We were in the billiard-room--English men and women collected from
various parts of the earth, and enjoying that state of intimacy which
is somehow produced by the comfortable click of billiard balls. It
is extraordinary what pretty things the balls say of a night in the
billiard-room of a good hotel. They say: “You are very good-natured and
jolly people. Click. Women spoil the play, but it’s nice to have them
here. Click. And so well-dressed and smiling and feminine I Click.
Click. Cigars are good and digestion is good. Click. How correct and
refined and broad-minded you all are! All’s right with the world.
Click.” A stockbroker sat near me by the fire. My previous experience
of stockbrokers had led me to suppose that all stockbrokers were pursy,
middle-aged, hard-breathers, thick-fingered, with a sure taste in wines,
steaks, and musical comedies. But this one was very different--except
perhaps on the point of musical comedies. He was quite young, quite
thin, quite simple. In fact, he was what is known as an English
gentleman. He frankly enjoyed showing young ladies aged twenty-three
how to make a loser off the red, and talking about waltzes, travel, and
sport. He never said anything original, and so never surprised one nor
made one feel uncomfortable. He was extremely amiable, and we all liked
him. The sole fact about the Stock Exchange which I gleamed from him
was that the Stock Exchange comprised many bounders, and “you had to be
civil to ‘em, too.”
*****
“You’ve heard the news?” I said to him. “About Japan?” he asked. No, he
had not heard. It took the English papers two days to reach us, and, of
course, for the English there are no newspapers but English newspapers.
There was a first-class local daily; with a complete service of foreign
news, and a hundred thousand readers; but I do not believe that one
English person in ten even knew of its existence. So I took the local
daily out of my pocket, and translated to him the Russian note informing
the Powers that ambassadors were packing up. “Looks rather had!” he
murmured. I could have jumped up and slain him on the spot with the
jigger, for every English person in that hotel every night for three
weeks past had exclaimed on glancing at the “Times”: “Looks bad!” And
here this amiable young stockbroker, with war practically broken out,
was saying it again! I am perfectly convinced that everyone said
this, and this only, because no one had any ideas beyond it. There
had appeared some masterly articles in the “Times” on the Manchurian
question. But nobody read them: I am sure of that. No one had even
a passable notion of Far Eastern geography, and no one could have
explained, lucidly or otherwise, the origin of the gigantic altercation.
How strange it is that the causes of war never excite interest! (What
was the cause of the Franco-German war, you who are omniscient?)
In response to another question, the young stockbroker said that his
particular market would be seriously affected. “I should like to be
there,” [on the Exchange], he remarked, and added dreamily: “It would be
rather fun.” Then we began a four-handed game, a game whose stupidities
were atoned for by the charming gestures of women. And the stockbroker
found himself in enormous form. The stone of the Russian Note had sunk
into the placid lake and not a ripple was left. Nothing but billiards
had existed since the beginning of the world, or ever would exist.
Nothing, I reflected, will rouse the average sensible man to an
imaginative conception of what a war is, not even the descriptions of a
Stephen Crane. Nay, not even income tax at fifteen pence in the pound!
*****
The next morning I went out for a solitary walk by the coast road. And
I had not gone a mile before I came to an unkempt building, with a few
officials lounging in front of it. “French Custom House” was painted
across its pale face. Then the road began to climb up among the outlying
spurs of the Maritime Alps. It went higher and higher till it was cut
out of the solid rock. Half a mile further, and there was another French
Custom House. Still further, where the rock became crags, and the crags
beetled above and beetled below, there occurred a profound gorge, and
from the stone bridge which spanned it one could see, and faintly hear,
a thin torrent rushing to the sea perhaps a couple of hundred feet
below. Immediately to the west of this bridge the surface of the crags
had been chiselled smooth, and on the expanse had been pictured a large
black triangle with a white border--about twelve feet across. And under
the triangle was a common little milestone arrangement, smaller than
many English milestones, and on one side of the milestone was painted
“France” and on the other “Italia.” This was the division between the
two greatest Latin countries; across this imaginary line had been waged
the bloodless but disastrous tariff war of ten years ago. I was in
France; a step, and I was in Italy! And it is on account of similar
imaginary, artificial, and unconvincing lines, one here, one there--they
straggle over the whole earth’s crust--that most wars, military, naval,
and financial, take place.
*****
Across the gorge was a high, brown tenement, and towards the tenement
strutted an Italian soldier in the full, impossible panoply of war. He
carried two rifles, a mile or so of braid, gilt enough to gild the dome
of St. Paul’s and Heaven knows what contrivances besides. And he was
smoking a cigarette out of a long holder. Two young girls, aged perhaps
six or eight, bounded out of the slatternly tenement, and began to
chatter to him in a high infantile treble. The formidable warrior smiled
affectionately, and bending down, offered them a few paternal words;
they were evidently spoiled little things. Close by a vendor of picture
post cards had set up shop on a stone wall. Far below, the Mediterranean
was stretched out like a blue cloth without a crease in it, and a brig
in full sail was crawling across the offing. The sun shone brilliantly.
Roses in perfect bloom had escaped from gardens and hung free over
hedges. Everything was steeped in a tremendous and impressive calm--a
calm at once pastoral and marine, and the calm of obdurate mountains
that no plough would ever conquer. And breaking against this mighty calm
was the high, thin chatter of the little girls, with their quick and
beautiful movements of childhood.
And as I watched the ragged little girls, and followed the brig on
the flat and peaceful sea, and sniffed the wonderful air, and was
impregnated by the spirit of the incomparable coast and the morning
hour, something overcame me, some new perception of the universality of
humanity. (It was the little girls that did it.) And I thought
intensely how absurd, how artificial, how grotesque, how accidental,
how inessential, was all that rigmarole of boundaries and limits and
frontiers. It seemed to me incredible, then, that people could go to war
about such matters. The peace, the natural universal peace, seemed so
profound and so inherent in the secret essence of things, that it could
not be broken. And at the very moment, though I knew it not, while
the brig was slipping by, and the little girls were imposing upon the
good-nature of their terrible father, and the hawker was arranging his
trumpery, pathetic post cards, they were killing each other--Russia and
Japan were--in a row about “spheres of influence.”