subject, having a great repugnance to consider murder as an engine of
politics. It fitted with my ethical sense that an act cruel and absurd
should be also useless. I had also the vision of a crowd of shadowy
archdukes in the background out of which one would step forward to take
the place of that dead man in the sun of European politics. And then, to
speak the whole truth, there was no man capable of forming a judgement
who attended so little to the march of events as I did at that time.
What for want of a more definite term I must call my mind was fixed on
my own affairs, not because they were in a bad posture, but because of
their fascinating, holiday promising aspect. I obtained my information
as to Europe at second hand, from friends good enough to come down now
and then to see us with their pockets full of crumpled papers, and who
imparted it to me casually with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the
reality of my interest. And yet I was not indifferent; but the tension
in the Balkans had become chronic after the acute crisis, and one could
not help being less conscious of it. It had wearied out one’s attention.
Who could have guessed that on that wild stage we had just been looking
at a miniature rehearsal of the great world drama, the reduced model of
the very passions and violences of what the future held in store for the
powers of the Old World? Here and there, perhaps, rare minds had a
suspicion of that possibility while watching the collective Europe stage
managing a little contemptuously in a feeling of conscious superiority,
by means of notes and conferences, the prophetic reproduction of its
awaiting fate. It was wonderfully exact in the spirit, same roar of
guns, same protestations of superiority, same words in the air: race,
liberation, justice, and the same mood of trivial demonstration. You
could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg, however roundabout the
route. “You mean Petrograd,” would say the booking-clerk. Shortly after
the fall of Adrianople a friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for
some “café turc” at the end of his lunch.
--“Monsieur veut dire café balkanique,” the patriotic waiter corrected
him austerely.
I will not say that I had not seen something of that instructive aspect
in the war of the Balkans, both in its first and even in its second
phase. But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to
see in it the evidence of an alarmist cynicism. As to alarm I pointed
out that fear is natural to man and even salutary. It has done as much
as courage for the preservation of races and institutions. But from a
charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. It is like a
charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of
disgraceful calamity that must be carried off by a jaunty bearing--a
sort of thing I am not capable of. Rather than be thought to be a mere
jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness
of the usual arguments. It had been pointed out to me that those were
nations not far removed from a savage state. Their economics were yet at
the stage of scratching the earth and feeding pigs. The complex material
civilization of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by war.
The industry and the finance could not allow themselves to be
disorganised by the ambitions of the idle class or even the aspirations,
whatever they might be, of the masses.
Very plausible all this sounded. War does not pay. There had been even a
book written on that theme--an attempt to put pacifism on a material
basis. Nothing more solid could have been imagined on this trading and
manufacturing globe. War was bad business! This was final.
But truth to say on this fateful July I reflected but little on the
condition of the civilised world. Whatever sinister passions were
heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated by a
simple and innocent desire to notice the signs, or to interpret them
correctly. The most innocent of passions takes the edge off one’s
judgement. The desire which obsessed me was simply the desire of travel.
And that being so, it would have taken something very plain in the way
of symptoms to shake my simple trust in the stability of things on the
continent. My sentiment and not my reason was engaged there. My eyes
were turned to the past, not to the future--the past that one cannot
suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession,
the darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.
In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to spend
some weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighbourhood of Cracow
but on the other side of the Russian frontier. The enterprise at first
seemed to be considerable. Since leaving the sea to which I have been
faithful for so many years, I have discovered that there is in my
composition very little stuff from which travellers are made. I confess
it with shame, my first idea about a projected journey is to leave it
alone.
But that invitation, received at first with a sort of uneasiness, awoke
the dormant energies in my feelings. Cracow is the town where I spent
with my father the last eighteen months of his life. It was in that old
royal and academical city that I ceased to be a child, became a boy,
knew the friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignation
of that age. It was between those historic walls that I began to
understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a
fund of sensations with which I was to break violently by throwing
myself into an unrelated life which permitted me but seldom to look back
that way. The wings of time were spread over all this, and I feared at
first that if I ventured bodily in there I would find that I who have
evoked so many imaginary lives had been embracing mere shadows in my
youth. I feared. But fear in itself may become a fascination. Men have
gone alone, trembling, into graveyards at midnight--just to see what
would happen. And this adventure was to be pursued in sunshine. Neither
would it be pursued alone. The invitation was extended to us all. This
journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a
tribe. My present, all that gave solidity and value to it at any rate,
would stand by me in this test of the reality of my past. I was pleased
to show my companions what Polish country life was like and the town
where I was at school, before my boys got too old, and gaining an
individual past of their own should lose the fresh sympathies of their
age. It is only in this short understanding of youth that perhaps we
have the faculty of coming out of ourselves to see dimly the visions and
share the trouble of another soul. For youth all is reality, and with
justice; since they can apprehend so vividly its images behind which a
longer life makes one doubt whether there is any substance. I trusted to
the fresh receptivity of these young beings in whom, unless heredity is
merely a phantasy, there should have been fibre which would quicken at
the sight, the atmosphere, the memories, of that corner of the earth
where my own boyhood received its first independent impressions.
