cabin of a ship from Rangoon two paper-covered books, with a Calcutta
imprint, smelling of something, whatever it was, that did not exist in
England. The books were _Plain Tales from the Hills_ and _Soldiers
Three_. It was high summer, and in that cabin of a ship in the Albert
Dock, with its mixed odour of tea, teak, and cheroots, I read through
all. The force in those stories went nearer to capturing me completely
than anything I have read since. I can believe now that I just escaped
taking a path which would have given me a world totally different from
the one I know, and the narrowness of the escape makes me feel tolerant
towards the young people who give up typewriting and book-keeping, and go
out into an unfriendly world determined to be Mary Pickfords and Charlie
Chaplins. A boy boards a ship merely to get a parrot, and his friend, who
brought it from Burma, has gone to Leadenhall Street; there is a long
interval, with those books lying in a bunk. Such a trivial
incident--something like it happening every week to everybody--and to-day
that boy, but for the Grace of God, might be reading the leaders of the
_Morning Post_ as the sole relief to a congested mind, going every week
to the cartoon of _Punch_ as to barley water for chronic prickly heat,
and talking of dealing with the heterodox as the Holy Office used to deal
with unbaptized Indian babies for the good of their little souls.
I have recovered from those astonishing adventures with Kipling. I may
read him to-day with enjoyment, but safe from excitation. This is due,
perhaps, to a stringy constitution, subject to bilious doubts, which
loves to see lusty Youth cock its hat when most nervous, swagger with
merry insolence to hide the uncertainty which comes of self-conscious
inexperience, assume a cynical shrewdness to protect its credulity, and
imitate the abandon of the hard fellow who has been to Hong Kong, Tal
Tal, and Delagoa Bay. We enjoy seeing Youth act thus; but one learns in
time that a visit to Rhodesia, worse luck, makes one no more intelligent
than a week-end at Brighton. Well, it doesn't matter. What ingrates we
should be now to turn on Kipling because we disagree with the politics he
prefers, those loud opinions of his which, when we get too much of them,
remain in the ears for a while like the echoes of a brass tray which a
hearty child banged for a drum. Though we hold the British Constitution
as sacred as the family vault we do not think the less of Dickens because
the awful spectacle of our assembled legislators made him laugh, nor do
we leave the room when Beethoven is played because his careless regard
for a monarch's divine right is painful to us. If Kipling had not given
us _My Sunday at Home_ and _The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney_, how
should we have got them?
I have just read Kipling's book, _Letters of Travel_. Its attractive
title drew me to it, and is to blame. Kipling has an uncanny gift of
sight. It prompts no divination in him, but its curiosity misses nothing
that is superficial. If he had watched the Crucifixion, and had been its
sole recorder, we should have had a perfect representation of the
soldiers, the crowds, the weather, the smells, the colours, and the three
uplifted figures; so lively a record that it would be immortal for the
fidelity and commonness of its physical experience. But we should never
have known more about the central figure than that He was a cool and
courageous rebel. Kipling can make a picture of an indifferent huddle of
fishing boats in a stagnant harbour which is more enjoyable than being
there. Letters from such a traveller would attract one directly across
the bookshop. But these letters of his were addressed to his friends the
Imperialists before the War, and one may guess the rest. Such an exposure
moves one to sorrow over a writer whose omniscience used to make the
timorous believe that arrogance, if lively enough, had some advantage
over reason.
Yet there is in a few of the letters enough to show what we missed
because they were not addressed to himself, or to anybody but a Composite
Portrait of The Breed. There are passages in the chapter called "Half a
Dozen Pictures" which clear all irritation from the mind (for many of the
author's insults are studied and gratuitous) and leave nothing but
respect for the artist. These come when the artist sees only a riot of
Oriental deck passengers, bears, and macaws, in the tropics; or a steamer
coming round, exposed by a clarity like crystal in the trough of immense
seas somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Auckland Islands at dayfall.
We get such impressions when Kipling has, for the moment, forgotten the
need to make a genuflection towards the Absolute and Everlasting
Chutney, and is a man and brother delighting in his craft.
