good deal of it. I shall never forget the disappointment and depression
of my marriage. I think I will tell you the real truth. My wife has a
habit of falling asleep, and she slept in the train as we neared Paris.
Very few women look their best when they are asleep. That little beast
of an Augustine used to, but Madeline, my wife, doesn’t, and she slept
all the way to Paris, I remember, as we returned. Every now and then
she would wake herself with a loud snore and go to sleep again, and I
was feeling woefully depressed: life seemed trivial and worthless: in
fact I had a bad taste in my mouth, so to say.
“No one met us at the station, though I had told my father-in-law when
we were due to arrive. My wife found nothing extraordinary in it; she
yawned and said it was very kind of her mother to leave us alone the
first day, and we drove straight to the apartment they had prepared for
us.
“You never saw such an apartment! It was ugly and it was prim,
business-like, and while my wife tried to go into ecstasies over it, I
yawned myself stiff and thought of how to find some way to alter it.
“Pousset, my father-in-law, was proud of me as a writer, and when he
came round next day he showed me how he had arranged my study with
books of accounts and a proper desk to write at, and he hoped I would
begin to work as soon as possible! And Madame Pousset pousséed, so to
speak--very worthy people in their way. Next morning I found that my
wife had arranged my desk, put out pens and paper, everything; like her
father, she urged me to sit down to work.
“I don’t know whether it was the spirit of contradiction inherent in
humanity or some ebb after the flood-tide of the honeymoon, but I could
think of nothing but Augustine and the way she used to flit about the
room, often in a chemise or less, and come and curl up on my knees
and coax me not to write, but to come out for this, that, or the other
piece of fun. So I let myself go and began describing her. She really
had the prettiest figure I have ever seen in my life. She was just like
one of the little Greek statuettes on the famous balustrade of the
temple in Athens; she might even have stood for that statuette there
of _The Wingless Victory_. I began eagerly, passionately, to write the
whole story of our relations, and especially I tried to picture her
slim loveliness and make it vivid by her crude bold speech and gutter
phrases.”
Again he laughed.
“What are you laughing at?” I asked.
“I am laughing,” he replied, “because my wife got hold of the chapter
where I described the girl’s perfect figure and her comment was
characteristic:
“‘It is wonderful, you know, Toutou,’ she said, ‘but everybody will
recognise that you are sketching me, and, though I like the picture
enormously, I’m afraid your heroine wasn’t a good woman.’ Good!
“I stood in the room when she went out and held my head in my hands and
asked myself was it possible that she could see herself in this lovely
figure I had described. After all, you know, my wife is a certain
weight.
“Ah, women are funny creatures. I went on with the book and it had an
enormous success, and my father-in-law, when I told him I was going to
have this new apartment on the strength of my first big cheque, was
good enough to double the cheque, which enabled me to buy that little
statuette of _The Wingless Victory_ there in the corner and furnish
this flat.”
“I must read the book,” I said; “but you have written some others,
notably that wonderful study of a _gourgandine_, which can be compared
only to the _Odyssée d’une Fille_ of de Maupassant.”
“Really? You think that, do you!” he cried. “I know I have no genius,”
he went on; “you made that clear to me years ago, but that book of mine
is a book of pure observation.”
“Where on earth did you observe an ordinary woman as closely as
that?--the little passing tempers of her, the funny view of life
that such a woman has got, the extraordinary calculation in her
and the everyday little phrases by which bit by bit she reveals
herself--commonplace phrases that yet light up the character in a most
extraordinary way? Where did you get all that?”
Raoul rose and stretched himself, smiling:
“To you I can tell everything. Well, all those sayings were taken down
absolutely after little talks and quarrels with my wife, taken down
absolutely from her lips--her very words. It is merely a close study of
married life.”
“Good God!” I exclaimed.
“The curious part of it is,” he went on, “that she thought _La
Gourgandine_ a poor book. ‘It may be like some common girl,’ she would
say, ‘but now only a year after our marriage you have left me out of
your pages: I shall always prefer _The Wingless Victory_, where you
described my very figure.’
“My wife has never recognised any likeness to herself in the exact
portrait and that’s the key to her contentment: our mortal happiness is
all--illusion and self-deception.”
A LUNATIC?
A LUNATIC?
I had gone down to the forest heights beyond Tunbridge Wells to rest
and recruit, and one day I found a road across the common, where I used
to walk undisturbed by passing motors.
