part of the North Sea much less known to me, I was deeply conscious of
the familiarity of my surroundings. It was a cloudy, nasty day, and the
aspects of nature don’t change, unless in the course of thousands of
years--or, perhaps, centuries. The Phœnicians, its first discoverers,
the Romans, the first imperial rulers of that sea, had experienced days
like this, so different in the wintry quality of the light even on that
July afternoon, from anything they had ever known in their native
Mediterranean. For myself, a very late comer into that sea and its
former pupil, I accorded amused recognition to the characteristic aspect
so well remembered from my days of training. The same old thing. A
grey-green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white
foam-ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made
of wet blotting-paper. From time to time a flurry of fine rain blew
along like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats,
very few, very scattered, very solid and motionless against an ever
dissolving, ever re-forming sky-line.
Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for the
emptiness of the decks favouring my reminiscent mood.
It might have been a day of five-and-thirty years ago, when there was on
this and every other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be seen.
Yet, thanks to the unchangeable sea, I could have given myself up to the
illusion bringing the past close to the future, if it had not been for
the periodical transit across my gaze of a German passenger. He was
marching round and round the boat-deck with characteristic
determination. Two sturdy boys gambolled round him in his progress like
two small disorderly satellites round their parent planet. He was
bringing them home from their school in England for their holiday. What
could have induced him to entrust his offspring to the unhealthy
influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and criminal country, I
cannot imagine. It could hardly have been from motives of economy. I did
not speak to him. He trod the deck of that decadent British ship with a
scornful foot, while his breast (and to some extent his stomach, too)
appeared expanded by the consciousness of a superior destiny. Later, I
could observe the same truculent bearing, touched with the racial
grotesqueness, in the men of the Landwehr corps, the first that passed
through Cracow to reinforce the Austrian Army in Eastern Galicia.
Indeed, the haughty passenger might very well have been, most probably
was, an officer of the Landwehr; and perhaps those two fine, active boys
are orphans by now. Thus things acquire significance by the lapse of
time. A citizen, a father, a warrior, a mote in the dust-cloud of six
million of fighting particles, still tossed East or West in the lurid
tempest, or already snapped up, an unconsidered trifle, in the jaws of
war, his very humanity was not consciously impressed on my mind at the
time. Mainly, for me, he was a sharp tapping of heels round the corner
of the deck-house, a white yachting-cap and a green overcoat getting
periodically between my eyes and the shifting cloud-horizon of the
ashy-green North Sea. He was but a shadowy intrusion and a disregarded
one, for far away there to the West, in the direction of the Dogger
Bank, where fishermen go seeking their daily bread and sometimes find
their graves, I could behold an experience of my own in the winter of
1881, not of war truly, but of a fairly lively contest with the elements
which were very angry indeed.
There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night--or
a night of hate (it isn’t for nothing that the North Sea is also called
the German Ocean)--when all the fury stored in its heart seemed
concentrated on one ship which could do no better than to float on her
side in an unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and altogether
intolerable manner. There were on board besides myself, seventeen men,
all good and true, including a round enormous Dutchman who, in those
hours between sunset and sunrise, managed to lose his blown-out
appearance somehow, became as it were deflated, and thereafter for a
long time moved in our midst wrinkled and slack all over like a
half-collapsed balloon. The whimpering of our deck-boy, a skinny,
impressionable little scarecrow out of a training-ship, for whom,
because of the tender immaturity of his nerves, this display of German
Ocean frightfulness was too much (before the year was out he developed
into a sufficiently cheeky young ruffian), his desolate whimpering, I
say, heard between the gusts of that black, savage night, was much more
present to my mind and indeed to my senses, than the green overcoat and
the white cap of the German passenger circling the deck indefatigably,
attended by his two gyrating children.
“That’s a very nice gentleman.” This information, together with the fact
that he was a widower and a regular passenger twice a year by the ship,
was communicated to me suddenly by our captain. At intervals through the
day he would pop out of his cabin and offer me short snatches of
conversation. He owned a simple soul and a not very entertaining mind,
and he was, without malice and, I believe, quite unconsciously, a warm
Germanophil. And no wonder! As he told me himself, he had been fifteen
years on that run, and spent almost as much of his life in Germany as in
England.
“Wonderful people they are,” he repeated from time to time, without
entering into particulars, but with many nods of sagacious obstinacy.