The first of the third week in July, while the telegraph wires hummed
with the words of enormous import which were to fill blue-books,
yellow-books, white-books and rouse the wonder of the world, was taken
up with light-hearted preparation for the journey. What was it but just
a rush through Germany to get over as quickly as possible?
It is the part of the earth’s solid surface of which I know the least.
In my life I had been across it only twice. I may well say of it, “Vidi
tantum,” and that very little I saw through the window of a railway
carriage at express speed. Those journeys were more like pilgrimages
when one hurries on towards the goal without looking to the right or
left for the satisfaction of deeper need than curiosity. In this last
instance, too, I was so uncurious that I would have liked to fall asleep
on the shores of England and open my eyes only, if it were possible, on
the other side of the Silesian frontier.
Yet in truth, as many others have done, I had “sensed it,” that promised
land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that race
planted in the middle of Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the
attitude of Europeans amongst effete Asiatics or mere niggers, and with
a feeling of superiority freeing their hands of all moral bonds and
anxious to take up, if I may express myself so, the “perfect man’s
burden.” Meantime in a clearing of the Teutonic forest their sages were
rearing a Tree of cynical wisdom, a sort of Upas tree, whose shade may
be seen lying now over the prostrate body of Belgium. It must be said
that they laboured open enough, watering it from the most authentic
sources of all evil, and watching with bespectacled eyes the slow
ripening of the glorious blood-red fruit. The sincerest words of peace,
words of menace, and I verily believe, words of abasement even, if there
had been a voice vile enough to utter them, would have been wasted on
their ecstasy. For when a fruit ripens on a branch, it must fall. There
is nothing on earth that can prevent it.
II
For reasons which at first seemed to me somewhat obscure, that one of my
companions whose wishes are law decided that our travels should begin in
an unusual way by the crossing of the North Sea. We should proceed from
Harwich to Hamburg. Besides being thirty-six times longer than the usual
Dover-Calais passage this rather unusual route had an air of adventure
in better keeping with the romantic feeling of this Polish journey,
which for so many years had been before us in a state of a project full
of colour and promise, but always retreating, elusive, like an enticing
mirage.
And, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage. No wonder they were
excited. It’s no mean experience to lay your hands on a mirage. The day
of departure had come, the very hour had struck. The luggage was coming
downstairs. It was most convincing. Poland then, if erased from the map,
yet existed in reality; it was not a mere “pays du rêve,” where you can
travel only in imagination. For no man, they argued, not even father, an
habitual pursuer of dreams, would push the love of the novelist’s art
of make-believe to the point of burdening himself with real trunks for a
voyage “au pays du rêve.”
As we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, the most
peaceful nook in Kent, the sky, after weeks of perfectly brazen
serenity, veiled its blue depths and started to weep fine tears for the
refreshment of the parched fields. A pearly blurr settled over them; a
light sifted of all glare, of everything unkindly and searching that
dwells in the splendour of unveiled skies. All unconscious of going
towards the very scenes of war, I carried off in my eye this tiny
fragment of Great Britain: a few fields, a wooded rise, a clump of trees
or two, with a short stretch of road, and here and there a gleam of red
wall and tiled roof above the darkening hedges wrapped up in soft mist
and peace. And I felt that all this had a very strong hold on me as the
embodiment of a beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was dear to me not
as an inheritance, but as an acquisition, as a conquest in the sense in
which a woman is conquered--by love, which is a sort of surrender.
Those were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts to the matter in
hand, which was the simplest sort of a Continental holiday. And I am
certain that my companions, near as they are to me, felt no other
trouble but the suppressed excitement of pleasurable anticipation. The
forms and the spirit of the land before their eyes were their
inheritance, not their conquest--which is a thing precarious, and,
therefore, the more precious, possessing you if only by the fear of
unworthiness, rather than possessed by you. Moreover, as we sat together
in the same railway carriage, they were looking forward to a voyage in
space, whereas I felt more and more plainly that what I had started on
was a journey in time, into the past; a fearful enough prospect for the
most consistent, but to him who had not known how to preserve against
his impulses the order and continuity of his life--so that at times it
presented itself to his conscience as a series of betrayals--still more
dreadful.
I confess here my thoughts so exclusively personal to explain why there
was no room in my consciousness for the apprehension of a European war.
