwill or indifference of our
fellow-creatures everywhere. To-night, over that obscure and unimportant
street, we had seen a celestial portent illuminate briefly a little of
the future of mankind.
III. Islands
JANUARY 5, 1918. The editor of the _Hibbert Journal_ betrays a secret and
lawless passion for islands. They must be small sanctuaries, of course,
far and isolated; for he shows quite rightly that places like the British
Isles are not islands in any just and poetic sense. Our kingdom is earth,
sour and worm-riddled earth, with all its aboriginal lustre trampled out.
By islands he means those surprising landfalls, Kerguelen, the Antarctic
Shetlands, Timor, Amboyna, the Carolines, the Marquesas, and the
Galapagos. An island with a splendid name, which I am sure he would have
mentioned had he thought of it, is Fernando de Noronha.
There must be a fair number of people to-day who cherish that ridiculous
dream of an oceanic solitude. We remember that whenever a storyteller
wishes to make enchantment seem thoroughly genuine, he begins upon an
island. One might say, if in a hurry, that Defoe began it, but in leisure
recall the fearful spell of islands in the Greek legends. It is easily
understood. If you have watched at sea an island shape, and pass,
forlorn in the waste, apparently lifeless, and with no movement to be
seen but the silent fountains of the combers, then you know where the
Sirens were born, and why awful shapes grew in the minds of the simple
Greeks out of the wonders in Crete devised by the wise and mysterious
Minoans, who took yearly the tribute of Greek youth--youth which never
returned to tell.
How easily the picture of one's first island in foreign seas comes back!
I had not expected mine, and was surprised one morning, when
eastward-bound in the Mediterranean, to see a pallid mass of rock two
miles to port, when I had imagined I knew the charts of that sea well
enough. It was a frail ghost of land on that hard blue plain, and had a
light of its own; but it looked arid and forbidding, a place of seamen's
bones. Turning quickly to the mate I asked for its name. "Alboran," he
said, very quietly, without looking at it, as though keeping something
back. He said no more. But while that strange glimmer was on the sea I
watched it; I have learned nothing since of Alboran; and so the memory of
that brief sight of a strange rock is as though once I had blundered on a
dreadful secret which the men who knew it preferred to keep.
But there is a West Indian Island which for me is the best in the seas,
because the memory of it is but a reflection of my last glimpse of the
tropics. That landfall in the Spanish Main was as soundless as a dream.
It was but an apparition of land. It might have been no more than an
unusually vivid recollection of a desire which had once stirred the
imagination of a boy. Looking at it, I felt sceptical, quite unprepared
to believe that what once was a dream could be coming true by any chance
of my drift through the years. Yet there it remained, right in our
course, on a floor of malachite which had stains of orange drift-weed. It
could have been a mirage. It appeared diaphanous, something so frail that
a wind could have stirred it. Did it belong to this earth? It grew
higher, and the waves could be seen exploding against its lower rocks. It
_was_ a dream come true. Yet even now, as I shall not have that landfall
again, I have a doubt that waters could be of the colours which were
radiant about that island, that rocks could be of rose and white, that
trees could be so green and aromatic, and light--except of the
Hesperides, which are lost--so like the exhilarating life and breath of
the prime. A doubt indeed! For every whisper one hears to-day deepens the
loom of a gigantic German attack.
IV. Travel Books
JANUARY 19, 1918. What long hours at night we wait for sleep! Sleep will
not come. A friend, who grows more like a sallow congestion of scorn than
a comfortable companion, warned me yesterday, when I spoke of the end of
the War, that it might have no end. He said that we could not escape our
fate. Our star, I gathered, was to receive a celestial spring-cleaning.
There would be bonfires of litter. We had become impeded with the rubbish
of centuries of wise and experienced statecraft, and we had hardly more
than begun to get rid of it. A renaissance with a vengeance! Youth was in
revolt against the aged and the dead.
