§ 1
In operas and romances one goes from such a parting in a splendid
dignity of gloom. But I am no hero, and I went down the big staircase of
Tarvrille's house the empty shuck of an abandoned desire. I was acutely
ashamed of my recent tears. In the centre of the hall was a marble
figure swathed about with yellow muslin. "On account of the flies," I
said, breaking our silence.
My words were far too unexpected for Tarvrille to understand. "The
flies," I repeated with an air of explanation.
"You're sure she'll be all right?" I said abruptly.
"You've done the best thing you can for her."
"I suppose I have. I have to go." And then I saw ahead of me a world
full of the tiresome need of decisions and arrangements and empty of all
interest. "Where the _devil_ am I to go, Tarvrille? I can't even get out
of things altogether...."
And then with a fresh realization of painful difficulties ahead: "I have
to tell this to my father. I've got to explain---- And he thought--he
expected----"
Tarvrille opened the half of the heavy front door for me, hesitated,
and came down the broad steps into the chilly grey street and a few
yards along the pavement with me. He wanted to say something that he
found difficult to say. When at last he did find words they were quite
ridiculous in substance, and yet at the time I took them as gravely as
he intended them. "It's no good quoting Marcus Aurelius," said
Tarvrille, "to a chap with his finger in the crack of a door."
"I suppose it isn't," I said.
"One doesn't want to be a flatulent ass of course," said Tarvrille,
"still----"
He resumed with an air of plunging. "It will sound just rot to you now,
Stratton, but after all it comes to this. Behind us is
a--situation--with half-a-dozen particular persons. Out here--I mean
here round the world--before you've done with them--there's a thousand
million people--men and women."
"Oh! what does that matter to me?" said I.
"Everything," said Tarvrille. "At least--it ought to."
He stopped and held out his hand. "Good-bye, Stratton--good luck to you!
Good-bye."
"Yes," I said. "Good-bye."
I turned away from him. The image of Mary crying as a child cries
suddenly blinded me and blotted out the world.
§ 2
I want to give you as clearly as I can some impression of the mental
states that followed this passion and this collapse. It seems to me one
of the most extraordinary aspects of all that literature of speculative
attack which is called psychology, that there is no name and no
description at all of most of the mental states that make up life.
Psychology, like sociology, is still largely in the scholastic stage, it
is ignorant and intellectual, a happy refuge for the lazy industry of
pedants; instead of experience and accurate description and analysis it
begins with the rash assumption of elements and starts out upon
ridiculous syntheses. Who with a sick soul would dream of going to a
psychologist?...
Now here was I with a mind sore and inflamed. I did not clearly
understand what had happened to me. I had blundered, offended, entangled
myself; and I had no more conception than a beast in a bog what it was
had got me, or the method or even the need of escape. The desires and
passionate excitements, the anger and stress and strain and suspicion of
the last few months had worn deep grooves in my brain, channels without
end or issue, out of which it seemed impossible to keep my thoughts. I
had done dishonorable things, told lies, abused the confidence of a
friend. I kept wrestling with these intolerable facts. If some momentary
distraction released me for a time, back I would fall presently before I
knew what was happening, and find myself scheming once more to reverse
the accomplished, or eloquently restating things already intolerably
overdiscussed in my mind, justifying the unjustifiable or avenging
defeat. I would dream again and again of some tremendous appeal to Mary,
some violent return and attack upon the situation....
One very great factor in my mental and moral distress was the uncertain
values of nearly every aspect of the case. There is an invincible sense
of wild rightness about passionate love that no reasoning and no
training will ever altogether repudiate; I had a persuasion that out of
that I would presently extract a magic to excuse my deceits and
treacheries and assuage my smarting shame. And round these deep central
preoccupations were others of acute exasperation and hatred towards
secondary people. There had been interventions, judgments upon
insufficient evidence, comments, and often quite justifiable comments,
that had filled me with an extraordinary savagery of resentment.
I had a persuasion, illogical but invincible, that I was still entitled
to all the respect due to a man of unblemished honor. I clung fiercely
to the idea that to do dishonorable things isn't necessarily to be
dishonorable.... This state of mind I am describing is, I am convinced,
the state of every man who has involved himself in any affair at once
questionable and passionate. He seems free, but he is not free; he is
the slave of the relentless paradox of his position.