I don’t mean to say I ignored the possibility. I simply did not think of
it. And it made no difference; for, if I had thought of it, it could
only have been in the lame and inconclusive way of the common
uninitiated mortals; and I am sure that nothing short of intellectual
certitude--obviously unattainable by the man in the street--could have
stayed me on that journey which now that I had started on it seemed an
irrevocable thing, a necessity of my self-respect.
London--the London of before the war, flaunting its enormous glare as of
a monstrous conflagration up into the black sky--received us with its
best Venice-like aspect of rainy evenings, the wet, asphalted streets
lying with the sheen of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great
houses of the city towering all dark like empty palaces above the
reflected lights of the glistening roadway.
Everything in the subdued incomplete night life around the Mansion House
went on normally, with its fascinating air of a dead commercial city of
sombre walls through which the inextinguishable night life of millions
streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles.
In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double gates, a
continuous line of taxicabs glided down the inclined approach and up
again, like an endless chain of dredger-buckets pouring in the
passengers, and dipping them out of the great railway station under the
inexorable pallid face of the clock telling off the diminishing minutes
of peace. It was the hour of the boat trains to Holland, to Hamburg, and
there seemed to be no lack of people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant,
who wanted to go to these places. The station was normally crowded, and
if there was a great flutter of evening papers in the multitude of
hands, there were no signs of extraordinary emotion on that multitude of
faces. There was nothing in them to distract me from the thought that it
was singularly appropriate that I should start from this station on the
retraced way of my existence. For this was the station at which,
thirty-six years ago, I arrived on my first visit to London. Not the
same building, but the same spot. At eighteen years of age, after a
period of probation and training I had imposed upon myself as ordinary
seaman on board a North Sea coaster, I had come up from Lowestoft--my
first long railway journey in England--to “sign on” for an Antipodean
voyage in a deep-water ship. Straight from a railway carriage I had
walked into the great city with something of the feeling of a traveller
penetrating into a vast and unexplored wilderness. No explorer could
have been more lonely. I did not know a single soul of all these
millions that all around me peopled the mysterious distances of the
streets. I cannot say I was free from a little youthful awe, but at that
age one’s feelings are simple. I was elated. I was pursuing a clear aim.
I was carrying out a deliberate plan of making out of myself, in the
first place, a seaman worthy of the service, good enough to work by the
side of the men with whom I was to live; and in the second place, I had
to justify my existence to myself, to redeem a tacit moral pledge. Both
these aims were to be attained by the same effort. How simple seemed the
problem of life then, on that hazy day of early September in the year
1878, when I entered London for the first time.
From that point of view--youth and a straightforward scheme of
conduct--it was certainly a year of grace. All the help I had to get in
touch with the world I was invading was a piece of paper not much bigger
than the palm of my hand--in which I held it--torn out of a larger plan
of London for the greater facility of reference. It had been the object
of careful study for some days past. The fact that I could take a
conveyance at the station had never occurred to my mind, no, not even
when I got out into the street and stood, taking my anxious bearings, in
the midst, so to speak, of twenty thousand cabs. A strange absence of
mind or unconscious conviction that one cannot approach an important
moment of one’s life by means of a hired carriage? Yes, it would have
been a preposterous proceeding. And indeed I was to make an Australian
voyage and encircle the globe before ever entering a London hansom.
Another document, a cutting from a newspaper, containing the address of
an obscure agent, was in my pocket. And I needed not to take it out.
That address was as if graven deep in my brain. I muttered its words to
myself as I walked on, navigating the sea of London by the chart
concealed in the palm of my hand; for I had vowed to myself not to
inquire my way from any one. Youth is the time of rash pledges. Had I
taken a wrong turn I would have been lost; and if faithful to my pledge
I might have remained lost for days, for weeks, have left perhaps my
bones to be discovered bleaching in some blind alley of the Whitechapel
district, as had happened to lonely travellers lost in the bush. But I
walked on to my destination without hesitation or mistake, showing
there, for the first time, something of that faculty to absorb and make
my own correctly the imaged topography of a chart, which in later years
was to help me in regions of intricate navigation to keep the ships
entrusted to me off the ground. And the place I was bound to was not so
easy to find, either. It was one of those courts hidden away from the
charted and navigable streets, lost amongst the thick growth of houses,
like a dark pool in the depths of a forest, approached by an
inconspicuous archway, as if by a secret path; a Dickensian nook of
London, that wonder-city, the growth of which bears no sign of
intelligent design, but many traces of freakishly sombre phantasy which
the great Master knew so well how to bring out by magic of his great and
understanding love. And the office I entered was Dickensian too. The
dust of the Waterloo year lay on the panes and frames of its windows;
early Georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting.