But what an idea to look at when waiting for sleep! I turned over with
another sigh, and recalled that William James has advised us that a
deleterious thought may be exorcised by willing another that is sunny. I
tried to command a more enjoyable picture for eyes that were closed but
intent. Yet you never know where the most promising image will transport
you through some inconsequential association. I recalled a pleasing day
in the Eastern Mediterranean, and that brought _Eothen_ into my mind, by
chance. And instantly, instead of seeing Sfax in Tunis, I was looking
down from a window on a black-edged day of rain, watching an unending
procession of moribund figures jolting over the _pave_ of a street in
Flanders, in every kind of conveyance, from the Yser. There I was, back
at the War, at two in the morning, and all because I had read _Eothen_
desperately in odd moments while waiting for the signs which would warn
me that the enemy was about to enter that village.
No escape yet! I could hear the old clock slowly making its way towards
another day. I heard a belated wayfarer going home, his feet muffled in
snow. Anyhow, I never had much of an opinion of _Eothen_, a book over
which the cymbals have been banged too loudly. Compare it, as a travel
book, for substance and style, with _A Week on the Concord_; though that
is a silly thing to ask, if no sillier than literary criticism usually
is. But though all the lists the critics make of our best travel books
invariably give Kinglake's a principal place, I have not once seen
Thoreau's narrative included.
What is the test for such a book? I should ask it to be a trustworthy
confidence of a kingdom where the marches may be foreign to our cheap and
usual experience, though familiar enough to our dreams. It may not offer,
but it must promise that Golden City which drew Raleigh to the Orinoco,
Thoreau to Walden Pond, Doughty to Arabia, Livingstone to Tanganyika, and
Hudson to the Arctic. The fountain of life is there. We hope to come to
our own.
We never notice whether that country has good corn-land, or whether it is
rich enough in minerals to arouse an interest in its future. But its
prospects are lovely and of good report. It is always a surprise to find
the earth can look so good, and behave so handsomely, on the quiet, to a
vagabond traveller like Thoreau, who has no valid excuse for not being at
honest work, as though it reserved its finest mornings to show to
favoured children when really good people are not about. The Sphinx has a
secret only for those who do not see her wink.
V. Signs of Spring
FEBRUARY 16, 1918. A catalogue of second-hand books was sent to me
yesterday. A raid warning, news of the destruction of Parliament House,
or a whisper of the authentic ascent of Mr. Lloyd George in a fiery
chariot and of the flight of God, would do no more to us than another
kick does to the dead. But that catalogue had to be handled to be
believed. It was an incredible survival from the days before the light
went out. Those minor gratifications have gone. I had even forgotten they
were ever ours. Sometimes now one wakes to a morning when the window is a
golden square, a fine greeting to a good earth, and the whistle of a
starling in the apple tree just outside is as tenuous as a thread of
silver; the smell of coffee brings one up blithe as a boy about to begin
play again. Yet something we feel to be wrong--a foggy memory of an ugly
dream--ah, yes; the War, the War. The damned remembrance of things as
they are drops its pall. The morning paper, too, I see, has the
information that our men are again cheerfully waiting for the spring
offensive.
Cheerfully! But, of course, the editor knows. And the _spring_ offensive!
I have seen that kind of vernal gladness. What an advent! When you find
the first blue egg in the shrubbery behind your billet in Artois; when
the G. S. O. 2 comes into the mess with a violet in his fingers, and
shows it to every doubter, then you know the time has come for the
testing of the gas cylinders, and you wonder whether this is the last
time you will be noteworthy because you had the earliest news of the
chiffchaff. The spring offensive! Guns are now converging by leagues of
roads to a new part of the Front, to try to do there what they failed to
do elsewhere. The men, as all important editors know, are happily waiting
for the great brutes to begin bellowing again in infernal concert. So
there accumulates at breakfast in these spring days all that evidence
which makes one proud to share with one's fellows the divine gift of
reason, instead of a blind and miserable animal instinct. No wonder the
cuckoo has a merry note!
