and on the crest of a hill you pass through a stone gateway. You
cannot tell why there should be a gateway in that deserted spot, far
from a village, but a fragment of massive wall suggests the ruin of
fortifications against the foes of a forgotten dynasty. And when you
come through the gateway you see below you the shining water in the
rice fields, diapered, like the chess-board in some Chinese _Alice in
Wonderland_, and then the rounded, tree-clad hills. But making your way
down the stone steps of the narrow causeway which is the high road from
city to city, in the gathering darkness you pass a coppice, and from it
waft towards you chill woodland odours of the night. Then you hear no
longer the measured tread of your bearers, your ears are on a sudden
deaf to their sharp cries as they change the pole from shoulder to
shoulder, and to the ceaseless chatter or the occasional snatch of song
with which they enliven the monotonous way, for the woodland odours
are the same as those which steal up from the fat Kentish soil when
you pass through the woods of Bleane; and nostalgia seizes you. Your
thoughts travel through time and space, far from the Here and Now, and
you remember your vanished youth with its high hopes, its passionate
love, and its ambition. Then if you are a cynic, as they say, and
therefore a sentimentalist, tears come to your unwilling eyes. And when
you have regained your self-control the night has fallen.
XLIV
THE NORMAL MAN
I was once obliged to study anatomy, a very dreary business, since
there is neither rhyme nor reason for the vast number of things you
have to remember; but one remark made by my teacher, when he was
helping me in the dissection of a thigh, has always remained in my
memory. I was looking in vain for a certain nerve and it needed his
greater skill to discover it in a place in which I had not sought it. I
was aggrieved because the text book had misled me. He smiled and said:
"You see, the normal is the rarest thing in the world."
And though he spoke of anatomy he might have spoken with equal truth
of man. The casual observation impressed itself upon me as many a
profounder one has not and all the years that have passed since then,
with the increasing knowledge of human nature which they have brought,
have only strengthened my conviction of its truth. I have met a hundred
men who seemed perfectly normal only to find in them presently an
idiosyncrasy so marked as to put them almost in a class by themselves.
It has entertained me not a little to discover the hidden oddity of
men to all appearances most ordinary. I have been often amazed to come
upon a hideous depravity in men who you would have sworn were perfectly
commonplace. I have at last sought the normal man as a precious work of
art. It has seemed to me that to know him would give me that peculiar
satisfaction which can only be described as æsthetic.
I really thought I had found him in Robert Webb. He was a consul in one
of the smaller ports and I was given a letter to him. I heard a good
deal about him on my way through China and I heard nothing but good.
Whenever I happened to mention that I was going to the port in which he
was stationed someone was sure to say:
"You'll like Bob Webb. He's an awfully good chap."
He was no less popular as an official than he was as a private person.
He managed to please the merchants because he was active in their
interests, without antagonising the Chinese who praised his firmness or
the missionaries who approved his private life. During the revolution
by his tact, decision, and courage he had not only saved from great
danger the foreign population of the city in which he then was, but
also many Chinese. He had come forward as a peacemaker between the
warring parties and by his ingenuity had been able to bring about a
satisfactory settlement. He was marked down for promotion. I certainly
found him a very engaging fellow. Though he was not good-looking his
appearance was pleasing; he was tall, perhaps a little more than of
average height, well covered without being fat, with a fresh complexion
inclined now (for he was nearly fifty) to be somewhat bloated in the
morning. This was not strange, for in China the foreigners both eat and
drink a great deal too much, and Robert Webb had a healthy liking for
the good things of life. He kept an excellent table. He liked eating
in company and it was seldom that he did not have one or two people to
tiffin or to dinner with him. His eyes were blue and friendly. He had
the social gifts that give pleasure: he played the piano quite well,
but he liked the music that other people liked, and he was always
ready to play a one step or a waltz if others wanted to dance. With
a wife, a son, and a daughter in England he could not afford to keep
racing ponies, but he was keenly interested in racing; he was a good
tennis player, and his bridge was better than the average. Unlike many
of his colleagues he did not allow himself to be overwhelmed by his
position, and in the evening at the club he was affable and unaffected.
