Round the World
In any number of days
[Illustration: MY TICKET IS FOR NEW ZEALAND (page 4)]
ROUND THE WORLD IN
ANY NUMBER OF DAYS
By Maurice Baring
ILLUSTRATED BY B. T. B., VINCENT LYNCH
AND WALTER J. ENRIGHT
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1914
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY MAURICE BARING
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1914_
Contents
INTRODUCTORY 1
TILBURY: JUNE 21 3
BAY OF BISCAY: JUNE 24 11
GIBRALTAR: JUNE 28 14
NAPLES: JUNE 29 15
PORT SAID: JULY 3 22
THE RED SEA: IN JULY 26
THE GULF OF ADEN: JULY 34
THE INDIAN OCEAN: DURING THE MONSOON 46
CEYLON: JULY 51
FROM COLOMBO TO FREMANTLE: JULY 57
FREMANTLE: JULY 68
ADELAIDE: JULY 71
MELBOURNE: JULY 76
SYDNEY: AUGUST 2 77
ON BOARD THE MAUNGANUI: AUGUST 82
WELLINGTON: AUGUST 10 102
NEAR PALMERSTON: AUGUST 20 106
WELLINGTON: SEPTEMBER 111
RORATONGA AND TAHITI: SEPTEMBER 117
ACROSS THE PACIFIC: SEPTEMBER 21-OCTOBER 3 138
SAN FRANCISCO: OCTOBER 3 144
NEW YORK: OCTOBER 173
Illustrations
MY TICKET IS FOR NEW ZEALAND (page 4) _Frontispiece_
THE STEWARDS 4
NAPLES--THREE IMPRESSIONS 16
FROM SHIP’S MUSIC, AS A RULE, ONE CAN WITHDRAW ONE’S
ATTENTION WITHOUT DIFFICULTY 36
IF G. K. CHESTERTON HAD BEEN AN AUSTRALIAN 42
“THERE IS NOTHING SO ROMANTIC AS FOOD” 62
IN SYDNEY I FOUND THE MEN IN THE BOOKSTORES ABNORMALLY
INTELLIGENT 78
“YOU MUSTN’T THINK OF A GREEN HORSE” 90
A WELLINGTON MAN TURNING A STREET CORNER 102
A GREAT QUANTITY OF NATIVES SWARM ON BOARD 120
VERY FEW WRITERS THINK WHEN THEY ARE WRITING 148
THE ONLY HANSOM CAB IN LONDON 158
ANOTHER TURN OF THE SCREW AND HE WOULD BREAK DOWN 176
UNDRESSING IN THE BERTH OF AN AMERICAN CAR IS AN ACROBATIC
FEAT 184
THEIR WHOLE BUSINESS IS TO STEAL OTHER PEOPLE’S BAGGAGE 188
TRYING TO GET A NUMBER AT THE HOTEL CECIL 192
ROUND THE WORLD IN ANY NUMBER OF DAYS
I believe there is a school of people who say the world is flat. I
asked H. G. Wells (who ought to know) whether the world was flat: He
said he thought it improbable (mark the scepticism of H. G. Wells!),
but he said the proofs generally given of the world’s roundness were
bosh. The dogmas of science go round and round, from reaction to
progress, and from progress to reaction, like the dogmas of medicine.
One has only to remain very conservative to find one’s self a
revolutionary. “But,” some one may say, “whether the world is round and
you are going round it, or whether it is flat and you are going across
(or along?) it, that is no reason for describing your voyage--nowadays
a hackneyed affair; you might just as well describe a journey round the
Place de la Concorde or Trafalgar Square.”
My answer to this is, I might. But all journeys differ with the
differing traveler. I write partly to please myself, partly in the hope
of pleasing others, and partly in the hope (a pious hope) of gain.
_Tilbury: June 21_
There is a dock-strike going on: but the leaders say this has been
defeated; the newspapers say it is over. I reach Tilbury Docks by
noon of Friday, June 21. There, evidences of a strike are manifest in
the shape of a local body of special police. The porter who wheels my
luggage points them out and alludes to them in vivid and disrespectful
terms. He says they are a pack of--you know the rest.
I am sailing in one of the Orient ships: one of the big ones, twelve
thousand tons or so.
As soon as I get on board the lift-boy assures me that there are only
eight old hands on board--all the rest have struck.
“But who are the new hands?” I ask. “Casual amateurs?”
“Oh! just any one we would get,” he says.
It turns out that five hundred members of the police have been on board
the ship for a week. Coaling has been carried out with the utmost
difficulty. Most of the new stewards have never been to sea. Nobody
knows where anything is. The steward in the smoking-room doesn’t know
where the materials for liquid refreshment are concealed.
“But will they be found before the end of the voyage?” I hear a man
inquire in some trepidation.
The steward says they will. There is a sigh of relief, and soon we
are steaming down the Thames. I shall be in the ship till we reach
Australia. My ticket is for New Zealand.