It was a heavenly morning--one of those English August days which show
how lovely summer can be in the foggy island. The air was like warm
fresh milk, the walking pleasant, and I sauntered for an hour or more
amid patches of purple heather and golden gorse. Away to the south I
could see the rounded bare outlines of the Downs like the backs of
galloping hounds and about me the good smell of warm earth perfumed by
clumps of canary gorse and beds of shy violets.
I had walked farther than I intended, for suddenly I came out on the
highroad and noticed on my left a pair of ornate iron gates leading to
a broad gravelled walk into private and well-kept grounds.
A man was standing almost in the gateway, a quietly dressed man of good
height. A second glance showed me that he stooped a little; his face
was thin, rather narrow too, with a short brown beard and moustache.
Our eyes met and I was interested at once by something interrogative in
the quick glance of his lively brown eyes.
“A beautiful day,” I remarked.
“Beautiful indeed,” he bowed courteously; “warm enough to sit in the
open without fear of a chill.”
It was half an invitation and I had nothing to do.
“I don’t see any seats,” I replied, “or I would sit willingly, for I
must have walked four or five miles, and am just a little tired.”
“There is a seat over there,” he answered invitingly, pointing to the
right, “by the little wood. I often sit there.” We turned and walked
together.
“I came up here for rest and change,” I said by way of introduction.
“I’m a writer.”
He responded immediately:
“A writer? How interesting! Do you write essays or stories or----”
“Both; but I prefer stories and pen portraits of important
contemporaries.”
“Portraits!” he repeated, pursing his lips reflectively. “The painter
makes money by them; but I don’t much care for mere presentments of
life. I prefer works of pure imagination.”
“You can put as much imagination into a portrait as you like,” I
replied.
“True, true,” he exclaimed, “and I have no right to criticise.”
“Merely to love imaginative work,” I said in response to his courtesy,
“is to be one in a million of our time.”
He shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly.
“I wanted to be an artist, but they wouldn’t let me, and now I do
nothing--am no good to anyone, no good at all. Merely an observer.”
“Lucky man,” I replied. “Work is apt to dwarf one or deform. The
labourer is bent and old at forty, and his hands are as insensitive as
his soul.”
“Do you think so?” he questioned. “I have always regarded any artist’s
work or writer’s as a sort of mental exercise.”
“It should be, I suppose,” I answered; “but once you have created a
character that people like, they pay you to go on repeating yourself so
often that it grows mechanical, tiresome.”
“I see,” he said, nodding his head. “New thoughts,” he went on
meditatively, “are not appreciated by the common. But won’t you be
seated?” and he motioned with his hand.
It was an ordinary bench placed in a sort of bay in a small pine wood.
Brown needles under our feet made a thick slippery carpet and the air
was fragrant with the strong scent of the pines.
“So you think the world hates new ideas?” I began.
He smiled and lifted his hands as if amused.
“So do you, I’m sure. We all know only too well how the world treats
its guides and leaders; in exact proportion to their value they are
punished: to Spinoza and Cervantes the world gave poverty and contempt,
perhaps because they would both have used money nobly; to Jesus shame
and torture--the crown of thorns--probably because He was a little
proud and very sensitive to pain. Did you ever think of that?” And he
twined his thin hands round his knee and looked up at me with his head
on one side--all question.
The man interested me peculiarly.
“That’s probably true,” I exclaimed. “But who are you?”
“No one; just an onlooker at life,” he replied; and then as if in
explanation: “I have no books down here, and I hate newspapers, and
having nothing to read I am forced to think and think all by myself;
but most people are offended by new ideas.”
“There are some of us,” I broke in, “who would give more for new
thoughts than for anything else in the world.”
He smiled, and the smile lit up his whole face; he took off his cap
at the same time and I was struck by a certain breadth of forehead I
had not noticed before and a fullness over the temples outlined by the
greying hair.
“Who can he be?” I asked myself, a little surprised.
“Do you really care for new thoughts?” he went on, with hasty
eagerness, “or is it only your own glimpses of truth that interest you?
I find so few who care to follow another’s mind. I am a recluse here,
have been for years, and so have a store of thoughts which seem to me,
I confess, valuable. If I did not bore you I should like to develop to
you some of my ideas. They are not taken from others anyway. Books are
the grave of originality.”