The rest of the book has, one must admit, a value, but it is an
undesigned value; indeed, its value is that it was designed to prove, at
the time it was written, something quite different. From this book, with
its recurring contempt for England, you may see what value we need have
attached to much that the assured and the violent ever had to tell us
about our Empire. If this publication is, indeed, an act of contrition
for words unwisely written, then it should be read as a warning by all
who write. Materialists naturally attach to transient circumstances a
value which the less patriotic of us might think not really material. "We
discussed, first of all, under the lee of a wet deck-house in
mid-Atlantic; man after man cutting in and out of the talk as he sucked
at his damp tobacco." There is no doubt Kipling supposes that the wet
deck-house adds a value to the words spoken under its lee-side. Yet the
words he reports are what one may hear, with grief, any day in any tavern
in the hurry and excitement of ten minutes before closing time. But
Kipling always thought an opinion gained in value if expressed elsewhere
than in England. His ideal government would be a polo-player from Simla
leading the crew of the _Bolivar_.
Every horror in the world, the author of these letters tells us, has its
fitting ritual. How easily, too, one realizes it, when feeling again the
fanatic heat and force of this maker of old magic with the tom-tom; the
vicious mockery, certain of popular applause, of ideas that are not
marketable; the abrupt rancour whenever the common folk must be
mentioned; the spite felt for England--"in England ... you see where the
rot starts"; the sly suspicion of other countries, and the consequent
jealousy and fear; here it all is, convulsive, uncertain, inflammable.
The prophet of Empire! But the prophecy was wrong. England, "where the
rot starts," bore most of the heat and burden of the day, and saved the
Empire for the money-mongers. And what of the British youngsters who did
that, who were not materialists in the least, but many of them the
idealists for whom no abuse once could be too vicious? The corruption of
the Somme! That faceless and nameless horror was the apotheosis of the
Imperialist.
XXXI. A Devon Estuary
SEPTEMBER 11, 1920. "This dreary expanse," the guide-book explains, "will
not attract the tourist." The guide was right. I was alone to that degree
beyond mere solitude when you feel you are not alone, but that the place
itself is observing you. Yet only five miles away long lines of
motor-cars were waiting to take tourists, at ruinous prices, to the
authentic and admitted beauty spots. There was not, as the polite
convention would put it, a soul about. It was certainly a dreary expanse,
but the sunlight there seemed strangely brilliant, I thought, and, what
was more curious, appeared to be alive. It was quivering. The transient
glittering of some seagulls remote in the blue was as if you could
glimpse, now and then, fleeting hints of what is immaculate in heaven.
Nothing of our business was in sight anywhere except the white stalk of a
lighthouse, and that, I knew, was miles away across the estuary whose
waters were then invisible, for it was not only low tide, but I was
descending to the saltings, having left the turf of the upper salt
marshes.
You felt that here in the saltings you were beyond human associations.
The very vegetation was unfamiliar. The thrift, sea lavender, rocket, sea
campion, and maritime spurge did not descend so low as this. They came no
nearer than where the highest tidal marks left lines of driftwood and
bleached shells, just below the break of the upper marshes. Here it was
another kingdom, neither sea nor land, but each alternately during the
spring tides. At first the sandy mud was reticulated with sun-cracks, not
being daily touched by the sea, and the crevasses gave a refuge for algae.
There was a smell, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, which reminded you of
something so deep in the memory that you could not give it a name. But it
was sound and good. Beyond that dry flat the smooth mud glistened as if
earth were growing a new skin, which yet was very tender. It was spongy,
but it did not break when I trod on it, though the earth complained as I
went. It was thinly sprinkled with a plant like little fingers of green
glass, the maritime samphire, and in the distance this samphire gave the
marsh a sheen of continuous and vivid emerald.
The saltings looked level and unbroken. But on walking seaward I was
continually surprised by drainage channels. These channels serpentined
everywhere, and were deep and wide. Sometimes they contained nothing but
silt, and sometimes they were salt-water rivers. I came upon each canyon
unexpectedly. The first warning was a sudden eruption from it, a flock of
dunlin, a flock which then passed seawards in a regimented flight that
was an alternate flash of light and a swift shadow. Dunlin, curlew,
oyster-catchers, or gulls, left a gully just before I knew I was headed
off again. In one of these creeks, however, the birds left me more than
their delicate footprints to examine. They left there a small craft whose
mast I had long taken to be a stump projecting from the mud. A young man
in a brown beard, a brown shirt, and a pair of khaki trousers was sitting
on its skylight. He hailed, and showed me how I could get to him without
sinking up to more than the knees in this dreary spot.