What he knew of them, I suppose, were a few commercial travellers and
small merchants, most likely. But I had observed long before that German
genius has a hypnotising power over half-baked souls and half-lighted
minds. There is an immense force of suggestion in highly organised
mediocrity. Had it not hypnotised half Europe? My man was very much
under the spell of German excellence. On the other hand, his contempt
for France was equally general and unbounded. I tried to advance some
arguments against this position, but I only succeeded in making him
hostile to myself. “I believe you are a Frenchman yourself,” he snarled
at last, giving me an intensely suspicious look; and forthwith broke off
communications with a man of such unsound sympathies.
Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish smudge
of the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any change in their
colouring and texture. Evening was coming on over the North Sea. Black
uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dotting the duskiness of water
and clouds in the eastern board; tops of islands fringing the German
shore. While I was looking at their antics amongst the waves--and for
all their manifest solidity they were very elusive things in the failing
light--another passenger came out on deck. This one wore a dark overcoat
and a grey cap. The yellow leather strap of his binocular-case crossed
his chest. His elderly red cheeks nourished but a very thin crop of
short white hairs, and the end of his nose was so perfectly round that
it determined the whole character of his physiognomy. Indeed, nothing
else in it had the slightest chance to assert itself. His disposition,
unlike the widower’s, appeared to be mild and humane. He offered me the
loan of his glasses. He had a wife and some small children concealed in
the depths of the ship, and he thought that they were very well where
they were. His eldest son was about the decks somewhere.
“We are Americans,” he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar
tone. He spoke English with the accent of our captain’s “wonderful
people,” and proceeded to give me the history of the family’s crossing
the Atlantic in a White Star ship. They remained in England just the
time necessary for a railway journey from Liverpool to Harwich. His
people (those in the depths of the ship, I suppose) were naturally a
little tired.
At that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to us
from the fore-deck in a state of intense elation. “Hurrah!” he cried
under his breath, “The first German light! Hurrah!”
And those two American citizens shook hands on it with the greatest
fervour, while I turned away and received full in the eyes the brilliant
wink of the Borkum lighthouse squatting low down in the darkness. The
shade of the night had settled on the North Sea.
I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full of lights. The
great change of sea-life since my time was brought home to me. I had
been conscious all day of an interminable procession of steamers. They
went on and on as if in chase of each other, the Baltic trade, the trade
of Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany, pitching heavily into a head-sea
and bound for the gateway of Dover Strait. Singly, and in small
companies of two or three, they emerged from the dull, colourless,
sunless distances ahead, as if the supply of rather roughly finished
mechanical toys were inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store, away
there, below the grey curve of the earth. Cargo steam-vessels have
reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one
reflects that this is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless
awe into one. These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in
port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle
when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a
seaway, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have
in them something caricatural, a suggestion of low parody directed at
noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical
toilers, conceited and without grace.
When they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo-tanks carried tame
lightning within its slab-sided body), when they switched on their lamps
they spangled the night with the cheap, electric, shop-glitter, here,
there, and everywhere, as of some High Street, broken up and washed out
to sea. Later, Heligoland cut into the overhead darkness with its
powerful beam, infinitely prolonged out of unfathomable night under the
clouds.
I remained on deck till we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so
over-lighted amidships that one could not make out her complete shape,
glided across our bows and sent a pilot on board. I fear that the oar,
as a working implement, shall become presently as obsolete as the sail.
The pilot boarded us in a motor dinghy. More and more is mankind
reducing its physical activities to pulling levers and twirling little
wheels. Progress! Yet the older methods of meeting natural forces
demanded intelligence too; an equally fine readiness of wits. And
readiness of wits working in combination with the strength of muscles
made a more complete man.
It was really a surprisingly small dinghy, and it ran to and fro like a
water-insect fussing noisily down there with immense self-importance.
Within hail of us the hull of the Elbe Lightship floated all dark and
silent under its enormous, round, service lantern; a faithful black
shadow watching the broad estuary full of lights.
Such was my first view of the Elbe approached under the wings of peace
already spread for a flight away from the luckless shores of Europe. Our
visual impressions remain with us so persistently that I find it
extremely difficult to hold fast to the rational belief that now
everything is dark over there, that the Elbe Lightship has been towed
away from its post of duty, the triumphant beam of Heligoland
extinguished, and the pilot-boat laid up, or turned to warlike uses for
lack of its proper work to do. And obviously it must be so.
Any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way must be creeping
along cautiously, with the unlighted, war-blighted, black coast close on
one, and sudden death on the other hand. For all the space we steamed
through on that Sunday evening must be now one great mine field, sown
thickly with the seeds of hate; while submarines steal out to sea, over
the very spot, perhaps, where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of
us with so much fussy importance. Mines, submarines. The last word in
sea warfare! Progress--impressively disclosed by this war.