And we were all of us more or less in deep grooves we had made for
ourselves, Philip, Guy, Justin, the friends involved, and all in the
measure of our grooves incapable of tolerance or sympathetic
realization. Even when we slept, the clenched fist of the attitudes we
had assumed gave a direction to our dreams.
You see the same string of events that had produced all this system of
intense preoccupations had also severed me from the possible resumption
of those wider interests out of which our intrigue had taken me. I had
had to leave England and all the political beginnings I had been
planning, and to return to those projects now, those now impossible
projects, was to fall back promptly into hopeless exasperation....
And then the longing, the longing that is like a physical pain, that
hunger of the heart for some one intolerably dear! The desire for a
voice! The arrested habit of phrasing one's thoughts for a hearer who
will listen in peace no more! From that lonely distress even rage, even
the concoction of insult and conflict, was a refuge. From that pitiless
travail of emptiness I was ready to turn desperately to any offer of
excitement and distraction.
From all those things I was to escape at last unhelped, but I want you
to understand particularly these phases through which I passed; it falls
to many and it may fall to you to pass through such a period of darkness
and malign obsession. Make the groove only a little deeper, a little
more unclimbable, make the temperament a little less sanguine, and
suicide stares you in the face. And things worse than suicide, that
suicide of self-respect which turns men to drugs and inflammatory vices
and the utmost outrageous defiance of the dreaming noble self that has
been so despitefully used. Into these same inky pools I have dipped my
feet, where other men have drowned. I understand why they drown. And my
taste of misdeed and resentment has given me just an inkling of what men
must feel who go to prison. I know what it is to quarrel with a world.
§ 3
My first plan when I went abroad was to change my Harbury French, which
was poor stuff and pedantic, into a more colloquial article, and then go
into Germany to do the same thing with my German, and then perhaps to
remain in Germany studying German social conditions--and the quality of
the German army. It seemed to me that when the term of my exile was over
I might return to England and re-enter the army. But all these were very
anæmic plans conceived by a tired mind, and I set about carrying them
out in a mood of slack lassitude. I got to Paris, and in Paris I threw
them all overboard and went to Switzerland.
I remember very clearly how I reached Paris. I arrived about sunset--I
suppose at St. Lazare or the Gare du Nord--sent my luggage to the little
hotel in the Rue d'Antin where I had taken rooms, and dreading their
loneliness decided to go direct to a restaurant and dine. I remember
walking out into the streets just as shops and windows and street lamps
were beginning to light up, and strolling circuitously through the clear
bright stir of the Parisian streets to find a dinner at the Café de la
Paix. Some day you will know that peculiar sharp definite excitement of
Paris. All cities are exciting, and each I think in a different way. And
as I walked down along some boulevard towards the centre of things I saw
a woman coming along a side street towards me, a woman with something in
her body and something in her carriage that reminded me acutely of Mary.
Her face was downcast, and then as we converged she looked up at me, not
with the meretricious smile of her class but with a steadfast, friendly
look. Her face seemed to me sane and strong. I passed and hesitated. An
extraordinary impulse took me. I turned back. I followed this woman
across the road and a little way along the opposite pavement. I remember
I did that, but I do not remember clearly what was in my mind at the
time; I think it was a vague rush towards the flash of companionship in
her eyes. There I had seemed to see the glimmer of a refuge from my
desolation. Then came amazement and reaction. I turned about and went on
my way, and saw her no more.
But afterwards, later, I went out into the streets of Paris bent upon
finding that woman. She had become a hope, a desire.
I looked for her for what seemed a long time, half an hour perhaps or
two hours. I went along, peering at the women's faces, through the
blazing various lights, the pools of shadowy darkness, the flickering
reflections and transient glitter, one of a vast stream of slow-moving
adventurous human beings. I crossed streams of traffic, paused at
luminous kiosks, became aware of dim rows of faces looking down upon me
from above the shining enamel of the omnibuses.... My first intentness
upon one person, so that I disregarded any distracting intervention,
gave place by insensible degrees to a more general apprehension of the
things about me. That original woman became as it were diffused. I began
to look at the men and women sitting at the little tables behind the
panes of the cafés, and even on the terraces--for the weather was still
dry and open. I scrutinized the faces I passed, faces for the most part
animated by a sort of shallow eagerness. Many were ugly, many vile with
an intense vulgarity, but some in that throng were pretty, some almost
gracious. There was something pathetic and appealing for me in this
great sweeping together of people into a little light, into a weak
community of desire for joy and eventfulness. There came to me a sense
of tolerance, of fellowship, of participation. From an outer darkness
of unhappiness or at least of joylessness, they had all come hither--as
I had come.