That is the way we idle and hapless civilians now begin our day. I look
up to the sky, and wonder whether this inopportune spell of fine weather
means that some London children will be killed in bed to-night. As I pass
the queues of women who have been waiting for hours for potatoes, and
probably won't get any, though the earth doubtless is still abundant, if
we had but the sense and opportunity to try it, I cannot help wondering
whether it would not have been better for us to have refused the gift of
reason from which could be devised the edifying wonders of civilization,
and have remained in the treetops instead, so ignorant that we were
unaware we were lucky.
Another grave statement by a great statesman, and, when we are fortunate,
a field postcard, are to-day our full literary deserts. Is it surprising
that catalogues of old books do not come our way? We do not deserve them.
Hope faintly revives, when the postman cheers us with an overdue field
postcard, of a morning to dawn when the abstraction we name the "average
intelligence" and the "great heart of the public" and the "herd mind,"
will not only regret that it made a ruinous fool of itself the night
before, but solemnly resolve to end all disruptive and dirty habits. This
wild hope was born in me of such a postcard (all right so far!)
coinciding with the arrival of the list of old books. It seemed at that
moment that things could be different and better. Then, when closing the
front door that morning--very gently--not slamming it on the run--I saw
something else. The door noiselessly closed, an easy launch into a
tranquil day, as though I had come down through the night with the
natural process of the hours, and so had commenced the day at the right
moment, I noticed the twig of a lilac bush had intruded into the porch.
It directly indicated me with a black finger. What did it want? I looked
intently, sure that an omen was here. Aha! So that was it! The twig was
showing me that it had a green nail.
Four young officers of the Flying Corps passed me, going ahead briskly,
and I thought that an elm under which they walked had kindling in it a
suggestion of coloured light. But it was too delicate to be more than a
hope. It must be confessed that the men who fight in the air were more
distinct than that light. Then the four officers parted, two to either
side, when marching past another figure. They went beyond it swiftly,
taking no notice of it, turned into the future, and vanished. I drew near
the bowed and leisurely being, which had a spade over its shoulder.
It stopped to light a pipe, and I caught up to it. The edge of the spade
was like silver with use, and the big hand which grasped it was brown
with dry earth. The lean neck of this figure was tinctured with many
summers, and cross-hatched by the weather and mature maleness. I caught a
smell of newly-turned earth. The figure moved as though time were
nothing. It turned its face as I drew level, and said it was a good
morning. The morning was better than good; and somehow this object in an
old hat and clothes as rough as bark, with a face which probably had the
same expression when William was momentous at Hastings, and when Pitt
solemnly ordered the map of Europe to be rolled up, was in accord with
the light in the elm, and the superior and convincing insolence of the
blackbirds. They all suggested the tantalizing idea that solid ground is
near us, in this unreasonable world of anxious change, if only we had
intelligence enough to know where to look for it.
VI. Prose Writing
MARCH 16, 1918. A critic has been mourning because good prose is not
being written to-day. This surprised him, and he asked why it was that
when poetry, which he pictured as "primroses and violets," found
abundance of nourishment even in the unlikely compost these latter days
provide, yet prose, which he saw as "cabbages and potatoes," made but
miserable growth.
It is hard to explain it, for I must own that the image of the potato
confuses me. One has seen modern verse which was, florally, very
spud-like. If those potatoes were meant for violets then they suggest
more than anything else a simple penny guide-book for their gardeners.