There have been other wars! Wars not inferior in the greatness of the
stake, and in the fierce animosity of feelings. During that one which
was finished a hundred years ago, it happened that while the English
fleet was keeping watch on Brest, an American, perhaps Fulton himself,
offered to the maritime Prefect of the port and to the French Admiral,
an invention which would sink the unsuspecting English ships one after
another--or at any rate, most of them. The offer was not even taken into
consideration; and the Prefect ends his report to the Minister of Marine
in Paris with a fine phrase of indignation: “It is not the sort of death
one would deal to brave men.”
And, behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the like
proportions in the intensity of aroused passions and the greatness of
issues, the dead flavour of archaism descended on the manly sentiment of
those self-denying words. Mankind had been demoralised since by its own
mastery of mechanical appliances. Its spirit apparently is so weak now,
and its flesh has grown so strong, that it will face any deadly horror
of destruction and cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy,
murderous contrivance. It has become the intoxicated slave of its own
detestable ingenuity. It is true, too, that since the Napoleonic times
another sort of war doctrine has been inculcated to a nation, and held
out to the world.
IV
On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a progress but
a retracing of footsteps on a road travelled before, I had no beacons to
look out for in Germany. I had never lingered in that land, which, as a
whole, is so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous
sympathies and magnanimous impulses. An ineradicable, invincible
provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like
a frowsy garment. Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from
it instinctively, as from a threatening phantom. I believe that children
and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of perception as far
as spectral apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned.
I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space,
without sights, without sounds. No whispers of the war reached my
voluntary abstraction. And perhaps not so very voluntary, after all!
Each of us is a fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had to watch my
own personality returning from another world, as it were, to revisit the
glimpses of old moons. Considering the condition of humanity, I am,
perhaps, not so much to blame for giving myself up to that occupation.
We prize the sensation of our continuity, and we can only capture it in
that way. By watching.
We arrived in Cracow late at night. After a scrambly supper, I said to
my eldest boy, “I can’t go to bed. I must go out for a look round.
Coming?”
He was ready enough. For him all this was part of the interesting
adventure of the whole journey. We stepped out of the portal of the
hotel into an empty street, very silent and bright with moonlight. I was
indeed revisiting the glimpses of the moon. I felt so much like a ghost
that the discovery that I could remember such material things as the
right turn to take and the general direction of the street gave me a
moment of wistful surprise.
The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great Central Square of
the town, the centre of its affairs and of the lighter side of its life.
We could see at the far end of the street a promising widening of space.
At the corner an unassuming (but armed) policeman, wearing ceremoniously
at midnight a pair of white gloves, which made his big hands extremely
noticeable, turned his head to look at the grizzled foreigner holding
forth in a strange tongue to a youth on whose arm he leaned.
The square, immense in its solitude, was full to the brim of moonlight.
The garland of lights at the foot of the houses seemed to burn at the
bottom of a bluish pool. I noticed with intimate satisfaction that the
unnecessary trees the Municipality persisted in sticking between the
stones had been steadily refusing to grow. They were not a bit bigger
than the poor victims I could remember. Also, the paving operations
seemed to be exactly at the same point at which I left them forty years
before. There were the dull, torn-up patches on that lighted expanse,
the piles of paving material looking ominously black, like heads of
rocks on a silvery sea. Who was it that said Time works wonders? What an
exploded superstition! As far as these trees and these paving-stones
were concerned it had worked nothing. The suspicion of the
unchangeableness of things already vaguely suggested to my senses by our
rapid drive from the railway station and by the short walk, was
agreeably strengthened within me.
“We are now on the line A.B.,” I said to my companion, importantly.
It was the name bestowed in my time to that side of the square by the
senior students of that town of classical learning and historical
relics. The common citizens knew nothing of it, and even if they had,
would not have dreamed of taking it seriously. He who used it was of the
initiated, belonged to the Schools. We youngsters regarded that name as
a fine jest, the invention of a most excellent fancy. Even as I uttered
it to my boy I experienced again that sense of privilege, of initiation.
And then, happening to look up at the wall, I saw in the light of the
corner lamp, a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing an
inscription in raised black letters, thus: “Line A.B.” Heavens! The name
had been adopted officially! Any town urchin, any guttersnipe, any
herb-selling woman of the market-place, any wandering Boetian, was free
to talk of the line A.B., to walk on the line A.B., to appoint to meet
his friends on the line A.B. It had become a mere name in a directory. I
was stunned by the extreme mutability of things. Time _could_ work
wonders, and no mistake. A Municipality had stolen an invention of
excellent fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid piece of cast
iron.