I was like a creature that slips back again towards some deep waters out
of which long since it came, into the light and air. It was as if old
forgotten things, prenatal experiences, some magic of ancestral
memories, urged me to mingle again with this unsatisfied passion for
life about me....
Then suddenly a wave of feeling between self-disgust and fear poured
over me. This vortex was drawing me into deep and unknown things.... I
hailed a passing _fiacre_, went straight to my little hotel, settled my
account with the proprietor, and caught a night train for Switzerland.
All night long my head ached, and I lay awake swaying and jolting and
listening to the rhythms of the wheels, Paris clean forgotten so soon as
it was left, and my thoughts circling continually about Justin and
Philip and Mary and the things I might have said and done.
§ 4
One day late in February I found myself in Vevey. I had come down with
the break-up of the weather from Montana, where I had met some Oxford
men I knew and had learned to ski. I had made a few of those vague
acquaintances one makes in a winter-sport hotel, but now all these
people were going back to England and I was thrown back upon myself once
more. I was dull and angry and unhappy still, full of self-reproaches
and dreary indignations, and then very much as the sky will sometimes
break surprisingly through storm clouds there began in me a new series
of moods. They came to me by surprise. One clear bright afternoon I sat
upon the wall that runs along under the limes by the lake shore, envying
all these people who were going back to England and work and usefulness.
I thought of myself, of my career spoilt, my honor tarnished, my
character tested and found wanting. So far as English politics went my
prospects had closed for ever. Even after three years it was improbable
that I should be considered by the party managers again. And besides, it
seemed to me I was a man crippled. My other self, the mate and
confirmation of my mind, had gone from me. I was no more than a
mutilated man. My life was a thing condemned; I had joined the ranks of
loafing, morally-limping, English exiles.
I looked up. The sun was setting, a warm glow fell upon the dissolving
mountains of Savoy and upon the shining mirror of the lake. The
luminous, tranquil breadth of it caught me and held me. "I am done for."
The light upon the lake and upon the mountains, the downward swoop of a
bird over the water and something in my heart, gave me the lie.
"What nonsense!" I said, and felt as if some dark cloud that had
overshadowed me had been thrust back.
I stared across at Savoy as though that land had spoken. Why should I
let all my life be ruled by the blunders and adventures of one short
year of adventure? Why should I become the votary of a train of
consequences? What had I been dreaming of all this time? Over there were
gigantic uplands I had never seen and trodden; and beyond were great
plains and cities, and beyond that the sea, and so on, great spaces and
multitudinous things all round about the world. What did the things I
had done, the things I had failed to do, the hopes crushed out of me,
the tears and the anger, matter to _that_? And in some amazing way this
thought so took possession of me that the question seemed also to carry
with it the still more startling collateral, what then did they matter
to me? "Come out of yourself," said the mountains and all the beauty of
the world. "Whatever you have done or suffered is nothing to the
inexhaustible offer life makes you. We are you, just as much as the past
is you."
It was as though I had forgotten and now remembered how infinitely
multitudinous life can be. It was as if Tarvrille's neglected words to
me had sprouted in the obscurity of my mind and borne fruit....
I cannot explain how that mood came, I am doing my best to describe it,
and it is not easy even to describe. And I fear that to you who will
have had I hope no experience of such shadows as I had passed through,
it is impossible to convey its immense elation.... I remember once I
came in a boat out of the caves of Han after two hours in the darkness,
and there was the common daylight that is nothing wonderful at all, and
its brightness ahead there seemed like trumpets and cheering, like
waving flags and like the sunrise. And so it was with this mood of my
release.