"Stay here if you like," he said, when I was with him. "When the tide is
full I'll pull you round to the village." It was a little cutter of about
fifteen tons, moored to the last huge links of a cable, the rest of which
had long been covered up. I thought he was making holiday in a novel
way. "No," he replied, "I'm living here."
It seems (I am but paraphrasing his apology) that he returned from
Cambrai, bringing back from France, as a young officer, some wounds and
other decorations, but also his youthful credulity and a remembrance of
society's noble promises to its young saviours. But not long after his
return to us the sight of us made him feel disappointed. He "stuck it,"
he said, as long as he could. But the more he observed us the worse he
felt. That was why he gave up a good position a second time on our
account. "What was the good of the money? The profiteers took most of it.
I worked hard, and had to give up what I earned to every kind of
parasite. London was more disagreeable than ever was Flanders. Yet I
think I would not object to sweep the roads for a community of good
people. Yes, I thought nothing could be worse than the dead in the mud.
But I found something worse. The minds of the living who did not know
what I knew in France were worse to me. I couldn't remember the friends
I'd lost and remain where I was with those people about me. It was more
awful than that German--did you ever meet him?--who lay just the other
side of the parapet for weeks and weeks."
His only companion now is a paraffin stove, which does not, perhaps,
require a gas-mask to aid in its companionship, though about that I won't
be sure. The only conversation he hears is that of the curlews; subdued,
cheerful, and very intimate voices, having just that touch of melancholy
which intimacy, when it is secure and genuine, is sure to give, however
jolly the intimacy may be. He said that at first he was afraid he could
not live on what little money he had, and must earn casually, after
buying the boat, but "it's easier to live than I thought. There's not
nearly as much worry needed as I used to suppose. It is surprising how
much one can do without. I was rather scared at first when I got rid of
my sense of duty. But, after all, it is not so hard to be free. Perhaps
the world already has more soft and easy people than is good for it. I
find one benefit of this life is that, being free of the crowd, I feel
indifferent about the way the crowd chooses to go. I don't care now what
the public does--that's its own affair, and I hope it will enjoy it."
After a silence he said: "That sounds selfish, I know. And I'm not sure
yet that it isn't. Anyhow, if one could help one's fellows one would.
But is it possible to help them? When did they last listen to reason? The
only guides they will listen to are frauds obvious enough to make an ass
lay back his ears. Well, I think I'll wait here till the crowd knows
enough to stop before it gets to the edge of the steep place--if it can
stop now."
I asked him what he read. "Very little. I fish more than I read. You'd
think it would take only a week to learn all there is here. I should have
thought so once. I see now that I shall never thoroughly know this
estuary. It's a wonderful place. Every tide is a new experience. I am
beginning to feel right again." In the boat, going round to the village,
he learned I was a writer, rested on his oars, and drifted with the tide.
"I'll give you a job," he said. "Write a book that will make people hate
the idea that the State is God as Moloch was at last hated. Turn the
young against it. The latest priest is the politician. No ritual in any
religion was worse than this new worship of the State. If men don't wake
up to that then they are doomed." He began then to pull me towards
humanity again.
XXXII. Barbellion
DECEMBER 18, 1920. When posterity feels curious to discover what may have
caused the disaster to our community it will get a little light from the
merry confessions of our contemporary great folk. Let it read Colonel
Repington's _Diary_, Mrs. Asquith's book, and the memoirs of General
French. The general, of course, implies that he was so puzzled by the
neutrality of time and space, and by the fact that the treacherous enemy
was in trenches and used big guns. Our descendants may learn from these
innocent revelations what quality of knowledge and temper, to be found
only in a superior caste, guided the poor and lowly, and shaped our fate
for us. They will know why wars and famines were inevitable for us, and
why nothing could avert doom from the youth of our Europe. There is no
disputing the importance of these confessions. But their relationship to
literature? For that matter they might be linoleum. Yet there has been a
book of confessions published recently which may be read as literature
when the important gossip with the vast sales is merely curious evidence
for historians equipped for psychological analysis. I mean Barbellion's
_Journal of a Disappointed Man_.