But he did not forget that he was His Britannic Majesty's Consul and
I admired the skill with which without portentousness he preserved
the dignity which he thought necessary to his station. In short he
had very good manners. He talked agreeably, and his interests, though
somewhat ordinary, were varied. He had a nice sense of humour. He could
make a joke and tell a good story. He was very happily married. His
son was at Charterhouse and he showed me a photograph of a tall, fair
lad in flannels, with a frank and pleasant face. He showed me also
the photograph of his daughter. It is one of the tragedies of life in
China that a man must be separated for long periods from his family,
and owing to the war Robert Webb had not seen his for eight years. His
wife had taken the children home when the boy was eight and the girl
eleven. They had meant to wait till his leave came so that they could
go all together, but he was stationed in a place that suited neither
of the children and he and his wife agreed that she had better take
them at once. His leave was due in three years and then he could spend
twelve months with them. But when the time for this came the war broke
out, the Consular staff was short-handed, and it was impossible for him
to leave his post. His wife did not want to be separated from young
children, the journey was difficult and dangerous, no one expected the
war to last so long, and one by one the years passed.
"My girl was a child when I saw her last," he said to me when he showed
me the photograph. "Now she's a married woman."
"When are you going on leave?" I asked him.
"Oh, my wife's coming out now."
"But don't you want to see your daughter?" I asked.
He looked at the photograph again and then looked away. There was a
curious look in his face, a somewhat peevish look, I thought, and he
answered:
"I've been away from home too long now. I shall never go back."
I leaned back in my chair, smoking my pipe. The photograph showed me a
girl of nineteen with wide blue eyes and bobbed hair; it was a pretty
face, open and friendly, but the most noticeable thing about it was a
peculiar charm of expression. Bob Webb's daughter was a very alluring
young person. I liked that engaging audacity.
"It was rather a surprise to me when she sent along that photograph,"
he said presently. "I'd always thought of her as a child. If I'd met
her in the street I shouldn't have known her."
He gave a little laugh that was not quite natural.
"It isn't fair.... When she was a child she used to love being petted."
His eyes were fixed on the photograph. I seemed to see in them a very
unexpected emotion.
"I can hardly realise she's my daughter. I thought she'd come back with
her mother, and then she wrote and said she was engaged."
He looked away now and I thought there was a singular embarrassment in
the down-turned corners of his mouth.
"I suppose one gets selfish out here, I felt awfully sore, but I gave a
big dinner party to all the fellows here the day she was married, and
we all got blind."
He gave an apologetic laugh.
"I had to, you know," he said awkwardly. "I had such an awful hump."
"What's the young man like?" I asked.
"She's awfully in love with him. When she writes to me her letters are
about nothing else." There was an odd quaver in his voice. "It's a bit
thick to bring a child into the world and to educate her and be fond of
her and all that sort of thing just for some man whom you've never even
seen. I've got his photograph somewhere, I don't know where it is. I
don't think I'd care about him very much."
He helped himself to another whisky. He was tired. He looked old and
bloated. He said nothing for a long time, and then suddenly he seemed
to pull himself together.
"Well, thank God, her mother's coming out soon."
I don't think he was quite a normal man after all.
XLV
THE OLD TIMER
He was seventy-six years old. He had come to China when he was little
more than a boy as second mate of a sailing vessel and had never gone
home again. Since then he had been many things. For long years he had
commanded a Chinese boat that ran from Shanghai to Ichang and he knew
by heart every inch of the great and terrible Yangtze. He had been
master of a tug at Hong-Kong and had fought in the Ever-Victorious
Army. He had got a lot of loot in the Boxer troubles and had been in
Hankow during the revolution when the rebels shelled the city. He had
been married three times, first to a Japanese woman, then to a Chinese,
and finally when he was hard upon fifty to an Englishwoman. They were
all dead now and it was the Japanese who lingered in his memory. He
would tell you how she arranged the flowers in the house in Shanghai,
just one chrysanthemum in a vase or a sprig of cherry blossom; and he
always remembered how she held a tea-cup, with both hands, delicately.