There is a phrase of Peter E. Noyes', that queer echo of Emerson whom
people are always rediscovering and forgetting again, a phrase that
sticks in my mind,--"Every living soul is heir to an empire and has
fallen into a pit." It's an image wonderfully apt to describe my change
of mental attitude, and render the contrast between those intensely
passionate personal entanglements that had held me tight and that wide
estate of life that spreads about us all, open to all of us in just the
measure that we can scramble out of our individual selves--to a more
general self. I seemed to be hanging there at the brim of my stale and
painful den, staring at the unthought-of greatness of the world, with an
unhoped-for wind out of heaven blowing upon my face.
I suppose the intention of the phrase "finding salvation," as religious
people use it, is very much this experience. If it is not the same thing
it is something very closely akin. It is as if someone were scrambling
out of a pit into a largeness--a largeness that is attainable by every
man just in the measure that he realizes it is there.
I leave these fine discriminations to the theologian. I know that I went
back to my hotel in Vevey with my mind healed, with my will restored to
me, and my ideas running together into plans. And I know that I had come
out that day a broken and apathetic man.
§ 5
The next day my mood declined again; it was as if that light, that sense
of release that had shone so clear and strong in my mind, had escaped
me. I sought earnestly to recover it. But I could not do so, and I found
my old narrow preoccupations calling urgently to me again.
I thought that perhaps I might get back those intimations of outlook and
relief if I clambered alone into some high solitude and thought. I had
a crude attractive vision of myself far above the heat and noise,
communing with the sky. It was the worst season for climbing, and on the
spur of the moment I could do nothing but get up the Rochers de Naye on
the wrong side, and try and find some eyrie that was neither slippery
nor wet. I did not succeed. In one place I slipped down a wet bank for
some yards and held at last by a root; if I had slipped much further I
should not be writing here now; and I came back a very weary and bruised
climber, without any meditation....
Three nights after when I was in bed I became very lucidly awake--it
must have been about two or three in the morning--and the vision of life
returned to me, with that same effect of enlargement and illumination.
It was as if the great stillness that is behind and above and around the
world of sense did in some way communicate with me. It bade me rouse my
spirit and go on with the thoughts and purposes that had been stirring
and proliferating in my mind when I had returned to England from the
Cape. "Dismiss your passion." But I urged that that I could not do;
there was the thought of Mary subjugated and weeping, the smarting
memory of injury and defeat, the stains of subterfuge and discovery, the
aching separation. No matter, the stillness answered, in the end all
that is just to temper you for your greater uses.... I cannot forget, I
insisted. Do not forget, but for the present this leads you no whither;
this chapter has ended; dismiss it and turn to those other things. You
are not only Stephen Stratton who fell into adultery; in these silences
he is a little thing and far away; here and with me you are
Man--Everyman--in this round world in which your lot has fallen. But
Mary, I urged, to forget Mary is a treason, an ingratitude, seeing that
she loved me. But the stillness did not command me to forget her, but
only to turn my face now to the great work that lies before mankind. And
that work? That work, so far as your share goes, is first to understand,
to solve, and then to achieve, to work out in the measure of yourself
that torment of pity and that desire for order and justice which
together saturate your soul. Go about the world, embrue yourself with
life, make use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so
painfully out of the deadness of matter....
"But who are you?" I cried out suddenly to the night. "Who are you?"
I sat up on the side of my bed. The dawn was just beginning to break up
the featureless blackness of the small hours. "This is just some odd
corner of my brain," I said....
Yet---- How did I come to have this odd corner in my brain? What _is_
this lucid stillness?...
§ 6
Let me tell you rather of my thoughts than of my moods, for there at
least one comes to something with a form that may be drawn and a
substance that is measurable; one ceases to struggle with things
indefinable and the effort to convey by metaphors and imaginary voices
things that are at once bodiless and soundless and lightless and yet
infinitely close and real. And moreover with that mysterious and subtle
change of heart in me there came also a change in the quality and range
of my ideas. I seemed to rise out of a tangle of immediacies and
misconceptions, to see more largely and more freely than I had ever done
before.