It will interest our descendants to learn that outside the circle which
Colonel Repington reports at its dinner-tables where the ladies were so
diverting, the fare usually excellent, and the gentlemen discussed the
"combing out" of mere men for places like Ypres, there was genuine
knowledge and warm understanding. Beyond those cheerful dinner-tables,
and in that outer darkness of which the best people knew nothing except
that it was possible to rake it fruitfully with a comb, there was a host
of young men from which could be manifested the courageous intellectual
curiosity, the ardour for truth, the gusto for life, and the love of
earth, which we see in Keeling's letters and Barbellion's diary. All is
shown in these two books in an exceptional degree, and, in Barbellion's
diary, is expressed with a remarkable wit and acuteness, and not seldom,
as in the description of a quarry, of a Beethoven Symphony, of a
rock-pool of the Devon coast, with a beauty that is startling.
Keeling was killed in the War. Barbellion (who, as we know now, was Bruce
Cummings) never went to France, for he was dying, though he did not know
it, when he presented himself for medical examination. But it is clear
that though secluded from the turmoil in a country cottage, paralyzed,
and his trunk already dead, Barbellion's sensitive mind and imaginative
sympathy knew more of what was happening to his fellows in France, and
what it meant for us all, than the combined Cabinet in Downing Street.
That spark of dying light was aware when the luminaries on whom we
depended were blind and ignorant. In his _Last Diary_, and within a day
or two of his death, he wrote of the Peace Treaty (May, 1919): "After all
the bright hopes of last autumn, justice will be done only when all the
power is vested in the people. Every liberal-minded man must feel the
shame of it." But did such men feel the shame of it? Refer to what the
popular writers, often liberal-minded, said about the shame they felt at
the time, and compare. To Barbellion, by the light of his expiring lamp,
was revealed what was hidden from nearly all experienced and active
publicists. Is there any doubt still of the superiority of imagination
over hard-headedness?
Imagination instantly responds. Percolation is a slow process in the hard
head of the worldly-wise. When we know that in the elderly, the shrewd,
and the practical, the desire for material power and safety, qualified
only by fear, served as their substitute for the City of God during the
War, it is heartening to remember that there were select though unknown
young men, mere subjects for "combing" like Barbellion, who made
articulate an immense rebellious protest that was in the best of our
boys; who showed a mocking intuition into us and our motives, as though
we were a species apart; a scorn of the world we had made for them, a
cruel knowledge of the cowardice and meanness at the back of our warlike
minds, and a yearning for that world of beauty which might have been, but
which the acts of the clever and the practical have turned into carrion
among the ruins. Would it matter now if we were bankrupt, and our Empire
among the things that were, if only we were turning to sackcloth and
ashes because of that dousing of the glim in the heart of the young?
This last diary of Bruce Cummings is sad enough, for he could but lie
inert, listen to the last news of the War, and wonder incidentally who
would come to him first--the postman bringing the reviews of his first
book, or the bony old gentleman bringing the scythe. He felt, of course,
the mockery of this frustration of his powers. He thought--and, it
seemed, with good reason--that he was a tragic failure. But was he? Read
his books, and admit that he accomplished a little that is beautiful and
enduring, and that he did it obscurely at a time when they who held most
of the fearful attention of the world were but working gravely on what
their children would execrate.
Some critics find in the diary of Barbellion's last days evidence that he
remembered he was writing for an audience. It may be there, but it is not
plain to me. It is likely that if we were writing a paragraph while
doubtful whether the hair which held the sword over us would last till we
had finished, we might find we were not so joyously abandoned to pure art
as we used to be. The interest of the book is that it is some more of
Bruce Cummings when we could not have expected another line from him.