“You could not please me more,” I cried; “fire away.”
“When I was a young man,” he began, “Darwin and his new moral law,
‘the survival of the fittest,’ had just begun to affect thought, and
at first I tried hard to believe that the fittest were, other things
being equal, the best. Like most other men I wanted to find a moral
purpose and meaning in life, but bit by bit I was forced to see that
the fittest were often morally the worst.” And he paused and looked at
me as if to mark how I received the bomb.
I contented myself with nodding; the line of thought was familiar to
me, and I was eager to learn whither it had led him, and how far he had
gone on the untrodden path.
“Who are the fittest in our society to-day?” he went on. “The most
greedy, the most sordid, the most unscrupulous; those who desire money,
and more and more--the millionaires--the wolves who prey on their
weaker fellows. They are the fittest; they survive and propagate their
kind.
“Of course we try to believe that it is only the weak and the wastrels
who come to grief and are being killed off in favour of the sharks and
wolves; but we soon find out that even that consolation is denied to
us. It is not only the weak and the wastrels who are ‘unfit,’ and are
therefore condemned to disappear. Our present industrial civilisation
inevitably kills off the best as well as the worst. It murders the
artists, the saints, the lovers of their kind still more implacably
than the idle and improvident, the drunkards and the vicious. That’s
the truth, the awful truth. If you doubt it, ask yourself which the
millionaire is inclined to help--the drunkard or the saint, the vicious
dope-fiend or the man of genius who despises him and his golden calf?
The rich man often helps the worthless with his gold, the genius never;
that’s the truth. The best and the weakest are the unfit.
“And that way dejection came upon me and I fell to despair.”... He
paused for a moment: “I am not a lively companion, am I?” he asked with
a short laugh.
“Go on,” I said. “I am not frightened, though I’ve never heard it put
so forcibly; but do not forget that some of the wisest and best are
strong also, and can beat the wolves at their own game; and some of the
wolves, thank God, are noble and fight against their kind to protect
the helpless. I hope everything from the wolves who become watchdogs.”
“Pshaw!” he exclaimed excitedly. “That is how you cheat yourself. I
used to gull myself at first in that way, but now I see clearly.
“What is the purpose of the world? You can judge God by His acts. Is it
not true? Let us do it; let us read Him by His deeds.
“I will now take Nature where from one end to the other the strong prey
on the weak; from the tiger to the beetle there is no law but force and
cruelty and desire; sympathy even is a form of fear. You will give me
Nature I suppose? Even Tennyson did that!”
I nodded, smiling. “Yes, yes, I will give you Nature--‘red in beak and
claw.’”
“Then let us go to man, where God is seen at His best,” he went on
excitedly; “to man, where one should find high purpose and noble desire
if anywhere.”
“First-rate,” I cried; “just my own thought! I have always believed
that great men show us the highest purpose of God; the growth of the
soul in man is the only revelation of the divine.”
“Ha, ha!” he laughed; “let us test your divine by facts.
“What do you see in man? Take the commonest truth, the most universal.
It is a proverb in a dozen languages that the very tall man loves the
very small woman, and that the little bit of a woman admires a man six
feet six. Have you ever thought why? Because mediocrity is the purpose
of God; the whole pressure and urge of the world is to produce the
mediocre. God loves mediocrity.”
I looked at him in astonishment.
“In everything the same,” he went on; “in mind as in body; wisdom is
won by childish coquetry, and purity adores a notorious libertine.
Marcus Aurelius, the noblest pagan, falls in love with the prostitute
Faustine; the most reasonable of men, Socrates, selects the barking
shrew, Xantippe; Goethe marries his cook; Shakespeare, a woman half as
old again as himself, whom he detests and leaves, choosing instead a
wanton, who deceives him with his dearest friend. Think of it! Goethe
and his drunken cook, a woman who preferred a sodden sleep to thoughts
that wander through eternity.
“The love of opposites points to the same purpose always: very big men
marrying shrimps of women; mediocrity the aim and end and purpose of
the world.
“At length I came to the heart of truth: ‘God Himself must be
mediocre.’”