I have told how in my muddled and wounded phase I had snatched at the
dull project of improving my languages, and under the cloak of that
spying a little upon German military arrangements. Now my mind set such
petty romanticism on one side. It had recovered the strength to look on
the whole of life and on my place in it. It could resume the ideas that
our storm of passion had for a time thrust into the background of my
thoughts. I took up again all those broad generalizations that had
arisen out of my experiences in South Africa, and which I had been not
so much fitting into as forcing into the formulæ of English politics; I
recalled my disillusionment with British Imperialism, my vague but
elaborating apprehension of a profound conflict between enterprise and
labor, a profound conflict between the life of the farm and the life of
trade and finance and wholesale production, as being something far truer
to realities than any of the issues of party and patriotism upon which
men were spending their lives. So far as this rivalry between England
and Germany, which so obsessed the imagination of Europe, went, I found
that any faith I may have had in its importance had simply fallen out of
my mind. As a danger to civilization, as a conceivable source of
destruction and delay, it was a monstrous business enough, but that in
the long run it mattered how or when they fought and which won I did not
believe. In the development of mankind the thing was of far less
importance than the struggle for Flanders or the wars of France and
Burgundy. I was already coming to see Europe as no more than the
dog's-eared corner of the page of history,--like most Europeans I had
thought it the page--and my recovering mind was eager and open to see
the world beyond and form some conception of the greater forces that lay
outside our insularities. What is humanity as a whole doing? What is the
nature of the world process of which I am a part? Why should I drift
from cradle to grave wearing the blinkers of my time and nationality, a
mere denizen of Christendom, accepting its beliefs, its stale
antagonisms, its unreal purposes? That perhaps had been tolerable while
I was still an accepted member of the little world into which my lot had
fallen, but now that I was thrust out its absurdity glared. For me the
alternative was to be a world-man or no man. I had seemed sinking
towards the latter: now I faced about and began to make myself what I
still seek to make myself to-day, a son of mankind, a conscious part of
that web of effort and perplexity which wraps about our globe....
All this I say came into my mind as if it were a part of that recovery
of my mind from its first passionate abjection. And it seemed a simple
and obvious part of the same conversion to realize that I was ignorant
and narrow, and that, too, in a world which is suffering like a beast in
a slime pit by reason of ignorance and narrowness of outlook, and that
it was my manifest work and purpose to make myself less ignorant and to
see and learn with all my being. It came to me as a clear duty that I
should get out of the land of hotels and leisure and go seeking the
facts and clues to human inter-relationship nearer the earthy roots of
things, and I turned my thoughts to India and China, those vast enigmas
of human accumulation, in a spirit extraordinarily like that of some
mystic who receives a call. I felt I must go to Asia and from Asia
perhaps round the world. But it was the greatness of Asia commanded me.
I wanted to see the East not as a spectacle but as the simmering vat in
which the greater destiny of man brews and brews....
§ 7
It was necessary to tell my father of my intentions. I made numerous
beginnings. I tore up several letters and quarrelled bitterly with the
hotel pens. At first I tried to describe the change that had happened to
my mind, to give him some impression of the new light, the release that
had come to me. But how difficult this present world is with its tainted
and poisoned phrases and its tangled misunderstandings! Here was I
writing for the first time in my life of something essentially religious
and writing it to him whose profession was religion, and I could find no
words to convey my meaning to him that did not seem to me fraught with
the possibilities of misinterpretation. One evening I made a desperate
resolve to let myself go, and scrawled my heart out to him as it seemed
that night, a strange, long letter. It was one of the profoundest
regrets that came to me when I saw him dead last winter that I did not
risk his misunderstanding and post that letter. But when I re-read it in
the next morning's daylight it seemed to me so rhetorical, so full
of--what shall I call it?--spiritual bombast, it so caricatured and
reflected upon the deep feelings sustaining me, that I could not post it
for shamefacedness, and I tore it up into little pieces and sent
instead the briefest of notes.
"I am doing no good here in Switzerland," I wrote. "Would you mind if I
went east? I want to see something of the world outside Europe. I have a
fancy I may find something to do beyond there. Of course, it will cost
rather more than my present allowance. I will do my best to economize.
Don't bother if it bothers you--I've been bother enough to you...."
He replied still more compactly. "By all means. I will send you some
circular notes, Poste Restante, Rome. That will be on your way. Good
wishes to you, Stephen. I'm glad you want to go east instead of just
staying in Switzerland."
I sit here now and wonder, little son, what he thought, what he
supposed, what he understood.