Apart even from their literary value, it seems to me that some day his
three volumes may prove to bear historic witness as important as that of
Colonel Repington's diary. It was just such minds as Barbellion's, not
uncommon in the youth of our war time--though in his case the unusual
intuitions and adventurous aspirations were defined by genius--it was
such minds that the war-mongers condemned and destroyed. Those men were
selected for sacrifice because they had the very qualities which, when
lost to the community, then it dies in its soul. They were candid with
themselves, and questioned our warranty with the same candour, but were
modest and reticent; they were kindly to us when they knew we were wooden
and wrong, and did our bidding, judging it was evil. In France they
subdued their insurgent thoughts--and what that sacrifice meant to them
in the lonely night watches I have been privileged to learn--and
surrendered, often in terrible derision, to our will; and then in cool
and calculated audacity devised the very tasks in which the bravest and
most intelligent would be the first to die.
XXXIII. Breaking the Spell
APRIL 8, 1921. My seat by the Serpentine was under a small and almost
impalpable cloud of almond petals. The babbling of ducks somewhere in the
place where the water seemed a pale and wavering fire was like the sound
of the upwelling of the hidden spring of life. This was the spot where I
could sit and there quietly match the darker shades of trouble in the
afternoon papers, the time being April in England, and the sky ineffable.
There was not a trace of mourning in the sky; not a black-edged cloud.
But human life, being an urgent and serious affair, and not a bright blue
emptiness like Heaven; human life being a state of trial in which, as
favoured beings, we are "heated hot with burning fears and dipped in
baths of hissing tears" for our own good, could not be expected to look
as pleasant, during so severe a necessary process, as almond trees in
blossom. So I sat down and prepared to measure, from the news in the
papers, the depth of the present border on our daily memorial card.
The black border was rather a deep one, when measured. The fears were
fairly hot. There were no noticeable signs of any tears in the papers, so
far, but one could guess there would be a deep extinguishing bath of them
ready to hiss presently, if all went well, and our affairs had
uninterrupted development under the usual clever guides. And we had the
guides. I could see that. The papers were loud with the inspirations of
friends of ours who had not missed a single lesson of the War for those
who were not in it; who were still resolute in that last and
indispensable ditch which no foe is ever likely to reach. But by now the
almond's cloud had vanished. I no longer heard the bubbling of the well
of life.
I finished reading the papers. Now I knew our current fate, and felt as
if I heard again the gas gong going continuously. I had the feeling in
April, unknown to any snail on the thorn, that the park was deafening
with the clangour of pallid, tense, and contending lunatics. The
Serpentine had receded from this tumult. Its tranquil shimmering was now
fatuous and unbelievable. It was but half seen; its glittering was a
distant grimacing and mockery at my troubled human intelligence. It was
nothing to do with me, and showed it in that impertinent way. Two ducks,
two absurd ducks, suddenly appeared before me on the polished water. They
were bowing politely to each other--only I was looking at them--and were
making soothing noises in imbecile ignorance of the fate overhanging us
all. There was a boy not far away. He stood as still as a thought
entranced. He was watching a boat with a paper sail. He was as intent as
if he were God observing the progress of Columbus, knowing now that
America is about to be found.
If that boy had but guessed what I knew! But he had not read the latest
news. It is the privilege of knowledge to be superior and grave; to be
able to smile sadly at the dream of a Golden Galleon which childhood sees
in April by the Serpentine; for knowledge is aware of the truth, the
tumult surrounding us of contentious lunatics, endless, inexplicable; the
noise of mankind in its upward journey towards the eclipse, or some other
heavenly mystery.
Presently that tinted mist which was a tree in flower began to shine
again through the dark noise which the papers had made. The uproar
cleared a little. The water came nearer, its glittering growing
stronger, its fire burning towards me. I saw in surprise through the
gloom in my mind that the fire had touched the elms; their dark masses
were faintly luminous. And the mallard drake, riding on the outer pulses
of that radiation, was purple and emerald. But would the beauty of the
spring surprise us, I wonder; would it still give the mind a twinge,
sadden us with a nameless disquiet, shoot through us so keen an anguish
when the almond tree is there again on a bright day, if we were decent,
healthy, and happy creatures? Perhaps not. It is hard to say. It is a
great while since our skinless and touchy crowds of the wonderful
industrial era, moving as one man to the words of the daily papers, were
such creatures. Perhaps we should merely yawn and stretch ourselves, feel
revived with the sun a little warmer on our backs, and snuff up a
pleasant smell which we remembered; begin to whistle, and grope for an
adze.