Here we see at least the danger of using flowers of speech, when violets
and onions get muddled in the same posy, and how ill botany is likely to
serve the writer who flies heedlessly to it for literary symbols. Figures
of speech are pregnant with possibilities (I myself had better be very
careful here), and those likely to show most distress over their progeny
are the unlucky fathers. For the first thing expected of any literary
expression is that it should be faithful to what is in the mind, and if
for the idea of good prose writing the image of a potato is given, then
it can but represent the features of the earthy lumps which are common to
the stalls of the market-place. What is prose? Sodden and lumbering
stuff, I suppose. And what is poetry? That fortunate lighting of an idea
which delights us with the belief that we have surprised truth, and have
seen that it is beautiful.
The difficulty with what the textbooks tell us is prose is that many of
us make it, not naturally and unconsciously like the gentleman who
discovered he had been doing it all his life, but professionally.
Consider the immense output of novels--but no, do not let us consider
anything so surprising and perplexing. The novel, that most exacting
problem in the sublimation of the history of our kind, not to be solved
with ease, it now appears may be handled by children as a profitable
pastime. Children, of course, should be taught to express themselves in
writing, and simply, lucidly, and with sincerity. Yet all editors know
the delusion is common with beginners in journalism that the essay, a
form in which perhaps only six writers have been successful in the
history of English letters, is but a prelude to serious work, a holiday
before the realities have begun. They all attempt it. Every editorial
letter-box is loaded with essays every morning. Yet the love of learning,
and wisdom and humour, are not usual, and the gods still more rarely give
with these gifts the ability to express them in the written word; and how
often may we count on learning, wisdom, and humour being not only
reflected through a delightful and original character, but miraculously
condensed into the controlled display of a bright and revealing beam? It
is no wonder we have but six essayists!
There is no doubt about it. If we mean by prose much more than the
sincere and lucid written expression of our desires and opinions, it is
because beyond that simplicity we know the thrill which is sometimes
given by a revelation of beauty and significance in common words and
tidings. The best writing must come of a gift for making magic out of
what are but commodities to us, and that gift is not distributed by the
generous gods from barrows which go the round of the neighbourhoods where
many babies are born, as are faith, hope, and credulity, those virtues
that cause the enormous circulations of the picture papers, and form the
ready material for the careers of statesmen and the glory of famous
soldiers. It is more unusual. We see it as often as we do comets and
signs in the heavens, a John in the Wilderness again, pastors who would
die for their lambs, women who contemn the ritual and splendour of
man-slaying, and a politician never moved by the enticements of a
successful career. It is therefore likely that when we see great prose
for the first time we may not know it, and may not enjoy it. It can be so
disrespectful to what we think is good. It may be even brightly innocent
of it. And as in addition our smaller minds will be overborne by the
startling activity and cool power of the prose of such a writer as Swift,
its superiority will only enhance our complaining grief.
VII. The Modern Mind
JULY 6, 1918. A Symphony in Verse has just come to me from America. The
picture on its wrapper shows a man in green tights, and whose hair is
blue, veiling his eyes before a lady in a flame-coloured robe who stares
from a distance in a tessellated solitude. As London two days ago
celebrated Independence Day like an American city, and displayed the
Stars and Stripes so deliriously that the fact that George III was ever a
British king was lost in a common acknowledgment that he was only another
violent fool, this Boston book invited attention. For ladies in gowns of
flame, with arms raised in appeal, may be supposed to want more than the
vote; and American poets wearing emerald tights who find themselves in
abandoned temples alone with such ladies, must clearly have left Whittier
with the nursery biscuits. Longfellow could never grow blue locks. Even
Whitman dressed in flannel and ate oranges in public. Nor did Poe at his
best rise to assure us:
"This is the night for murder: give us knives:
We have long sought for this."
Well, not all of us. The truth is some of us have not sought for knives
with any zest, being paltry and early Victorian in our murders. Yet in
this symphony in verse, _The Jig of Forslin_, by Mr. Conrad Aiken, there
are such lines as these:
"When the skies are pale and stars are cold,
Dew should rise from the grass in little bubbles,
And tinkle in music amid green leaves.
Something immortal lives in such air--
We breathe, we change.
Our bodies become as cold and bright as starlight.