I loved my father, and I began to perceive he loved me wonderfully. I
can imagine no man I would have sooner had for a priest than him; all
priestcraft lays hands if it can, and with an excellent wisdom, upon the
titles and dignity of fatherhood; and yet here am I left to guessing--I
do not know whether my father ever worshipped, whether he ever prayed
with his heart bared to God. There are times when the inexpressiveness
of life comes near to overwhelming me, when it seems to me we are all
asleep or entranced, and but a little way above the still cows who stand
munching slowly in a field. Why couldn't we and why didn't we talk
together?... We fear bathos too much, are shyly decent to the pitch of
mania. We have neither the courage of our bodies nor of our souls....
I went almost immediately to Rome. I stayed in Rome some days, getting
together an outfit, and incidentally seeing that greater city of the
dead in whose embrace the modern city lies. I was now becoming
interested in things outside my grooves, though my grooves were still
there, deep and receptive, and I went about the place at last almost
eagerly, tracing the outlines of that great departed city on whose
colossal bones the churches and palaces of the middle ages cluster like
weeds in the spaces and ruins of a magnificent garden. I found myself
one day in the Forum, thinking of that imperialism that had built the
Basilica of Julius Cæsar, and comparing its cramped vestiges with that
vaster second administrative effort which has left the world the
monstrous arches of Constantine. I sat down over against these last
among the ruins of the Vestals' House, and mused on that later
reconstruction when the Empire, with its science aborted and its
literature and philosophy shrivelled to nothing, its social fabric
ruined by the extravagances of financial adventure and its honor and
patriotism altogether dead, united itself, in a desperate effort to
continue, with all that was most bickeringly intolerant and destructive
in Christianity--only to achieve one common vast decay. All Europe to
this day is little more than the sequel to that failure. It is the Roman
Empire in disintegration. The very churches whose domes rise to the
northward of the ancient remains are built of looted stones and look
like parasitic and fungoid growths, and the tourists stream through
those spaces day by day, stare at the marble fragments, the arches, the
fallen carvings and rich capitals, with nothing greater in their minds
and nothing clearer....
I discovered I was putting all this into the form of a letter to Mary.
I was writing to her in my mind, as many people talk to themselves. And
I remember that I wandered upon the Palatine Hill musing over the idea
of writing a long letter to her, a long continuous letter to her, a sort
of diary of impressions and ideas, that somewhen, years ahead, I might
be able to put into her hands.
One does not carry out such an idea into reality; it is so much easier
to leave the letter imagined and unwritten if there lives but little
hope of its delivery; yet for many years I kept up an impalpable
correspondence in my thoughts, a stream of expression to which no answer
came--until at last the habits of public writing and the gathering
interests of a new rôle in life diverted it to other ends.
§ 8
One morning on the way from Brindisi to Egypt I came up on deck at dawn
because my mind was restless and I could not sleep. Another solitary
passenger was already up, so intently watching a pink-lit rocky
coast-line away to the north of us that for a time he did not observe
me.
"That's Crete," he said, when at last he became aware of me close at
hand.
"Crete!" said I.
"Yes," he said, "Crete."
He came nearer to me. "That, sir," he said with a challenging emphasis,
"is the most wonderful island I've ever yet set eyes on,--quite the most
wonderful."
"Five thousand years ago," he remarked after a pause that seemed to me
to be calculated, "they were building palaces there, better than the
best we can build to-day. And things--like modern things. They had
bathrooms there, beautifully fitted bathrooms--and admirable
sanitation--admirable. Practically--American. They had better artists to
serve them than your King Edward has, why! Minos would have laughed or
screamed at all that Windsor furniture. And the things they made of
gold, sir--you couldn't get them done anywhere to-day. Not for any
money. There was a Go about them.... They had a kind of writing,
too--before the Phoenicians. No man can read it now, and there it is.
Fifty centuries ago it was; and to-day--They grow oranges and lemons.
And they riot.... Everything else gone.... It's as if men struggled up
to a certain pitch and then--grew tired.... All this Mediterranean; it's
a tired sea...."
That was the beginning of a curious conversation. He was an American, a
year or so younger than myself, going, he said, "to look at Egypt."
"In our country," he explained, "we're apt to forget all these
worked-out regions. Too apt. We don't get our perspectives. We think the
whole blessed world is one everlasting boom. It hit me first down in
Yucatan that that wasn't so. Why! the world's littered with the remains
of booms and swaggering beginnings. Americanism!--there's always been
Americanism. This Mediterranean is just a Museum of old Americas. I
guess Tyre and Sidon thought they were licking creation all the time.