He had had a number of children, but he took no interest in them; they
were settled in the various ports of China, in banks and shipping
offices, and he seldom saw them. He was proud of his daughter by his
English wife, the only girl he ever had, but she had married well and
was gone to England. He would never see her again. The only person
now for whom he had any affection was the boy who had been with him
for five and forty years. He was a little wizened Chinaman, with a
bald head, slow of movement and solemn. He was well over sixty. They
quarrelled incessantly. The old timer would tell the boy that he was
past his work and that he must get rid of him, and then the boy would
say that he was tired of serving a mad foreign devil. But each knew
that the other did not mean a word he said. They were old friends, old
men both of them, and they would remain together till death parted them.
It was when he married his English wife that he retired from the water
and put his savings into a hotel. But it was not a success. It was a
little way from Shanghai, a summer resort, and it was before there were
motor cars in China. He was a sociable fellow and he spent too much of
his time in the bar. He was generous and he gave away as many drinks as
were paid for. He also had the peculiar habit of spitting in the bath
and the more squeamish of his visitors objected to it. When his last
wife died he found it was she who had kept things from going to pieces
and in a little while he could no longer bear up against the difficulty
of his circumstances. All his savings had gone into buying the place,
now heavily mortgaged, and in making up the deficit year by year. He
was obliged to sell out to a Japanese and having paid his debts at the
age of sixty-eight found himself without a penny. But, by God, sir, he
was a sailor. One of the companies running boats up the Yangtze, gave
him a berth as chief officer--he had no master's certificate--and he
returned to the river which he knew so well. For eight years he had
been on the same run.
And now he stood on the bridge of his trim little ship, not so large as
a penny steamer on the Thames, a gallant figure, upright and slender
as when he was a lad, in a neat blue suit and the company's cap set
jauntily on his white hair, with his pointed beard nattily trimmed.
Seventy-six years old. It is a great age. With his head thrown back,
his glasses in his hand, the Chinese pilot by his side, he watched the
vast expanse of the winding river. A fleet of junks with their high
sterns, their square sails set, descended on the swift current, and
the rowers chanted a monotonous chant as they worked at their creaking
oars. The yellow water in the setting sun was lovely with pale soft
tints, it was as smooth as glass; and along the flat banks the trees
and the huts of a bedraggled village, hazy in the heat of the day, were
now silhouetted sharply, like the shadows of a shadowgraph, against the
pale sky. He raised his head as he heard the cry of wild geese and he
saw them flying high above him in a great V to what far lands he knew
not. In the distance against the sunlight stood a solitary hill crowned
with temples. Because he had seen all this so often it affected him
strangely. The dying day made him think, he knew not why, of his long
past and of his great age. He regretted nothing.
"By George," he muttered, "I've had a fine life."
XLVI
THE PLAIN
The incident was of course perfectly trivial, and it could be very
easily explained; but I was surprised that the eyes of the spirit could
blind me so completely to what was visible to the eyes of sense. I was
taken aback to find how completely one could be at the mercy of the
laws of association. Day after day I had marched among the uplands and
to-day I knew that I must come to the great plain in which lay the
ancient city whither I was bound; but when I set out in the morning
there was no sign that I approached it. Indeed the hills seemed no less
sheer and when I reached the top of one, thinking to see the valley
below, it was only to see before me one steeper and taller yet. Beyond,
climbing steadily, I could see the white causeway that I had followed
so long, shining in the sunlight as it skirted the brow of a rugged
tawny rock. The sky was blue and in the west hung here and there little
clouds like fishing boats becalmed towards evening off Dungeness. I
trudged along, mounting all the time, alert for the prospect that
awaited me, if not round this bend, then round the next, and at last,
suddenly, when I was thinking of other things, I came upon it. But
it was no Chinese landscape that I saw, with its padi fields, its
memorial arches and its fantastic temples, with its farmhouses set in
a bamboo grove and its wayside inns where under the banyan trees the
poor coolies may rest them of their weary loads; it was the valley of