Our hearts grow young and strange.
Let us extend ourselves as evening shadows
And learn the nocturnal secrets of these meadows."
It is not all knives and murder. The Jig, in fact, dances us through a
world of ice lighted by star gleams and Arctic streamers, where sometimes
our chill loneliness is interrupted by a woman whose "mouth is a sly
carnivorous flower"; where we escape the greenish light of a vampire's
eyes to enter a tavern where men strike each other with bottles. Mermaids
are there, and Peter and Paul, and when at last Mr. Aiken feels the
reader may be released, it is as though we groped in the dark, bewildered
and alarmed, for assurance that this was nothing but art.
One cannot help feeling, while reading this product of the modern mind,
that we are all a little mad, and that the cleverest of us know it, and
indulge the vagaries and instability of insanity. In an advertisement to
Mr. Aiken's poetry we are told that it is based on the Freudian
psychology. We are not seldom reminded to-day of that base to the New
Art. We are even beginning to look on each other's simplest acts with a
new and grave suspicion. It causes a man to wonder what obscure motive,
probably hellish, prompted his wife to brush his clothes, though when he
caught her at it she was doing it in apparent kindness. Instead of the
truth making us free, its dread countenance, when we glimpse it, only
startles us into a pallid mimicry of its sinister aspect. It is like the
sardonic grin I have seen on the face of an intelligent soldier as he
strode over filth and corpses towards shell-fire. Soldiers, when they are
home again, delight in watching the faces and the ways of children. They
want to play with the youngsters, eat buns in the street, and join the
haymakers. They do not want the truth. Without knowing anything of Freud,
they can add to their new and dreadful knowledge of this world all they
want of the subconscious by reading the warlike speeches of the aged, one
of the most obscene and shocking features of the War. The soldiers who
are home on leave turn in revolt from that to hop-scotch. Yes, the truth
about our own day will hardly bear looking at, whether it is reflected
from common speech, or from the minds of artists like Mr. Conrad Aiken.
VIII. Magazines
JULY 16, 1918. I was looking in a hurry for something to read. One
magazine on the bookstall told me it was exactly what I wanted for a
railway journey. It had a picture of a large gun to make its cover
attractive. The next advertised its claims in another way. A girl's face
was the decorative feature of its wrapper, and you could not imagine eyes
and a simper more likely to make a man feel holier than Bernard of Cluny
till your gaze wandered to the face of the girl smirking from the
magazine beyond. Is it possible that nobody reads current English
literature, as the magazines give it, except the sort of men who collect
golf balls and eat green gooseberries? It seems like it. One wonders what
the editors of those magazines read when they are on a railway journey.
For it would be interesting to know whether this sort of thing is done
purposely, like glass beads for Africa, or whether it is the gift of
heaven, natural and unconscious, like chickweed.
One would be grateful for direction in this. The matter is of some
importance, because either the producers or the readers are in a bad
way; and it would be disheartening to suppose it is the readers, for
probably there are more readers than editors, and so less chance of a
cure. I do not want to believe it is the readers. It is more
comforting to suppose those poor people must put up with what they can
get in a hurry ten minutes before the train starts, only to find, as
they might have guessed, that vacuity is behind the smirk of a girl with
a face like that. They are forced to stuff their literature behind them,
so that ownership of it shall not openly shame them before their
fellow-passengers.
With several exceptions, the mass of English magazines and reviews may be
dismissed in a few seconds. The exceptions usually are not out yet, or
one has seen them. It used not to be so, and that is what makes me think
it is the producers, and not the readers, who require skilled attention.
It is startling to turn to the magazines of twenty or thirty years ago,
and to compare them with what is thought good enough for us. I was
looking through such a magazine recently, and found a poem by Swinburne,
a prose-romance by William Morris, and much more work of a quality you
would no more expect to find in a current magazine than you would palm
trees in Whitechapel.