“Evil thoughts do come,” I began when he stopped speaking, “and there
is some ground for them; but still there are glimpses of hope. If
mediocrity were indeed, as you say, the whole purpose and end and aim
of things, then the Christs would have been forgotten at once; they
would have passed out of our minds like the weak and the wastrels: but
they do not; the finest all survive like beacon-lights--Shakespeare,
Goethe, Hugo, Balzac, and the rest.”
“Like marsh-lights,” he broke in sharply, “to lure you astray. Why
won’t you see the fact that is before your face?
“Suppose,” and he turned to me, holding out his hands, “suppose that
you have written a story; would you be content with it? would you go
on making replica after replica of it, by the million, by the hundred
million, by the thousand million, year in year out, through all
eternity? Of course you wouldn’t; you said as much: not even for pay
would you repeat yourself even once.
“You must admit that the creative artist who repeats himself is an
ass. And what does God do but that? Countless myriads of commonplace
men and women--whole generations of them--all mediocrities, all, all.
Throughout all the ages God is in love with mediocrity, with the
common: ‘was uns Alle baendigt, das Gemeine!’ (that fetters all of us)”
“But they do not survive,” I said; “and the great ones and their
influence do survive.”
“For all the good they do,” he answered, laughing, “they might as well
be dead. Jesus, who always spoke for the poor and the humble and the
outcast, for peace and love and gentleness, has brought war and hate
into the world. But let us keep to the idea of the creative artist.
That will show us God in His true light.
“God created the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night.
But why only one sun, and why in pity’s sake only one moon? Why not a
dozen suns and a score of moons lamping it every night?--moons of every
shape and colour, so that a girl could look at her lover and say: ‘That
night you kissed me first and made me conscious of my body the moons
were like primroses in the sky’; or some Cleopatra would remind Antony
of the night when to celebrate their marriage she bared her beauty to
the moons that flamed like orchids here in red, and there in yellow;
and a youth would cry to his mistress: ‘When you looked at me with
love that night our moon was like a passion flower set in the purple
Heaven, and when we went home afterwards a great marigold lit our
steps.’
“Now, alas! the moon in waning or in waxing must always be the
same--ivory light or silver light--something for the poets--a sliver
of cheese in the illimitable vast. God a creative artist! There never
was a creature more devoid of the creative impulse if creation means
originality; if creation means mediocre, fishlike productivity, then
you are right. He is prodigious; a gigantic Conan Doyle.
“Ah, you listen and so I’ll confess to you.
“I was an artist in the beginning and tried to paint my dreams. In one
picture I put three moons with astonishing effects of light and shade,
and everyone who saw it laughed and jeered--the idiots.
“‘Nothing like that in Nature,’ the critics sneered.
“‘Sure,’ I answered; ‘don’t you wish there were?’ Oh, the fools!
“Don’t you see, man, God hates originality; that’s the first truth. And
He is immoral; that’s the second great fact. Ha! that makes you gasp.
And I will prove it, show you how.
“If suffering were to be any good in life it would have a moral
purpose, would it not? You would suffer in exact proportion to the
injury inflicted on the organism. But no! Tear your nail to the quick
and you will suffer more than if a knife were driven through your
heart. Pain has no relation to morality; you are pained gratuitously,
suffer agonies for nothing: a scratch hurts more than a death wound; it
is all chance and senseless. Moreover, God is cruel! He loves to punish
without reason and beyond measure.”
I found almost nothing to reply. “Pleasure, too, is disproportionate?”
I said half to myself.
“Sure,” he cried; “sure. Pleasure is a lure to disease as pain is
malevolent cruelty. Pleasure is as immoral as pain. God knows nothing
of morality, cares nothing for man or man’s welfare. Think of man’s
miserable state: one organ for pleasure and a dozen for suffering. One
small palate to taste with that gives both pain and pleasure, but a
stomach, liver, spleen, lungs and useless yards of intestine and God
knows what besides, all to give pain and no pleasure at all!
“Pleasure the rare exception, pain the rule. Everyone knows that our
nerves feel pain and suffering ten times more keenly than pleasure or
joy: how often does one scream with pleasure or go mad with joy? God is
a Sadist who delights in our suffering!
“Look at the world to-day....
“Men are like God. Look at the cities they build; dreadful places,
hideous. A big meaningless street or two and leagues of hovels and
festering animal dens, all sordid, squalid, commonplace.