the Rhine, the broad plain all golden in the sunset, the valley of the
Rhine with its river, a silvery streak, running through it, and the
distant towers of Worms; it was the great plain upon which my young
eyes rested, when, a student in Heidelberg, after walking long among
the fir-clad hills above the old city, I came out upon a clearing. And
because I was there first conscious of beauty; because there I knew
the first glow of the acquisition of knowledge (each book I read was
an extraordinary adventure); because there I first knew the delight of
conversation (oh, those wonderful commonplaces which each boy discovers
as though none had discovered them before); because of the morning
stroll in the sunny Anlage, the cakes and coffee which refreshed my
abstemious youth at the end of a strenuous walk, the leisurely evenings
on the castle terrace, with the smoky blue haze over the tumbled roofs
of the old town below me; because of Goethe and Heine and Beethoven and
Wagner and (why not?) Strauss with his waltzes, and the beer-garden
where the band played and girls with yellow plaits walked sedately;
because of all these things--recollections which have all the force
of the appeal of sense--to me not only does the word _plain_ mean
everywhere and exclusively the valley of the Rhine; but the only symbol
for happiness I know is a wide prospect all golden in the setting sun,
with a shining stream of silver running through it, like the path of
life or like the ideal that guides you through it, and far away the
grey towers of an ancient town.
XLVII
FAILURE
A little man, portly, in a fantastic hat, like a bushranger's, with
an immense brim, a pea-jacket such as you see in Leech's pictures of
the sea-faring man, and very wide check trousers of a cut fashionable
heaven knows how many years ago. When he takes off his hat you see a
fine head of long curly hair, and though he is approaching the sixties
it is scarcely grey. His features are regular. He wears a collar
several sizes too large for him so that his whole neck, massive and
statuesque, is shown. He has the look of a Roman Emperor in a tragedy
of the sixties and this air of an actor of the old school is enhanced
by his deep booming voice. His stumpy frame makes it slightly absurd.
You can imagine his declaiming the blank verse of Sheridan Knowles with
an emphasis to rouse the pit to frenzy, and when he greets you, with
too large a gesture, you guess how that resonant organ would tremble
when he wrung your heart (in 1860) over the death of his child. It was
splendid a little later to hear him ask the Chinese servant for "me
boots, boy, me boots. A kingdom for me boots." He confessed that he
should have been an actor.
"To be or not to be, that was the question, but me family, me family,
dear boy, they would have died of the disgrace, and so I was exposed to
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
In short he came out to China as a tea-taster. But he came when the
Ceylon tea was already ousting the Chinese and it was no longer
possible for the merchant to enrich himself in a few years. But the
old lavishness endured and life was led in a grand style when the
means to pay for it no longer existed. The struggle became harder.
Finally came the Sino-Japanese war, and with the loss of Formosa,
ruin. The tea-taster looked about for other means of livelihood. He
became a wine-merchant, an undertaker, an estate-agent, a broker,
an auctioneer. He tried every way of making money that his ardent
imagination suggested, but with the diminishing prosperity of the
port his efforts were bootless. Life was too much for him. And now at
last he had the pitiful air of a broken man; there was even something
touching in it, like the appeal of a woman who cannot believe in the
loss of her beauty and implores the compliment which reassures but no
longer convinces her. And yet, notwithstanding, he had a solace: he had
still a magnificent assurance; he was a failure and he knew it; but it
did not really affect him, for he was the victim of fate: no shadow of
a doubt in his own capacity had ever crossed his mind.
XLVIII
A STUDENT OF THE DRAMA
He sent in a neat card of the correct shape and size, deeply bordered
in black, upon which under his name was printed _Professor of
Comparative Modern Literature_. He turned out to be a young man, small,
with tiny elegant hands, with a larger nose than you see as a rule in
the Chinese and gold rimmed spectacles. Though it was a warm day he
was dressed, in European clothes, in a suit of heavy tweed. He seemed
a trifle shy. He spoke in a high falsetto, as though his voice had
never broken, and those shrill notes gave I know not what feeling of
unreality to his conversation. He had studied in Geneva and in Paris,
Berlin and Vienna, and he expressed himself fluently in English,
French, and German.