It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy. By the
light of a single gas-jet depending from the smoked ceiling I saw an
elderly man, in a long coat of black broadcloth. He had a grey beard, a
big nose, thick lips, and broad shoulders. His longish white hair and
the general character of his head recalled vaguely a burly apostle in
the “barocco” style of Italian art. Standing up at a tall, shabby,
slanting desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his
forehead, he was eating a mutton chop, which had been just brought to
him from some Dickensian eating-house round the corner.
Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his barocco apostle’s head with
an expression of inquiry.
I produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which must have borne
sufficient resemblance to the phonetics of English speech; for his face
broke into a smile of comprehension almost at once.--“Oh it’s you who
wrote a letter to me the other day from Lowestoft about getting a ship.”
I had written to him from Lowestoft. I can’t remember a single word of
that letter now. It was my very first composition in the English
language. And he had understood it; because he spoke to the point at
once, explaining that his business, mainly, was to find good ships for
young gentlemen who wanted to go to sea as premium apprentices with a
view of being trained for officers. But he gathered that this was not my
object. I did not desire to be apprenticed. Was that the case?
It was. He was good enough to say then, “Of course I see that you are a
gentleman too. But your wish is to get a berth before the mast as an
Able Seaman if possible. Is that it?”
It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared he
could not help me much in this. There was an Act of Parliament which
made it penal to procure ships for sailors. “An Act--of--Parliament. A
law,” he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign
understanding, while I looked at him in consternation.
I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against
an Act of Parliament! What a hopeless adventure! However, the barocco
apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get round
the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit. Yet, strictly
speaking, it was not the conduct of a good citizen. And in retrospect
there is an unfilial flavour about that early sin. For this Act of
Parliament, the Merchant Shipping Act of the mid-Victorian era, had been
in a manner of speaking a father and mother to me. For many years it had
regulated and disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount of
my breathing space, had looked after my health and tried as much as
possible to secure my personal safety in a risky calling. It isn’t such
a bad thing to lead a life of hard toil and plain duty within the four
corners of an honest Act of Parliament. And I am glad to say that its
severities have never been applied to me.
In the year 1878, the year of Peace with Honour, I had walked as lone as
any human being in the streets of London, out of Liverpool Street
Station, to surrender myself to its care. And now, in the year of the
war waged for honour and conscience more than for any other cause, I was
there again, no longer alone, but a man of infinitely dear and close
ties grown since that time, of work done, of words written, of
friendship secured. It was like the closing of a thirty-six years’
cycle.
All unaware of the War Angel already waiting with the trumpet at its
lips the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat there, thinking that this life
of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear very
wonderful, entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre
associations crowded into one half-hour of retrospective musing.
I felt, too, that this journey so suddenly entered upon was bound to
take me away from daily life’s actualities at every step. I felt it more
than ever when presently we steamed out into the North Sea, on a dark
night fitful with gusts of wind, and I lingered on deck, alone of all
the tale of the ship’s passengers. That sea was to me something
unforgettable, something much more than a name. It had been for a time
the schoolroom of my trade. On it, I may safely say, I had learned, too,
my first words of English. A wild and stormy abode, sometimes, was that
fine, narrow-waters academy of seamanship from which I launched myself
on the wide oceans. My teachers had been the coasting sailors of the
Norfolk shore. Coast men, with steady eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle
voice. Men of very few words, which, at least, were never bare of
meaning. Honest, strong, steady men, sobered by domestic ties, one and
all as far as I can remember.
That is what years ago the North Sea, I could hear growling in the dark
all round the ship, had been for me. And I fancied that I must have been
carrying its voice in my ear ever since, for nothing could be more
familiar than those short, angry sounds I was listening to with a smile
of affectionate recognition.
I could not guess that before many days my schoolroom would be
desecrated by violence, littered with wrecks, with death walking its
waves, hiding under the waters. Perhaps while I am writing these words
the children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific teachers are out
in drifters under the naval flag, dredging for German submarine mines.
III
I have said that the North Sea was my finishing school of seamanship
before I launched myself on the wider oceans. Confined as it is in
comparison with the vast stage of this water-girt globe, I did not know
it in all its parts. My classroom was the region of the English East
Coast which, in the year of Peace with Honour, had long forgotten the
war episodes belonging to its maritime history. It was a peaceful coast,
agricultural, industrial, the home of fishermen. At night the lights of
its many towns played on the clouds, or in clear weather lay still, here
and there, in brilliant pools above the ink-black outline of the shore.
On many a night I have hauled at the braces under the very shadow of
that coast, envying, as sailors will, the people ashore sleeping quietly
in their beds within sound of the sea. I imagine that not one head on
these envied pillows was made uneasy by the slightest premonition of the
realities of naval war the short lifetime of one generation was to bring
to their peaceful shores.