“If I were the master of London or Paris or New York I would build
a city to delight the soul; beautiful houses all different and all
healthy. Why, I’d have a children’s park that would be a paradise
for the young, where paving-stones should gather themselves into big
rockeries to mirage mountains for the tots and there should be sandy
beaches and lakelets for the girl children to play by.
“I would have a comic street too, of course, that would be a delight to
all of us--a really comic street, where the chimneys would lean over
the eaves and listen to what went on below; where lamp-posts instead
of being ranged stupidly at equal distances (they measure them to be
exact!) should be distributed about like lilies pensively reflecting
on the light they shed in dark places: here one should stand in the
middle of the street with head bent over as if the neck were too weak
to bear the weight of light, and there one should lean against the
wall weak-kneed as if drunk, with a flickering gleam to mimic the
intelligence floating in a drunkard’s eyes.
“And the side-walk. It should surely wander into the road at places
and return when you least expected it; and the houses should all have
character: here a marble palace should lean against a frame shack as if
for support as in real life. Oh, oh! I would build a City of wonders.
“But now every street is dull and sordid, for men are as mediocre as
the God that made them. I hate God and I hate His dull commonplace
world, and I hate most of all the myriads of cruel, greedy, ferocious
men and women He has made, the slimy spawn of selfishness----”
“There, there,” said a voice, and as I looked up I saw a man of middle
age, who had come out of the wood behind us, touch my companion on
the shoulder. “Don’t you go exciting yourself, Mr. Scroper. God’s all
right, I guess. It’s your wits that are wrong.”
The keeper turned to me: “’Tain’t good for ’m, sir, exciting ’isself
like this. He do ’ave strange ideas though, don’t ’e, sir, and ’e do
talk ’em fine.”
All the light had gone out of my companion’s face. As he was led away
he would not even look at me. Was he insane? I could not believe it.
After a moment’s pause I hurried after him:
“There’s nothing wrong with you?” I cried; “nothing.”
He turned to me with a wan smile:
“Thank you, thank you!”
“But why are you here?” I burst out.
He lifted his hand with resignation:
“The mediocrites,” he said gently, “are our masters.”
IN CENTRAL AFRICA
IN CENTRAL AFRICA
I
I had gone to Zanzibar and hired carriers for a hunting expedition
and then pushed into the wild alone--for uneducated natives are not
companions. Week after week I had marched, rising steadily towards the
great lake, killing game only when food was needed, going wherever the
spirit moved, in perfect lawless freedom.
One evening the great mountain Kilimanjaro etched its mass against
the opal sky and I made up my mind to climb it, or at least to get to
know it, and a week later we were among the foothills. One day the
negro captain I had put in charge of the men told me the carriers were
all frightened, for a great chief lived on the mountain, and he was a
slave-dealer and might send them away in chains to die far from kith or
kin on the further side of the sea.
I asked his name. Suleiman, I was told; and for curiosity’s sake or
for adventure I resolved to visit him. Two days later, just as we were
breaking camp, three men from Suleiman presented themselves with a
letter asking me to halt my men and accompany the messengers to the
Great Chief. In spite of the captain’s warnings I took my English
servant and went with them.
All three were fine specimens; the leader, a chief of the Swahili, must
have been six feet three and was broad in proportion, and two of his
tribesmen, both above medium height, were stoutly built and armed, as I
noticed at once, not with assegais or clubs, but with cheap repeating
rifles.
“Where did you get them?” I asked the chief, pointing to the rifles.
“Chief Suleiman,” was his reply. Evidently Suleiman, in his eyes, was a
sort of god, for he mouthed the word like a challenge.
That first morning the march lay through scattered clumps of trees
and bushes of thorn and was steadily upward, I remarked, for towards
evening the air was at once lighter and cooler.
Next day we got into the forest itself and marched along a narrow
winding path, which ran like a black ribbon through the gloom. Often I
had wondered who first made these winding ways through the forest trees
and thorn bushes; wait-a-bit thorns the Boers call them, and indeed if
you get caught in them you are likely to wait a bit and be uncommon
glad to get free with a whole skin, for the thorns are often as thick
and long as a man’s little finger and as sharp as a steel fishhook, and
these hooks are set at all angles on tough branches. I’d rather brave a
German barrage and the worst barbed wire than that murderous, elastic
entanglement.
All that day I walked behind the big chief and learned from him half a
hundred Swahili words; savages, I found, are very like children, and
love to give themselves airs as teachers.