It appeared that he lectured on the drama and he had lately written,
in French, a work on the Chinese theatre. His studies abroad had left
him with a surprising enthusiasm for Scribe, and this was the model
he proposed for the regeneration of the Chinese drama. It was curious
to hear him demand that the drama should be exciting. He was asking
for the _pièce bien faite_, the _scène à faire_, the curtain, the
unexpected, the dramatic. The Chinese theatre, with its elaborate
symbolism, has been what we are always crying for, the theatre of
ideas; and apparently it has been perishing of dullness. It is true
that ideas do not grow on every gooseberry bush, they need novelty to
make them appetising, and when they are stale they stink as badly as
stale fish.
But then, remembering the description on the card, I asked my friend
what books, English and French, he recommended his students to read in
order to familiarise themselves with the current literature of the day.
He hesitated a little.
"I really don't know," he said at last, "you see, that's not my branch,
I only have to do with drama; but if you're interested I'll ask my
colleague who lectures on European fiction to call on you."
"I beg your pardon," I said.
"Have you read _Les Avariés_?" he asked. "I think that is the finest
play that has been produced in Europe since Scribe."
"Do you?" I said politely.
"Yes, you see our students are greatly interested in sociological
questions."
It is my misfortune that I am not, and so as deftly as I could I led
the conversation to Chinese philosophy which I was desultorily reading.
I mentioned Chuang-Tzu. The professor's jaw fell.
"He lived a very long time ago," he said, perplexed.
"So did Aristotle," I murmured pleasantly.
"I have never studied the philosophers," he said, "but of course we
have at our university a professor of Chinese philosophy and if you are
interested in that I will ask him to come and call on you."
It is useless to argue with a pedagogue, as the Spirit of the Ocean
(somewhat portentously to my mind) remarked to the Spirit of the River
and I resigned myself to discuss the drama. My professor was interested
in its technique and indeed was preparing a course of lectures on the
subject, which he seemed to think both complicated and abstruse. He
flattered me by asking me what were the secrets of the craft.
"I know only two," I answered. "One is to have common-sense and the
other is to stick to the point."
"Does it require no more than that to write a play?" he inquired with a
shade of dismay in his tone.
"You want a certain knack," I allowed, "but no more than to play
billiards."
"They lecture on the technique of the drama in all the important
universities of America," said he.
"The Americans are an extremely practical people," I answered. "I
believe that Harvard is instituting a chair to instruct grandmothers
how to suck eggs."
"I do not think I quite understand you."
"If you can't write a play no one can teach you and if you can it's as
easy as falling off a log."
Here his face expressed a lively perplexity, but I think only because
he could not make up his mind whether this operation came within the
province of the professor of physics or within that of the professor of
applied mechanics.
"But if it is so easy to write a play why do dramatists take so long
about it?"
"They didn't, you know. Lope de la Vega and Shakespeare and a hundred
others wrote copiously and with ease. Some modern playwrights have
been perfectly illiterate men and have found it an almost insuperable
difficulty to put two sentences together. A celebrated English
dramatist once showed me a manuscript and I saw that he had written the
question: will you have sugar in your tea, five times before he could
put it in this form. A novelist would starve if he could not on the
whole say what he wanted to without any beating about the bush."
"You would not call Ibsen an illiterate man and yet it is well known
that he took two years to write a play."
"It is obvious that Ibsen found a prodigious difficulty in thinking of
a plot. He racked his brain furiously, month after month, and at last
in despair used the very same that he had used before."
"What do you mean?" the professor cried, his voice rising to a shrill
scream. "I do not understand you at all."
"Have you not noticed that Ibsen uses the same plot over and over
again? A number of people are living in a closed and stuffy room, then
some one comes (from the mountains or from over the sea) and flings the
window open; everyone gets a cold in the head and the curtain falls."
I thought it just possible that the shadow of a smile might lighten for
a moment the professor's grave face, but he knit his brows and gazed
for two minutes into space. Then he rose.
"I will peruse the works of Henrik Ibsen once more with that point of
view in mind," he said.