There is a sense of delicious independence and freedom from the
fretting ties of everyday life when one starts on a long journey in a
big liner. And, watching the lights of Brighton flashing in the night,
I murmur to myself the words of the hymn:--
“Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away.”
Somebody ought one day to write the epic of Brighton, just as Mr.
Arnold Bennett has written the epic of the Five Towns. Arnold Bennett
has given us pictures of Brighton, it is true; and as for Sussex, no
county has such a crowd of enthusiastic poets to sing its praise. But
when I hear the word Sussex spoken, the picture it evokes for me has
nothing to do with any of that lyrical enthusiasm.
[Illustration: THE STEWARDS]
I see a third-class railway carriage on a Monday morning full of
bluejackets. They are travelling to London from Portsmouth. We have
just left Horsham. One of them is looking out of the window; he
observes a man sitting on a stile. “Nice easy job that bloke’s got,”
the sailor observes, “watching the tortoises _flash_ by.”
All this is suggested by the sight of Brighton where, at this very
moment, while I am setting out to wander with the antipodes (the
expression is Shakespeare’s), I know that two friends of mine are
dining in that most comfortable of inns, the Royal York Hotel. I wish I
were there....
While thus meditating on absent friends, somebody asks me if I play
bridge. I say Yes. “Why did you say Yes?” I say to myself, groaning
inwardly as I sit down to play. “You know you can’t play properly and
that you’ll spoil the game.”
Sure enough I revoke in the first game. However, in my prophetic soul
the comforting thought arises that I shan’t be asked to play again.
The next morning by breakfast time we have almost reached Plymouth.
I know the coast we are passing between Bolt Head and Wembury Point,
having been brought up in that little corner of land. I played on those
beaches as a child, picnicked on those cliffs, played at robbers and
smugglers in those caves. It is like a piece of a dream to see these
familiar, these intimate rocks and cliffs, after so many years.
The sea has that peculiar glitter as of a million golden scales, and
the sky has something peculiar in the quality of its azure, something
luminous, hazy, and radiant which seems to me to belong to the seas of
South Devon, and to the seas of South Devon alone.
Is this really so? Does it, I wonder, strike other people in the same
way? Or is the impression I receive due to the unfading spell and the
old glamour of childhood.
There is a ruined church nestling in the rocks right down by the
waves; there are the paths, and the pools, which were the playground
of hundreds of games, and the battlefields of mimic warfare, and the
temples of the long thoughts of boyhood.
There are the spots which to childhood’s eye seemed one’s very own, a
sacred and permanent possession, part and parcel of that larger entity
of home which was then the centre of one’s universe, and seemed to be
indestructible and everlasting.
And now! Thirty years after, I have no more to do with it than any of
my fellow passengers in this ship. The place is there, the place is
the same, but I am divorced from it. There it is, in sight and almost
within reach, but I no longer belong to it. It is far away, a part of
the past, a part of the irrevocable, a fugitive facet in a kaleidoscope
of memories and dreams.
* * * * *
If the world of romance be divided into provinces, each having its
capital, Plymouth is certainly the capital of that region in the
romantic world of England which concerns the sea. And the last twenty
years, which have made such fearful havoc among so much which was
characteristically English, have spared Plymouth. Plymouth still smiles
over the Sound--between the luxuriant wooded hills of Mount Edgecombe
and the forts of Statton Heights, crowned in the distance by the
blue rim of Dartmoor. Little cutters, with their spotless sails, are
racing in the Sound; two torpedo destroyers are dressed because it is
Coronation Day; a German liner has arrived from New York. Everything
is just the same as it used to be thirty years ago.
Just before sunset a real Devonshire shower comes on, veiling the hills
in a gray mist, but the sun, only half hidden, silvers the waters. Then
the rain drifts away, and the sun sets in a watery glory of gold and
silver, and as the twilight deepens, threatening and cloudy, all the
lights begin to twinkle on the Hoe.
There are always a lot of lights in Plymouth, but there are more than
usual to-night, because the city is illuminated. We steam past the
breakwater. The Eddystone Light appears and vanishes intermittently far
ahead, and behind us Plymouth is twinkling and gleaming and flashing.
“Yarnder lumes the Island, yarnder lie the ships,
Wi’ sailor lads a-dancin’ heel-an’-toe,
An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’ the night-tide dashin’,
He sees it arl so plainly, as he saw it long ago.”
These lines of Newbolt’s, from his poem, “Drake’s Drum,” ring in my
memory and seem now and to-night intolerably appropriate. It begins to
drizzle once more, and I feel the well-known smell of the West Country
rain all about me, and the years slip by, and the past rises from its
tomb, sharp and vivid as the present.... I see it all so plainly as I
saw it long ago.
All at once forward in the steerage, a party of Welsh emigrants start
singing a wailing Celtic chorus, piercingly melancholy, alien and
strange, and this chases away the dream, and reminds me that I am on a
liner bound for Australia, and that it’s raining, and I determine to
seek the smoking-room.
_Bay of Biscay: June 24_
Somebody ought to start a series called “Books by Bores for People who
Really Want to Know.”