I proposed that we should walk to the other end of the line, using the
profaned name, not only without gusto, but with positive distaste. And
this, too, was one of the wonders of Time, for a bare minute had worked
that change. There was at the end of the line a certain street I wanted
to look at, I explained to my companion.
To our right the unequal massive towers of St. Mary’s Church soared
aloft into the ethereal radiance of the air, very black on their shaded
sides, glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the others. In the
distance the Florian Gate, thick and squat under its pointed roof,
barred the street with the square shoulders of the old city wall. In the
narrow brilliantly pale vista of bluish flagstones and silvery fronts of
houses, its black archway stood out small but very distinct.
There was not a soul in sight, and not even the echo of a footstep for
our ears. Into this coldly illuminated and dumb emptiness there issued
out of my aroused memory a small boy of eleven, wending his way, not
very fast, to a preparatory school for day-pupils on the second floor of
the third house down from Florian Gate. It was in the winter months of
1868. At eight o’clock of every morning that God made, sleet or shine, I
walked up Florian Street. But of the school I remember very little. I
believe that one of my co-sufferers there has become a much appreciated
editor of historical documents. But I didn’t suffer very much from the
various imperfections of my first school. I was rather indifferent to
school troubles. I had a private gnawing worm of my own. This was the
time of my father’s last illness. Every evening at seven, turning my
back on the Florian Gate, I walked all the way to a big old house in a
quiet little street a good distance beyond the Great Square. There, in
a large drawing-room, panelled and bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty
ceiling, in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of
dusk, I sat at a little table to worry and ink myself all over till the
task of preparation was done. The table of my toil faced a tall white
double door which was kept closed; but now and then it would come ajar
and a nun in a white coif would squeeze herself through, glide across
the room and disappear. There were two of these noiseless nursing nuns.
Their voices were seldom heard. For indeed what could they have to say!
When they did speak to me, it was with their lips hardly moving, in a
claustral clear whisper. Domestic matters were ordered by the elderly
housekeeper of our neighbour on the second floor, a Canon of the
Cathedral, lent for the emergency. She too spoke but seldom. She wore a
black dress with a cross hanging by a chain on her ample bosom. And
though when she spoke she moved her lips more than the nuns, she never
let her voice rise above a peacefully murmuring note. The air around me
was all piety, resignation and silence.
I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not been a reading
boy. My lessons done I would have had nothing to do but sit and watch
the awful stillness of the sick-room flow out through the closed white
door and coldly enfold my scared heart. I suppose that in a futile
childish way I would have gone crazy. But I was a reading boy. There
were many books about, lying on consoles, on tables, and even on the
floor, for we had not had time to settle down. I read! What did I not
read! Sometimes the eldest nun gliding up and casting a mistrustful
glance at the open pages would lay her hand lightly on my head and
suggest in a doubtful whisper: “Perhaps it isn’t very good for you to
read these books.” I would raise my eyes to her face mutely and with a
vague gesture of giving it up she would glide away.
Later in the evening, but not always, I would be permitted to tiptoe
into the sick-room to say good-night to the figure prone on the bed
which often could not recognise my presence but by a slow movement of
the eyes, put my lips dutifully to the nerveless hand lying on the
coverlet, and tiptoe out again. Then I would go to bed, in a room at the
end of a corridor, and often, not always, cry myself into a good, sound
sleep.
I looked forward to what was coming with an incredulous terror. I turned
my eyes from it, sometimes with success; and yet all the time I had an
awful sensation of the inevitable. I had also moments of revolt which
stripped off me some of my simple trust in the government of the
universe. But when the inevitable entered the sick-room and the white
door was thrown wide open, I don’t think I found a single tear to shed.
I have a suspicion that the Canon’s housekeeper looked upon me as the
most callous little wretch on earth.
The day of the funeral came in due course, and all the generous “Youth
of the Schools,” the grave Senate of the University, the delegations of
the trade-guilds, might have obtained (if they cared) _de visu_ evidence
of the callousness of the little wretch. There was nothing in my aching
head but a few words, some such stupid sentences as: “It’s done,” or
“It’s accomplished” (in Polish it is much shorter), or something of the
sort, repeating itself endlessly. The long procession moved on out of
the little street, down a long street, past the Gothic portal of St.
Mary’s between its unequal towers, towards the Florian Gate.