It's set me thinking. What's _really_ going on? Why--anywhere,--you're
running about among ruins--anywhere. And ruins of something just as good
as anything we're doing to-day. Better--in some ways. It takes the heart
out of you...."
It was Gidding, who is now my close friend and ally. I remember very
vividly the flavor of morning freshness as we watched Crete pass away
northward and I listened to his talk.
"I was coming out of New York Harbor a month ago and looking back at the
skyscrapers," he said, "and suddenly it hit me in the mind;--'That's
just the next ruin,' I thought."
I remember that much of our first talk, but the rest of it now is
indistinct.
We had however struck up an acquaintance, we were both alone, and until
he left me on his way to Abydos we seem now to have been conversing all
the time. And almost all the time we were discussing human destiny and
the causes of effort and decay, and whether the last few ascendant
centuries the world has seen have in them anything more persistent than
the countless beginnings that have gone before.
"There's Science," said I a little doubtfully.
"At Cnossus there they had Dædalus, sir, fifty centuries ago. Dædalus!
He was an F.R.S. all right. I haven't a doubt he flew. If they hadn't
steel they had brass. We're too conceited about our little modern
things."
§ 9
I found something very striking and dramatic in the passage from Europe
to Asia. One steams slowly through a desert that comes up close to the
ship; the sand stretches away, hillock and mound beyond hillock and
mound; one sees camels in the offing stringing out to some ancient
destination; one is manifestly passing across a barrier,--the canal has
changed nothing of that. Suez is a first dab of tumultuous Orientalism,
noisy and vivid. And then, after that gleam of turmoil, one opens out
into the lonely dark blue waters of the Red Sea. Right and left the
shore is a bitter, sun-scorched desolation; eastward frowns a great
rampart of lowering purple mountains towering up to Sinai. It is like no
European landscape. The boat goes slowly as if uncharted dangers lurked
ahead. It is a new world with a new atmosphere. Then comes wave upon
wave of ever more sultry air, and the punkahs begin to swing and the
white clothes appear. Everyone casts off Europe, assumes an Asiatic
livery. The very sun, rushing up angrily and abruptly after a heated
night, is unfamiliar, an Asiatic sun.
And so one goes down that reef-fringed waterway to Aden; it is studded
with lonely-looking lighthouses that burn, it seems, untended, and
sometimes in their melancholy isolation swing great rhythmic arms of
light. And then, land and the last lateen sails of Aden vanishing
together, one stands out into the hot thundery monotonies of the Indian
Ocean; into imprisonment in a blue horizon across whose Titan ring the
engines seem to throb in vain. How one paces the ship day by day, and
eats and dozes and eats again, and gossips inanely and thanks Heaven
even for a flight of flying fish or a trail of smoke from over the
horizon to take one's mind a little out of one's oily quivering
prison!... A hot portentous delay; a sinister significant pause; that is
the voyage from Europe to India still.
I suppose by the time that you will go to India all this prelude will
have vanished, you will rattle through in a train-de-luxe from Calais,
by way of Baku or Constantinople; you will have none of this effect of
a deliberate sullen approach across limitless miles of sea. But that is
how I went to India. Everything seemed to expand; I was coming out of
the frequent landfalls, the neighborly intimacies and neighborly
conflicts of the Mediterranean into something remoter; into larger seas
and greater lands, rarer communications and a vaster future....
To go from Europe to Asia is like going from Norway to Russia, from
something slight and "advanced" to something massive and portentous. I
felt that nearly nine years ago; to-day all Asia seems moving forward to
justify my feelings....
And I remember too that as I went down the Red Sea and again in the
Indian Ocean I had a nearly intolerable passion of loneliness. A wound
may heal and still leave pain. I was coming out of Europe as one comes
out of a familiar house into something larger and stranger, I seemed but
a little speck of life, and behind me, far away and silent and receding,
was the one other being to whom my thoughts were open. It seemed very
cruel to me that I could not write to her.
Such moods were to come to me again and again, and particularly during
the inactivities of voyages and in large empty spaces and at night when
I was weary. At other times I could banish and overcome them by forcing
myself to be busy and by going to see novel and moving things.