These books would contain that particular information which you need
at particular times and seasons, but which you cannot bear to have
imparted to you at any other time. Information about the conditions
of life on board different liners, for instance. If somebody begins
to tell you about this when you are not going on a journey and he has
just returned, you withdraw your attention and think of Tom Thumb, as
Dr. Johnson did when people talked of the Punic Wars; or, if you are
on familiar terms with the informant, you tell him to dry up. But when
you are yourself starting on a journey, that is just what you want,
in choosing your line and your steamer, and just what you can’t get.
Nobody knows. It appears to be a dead secret. I am not going to give
a particle of that information here,--I know the result too well.
Any digression on any general subject, say the claims of Christian
Science, or the merits of Harry Lauder’s songs, would be tolerated,
but not that; because those things are topics, and this other thing
is instruction. Neither children nor grown-up people can bear to be
instructed. Children have to submit to it, until the general Children’s
Strike occurs. Grown-up people needn’t and don’t, and if people insist
on instructing them, they either kill them, as the Greeks killed
Socrates, who was a schoolmaster abroad if ever there was one; or they
put them in Coventry and isolate them by not listening, as the House
of Commons did to Burke and Macaulay; or they damn them by saying,
“So-and-so knows a lot, but he is a bore.” It need only be said once.
The man is done for. He has quaffed an invisible and intangible poison
more deadly than hemlock. He is a social leper. His approach is like a
bell. Wherever he goes, he makes a desert. He can call it peace, if he
likes.
That is why I shall say no word about the arrangements, the huge
qualities and advantages, of the steamers of the Orient line.
But to go back to the Series of Books by Bores for People who Really
Want to Know: I would suggest the following subjects:--
A Book telling you (A) whom to give tips to, and how much, in
country-houses and hotels in all the countries of the world.
And (B) how much to public men, men of business, and like officials,
anywhere.
Section (B) would be good reading if written by an expert, because the
art of tipping or bribing a Prime Minister is no doubt a delicate one,
and though one hears so much about the terrible bribery and corruption
in many countries, one so rarely meets any one who has actually himself
tipped or bribed either a rich Banker, a Magistrate, a General, an
Archbishop, or a Minister for Foreign Affairs.
_Gibraltar: June 28_
Most people have been there. For those who haven’t:--
“It looks
Exactly as it does in books.”
We stop there only three hours.
_Naples: June 29_
One often hears people say that Naples is “disappointing.” The
disappointment depends on what you expect, on your standard of
comparison, and on the nature of the conditions under which you see
Naples.
There was once upon a time an Englishwoman who came out to Rome to
live there. She was the wife of a scholar. She was asked by one of her
compatriots whether she liked Rome. She said it was a great come-down
after what she had been used to.
“And where,” asked the second Englishwoman, “used you to live in
England?”
“Surbiton,” she answered.
Have you ever seen Surbiton? It is a small suburban town on the
Southwestern Railway, about half an hour’s distance by rail from London.
Well, if you go to a place like Naples and you expect to find a place
like Sheerness, you will be disappointed.
Then as to the conditions. These depend on the weather; and I know
by experience that the weather at Naples can make disappointment a
certainty. The first time I went there it rained. That was in spring.
The second time I went there it snowed. That was in winter. The third
time I went there I chose the month of May so as to insure good
weather. There was a thick fog the whole time. You couldn’t even see
Vesuvius. Nevertheless I persevered and went there a fourth time, and
was rewarded. This time I found the proper weather for Naples. It is
broiling hot, with just a slight sea-breeze.
[Illustration: NAPLES--THREE IMPRESSIONS]
It is St. Peter’s Day, consequently I anticipated that the shops would
be shut. I spoke my fear to one of the talkative and gesticulative
guides who boarded the ship.
He said No.
“But it’s ‘festa,’” I said.
“St. Peter,” he answered with a sniff; “St. Peter’s the patron Saint
of Rome, but here, no!”--and he made a gesture of indifferent contempt,
which no man can do so well as an Italian. “We’ve got St. Januarius,”
he added.
St. Peter, he gave one to understand, was, as far as Naples is
concerned, a very secondary person, a poor affair. And this is odd,
because St. Peter was a fisherman, and Naples is a city of fishermen.
At Naples St. Januarius overshadows every one and everything which is
connected with the Life Sacred: besides the fact of having a miracle
that works plumb, and to which the unbeliever bears witness.
Some of the shops were shut, some were open. The churches were
decorated with red hangings and crowded with people--old fishermen,
decrepit women, quantities of children and young women, and some smart
young men in white ducks and flannels.
I hold that in many ways Naples is the most characteristic, the most
Italian, of all Italy’s cities. It is the most exaggeratedly Italian of
them all. _L’Italie au grand complet._ It is there you see the bluest
of blue skies, the yellowest of yellow houses, where you hear Italian
talk at its most garrulous, Italian smells at their most pungent, and
Italian song at its most nasal sentimental pitch, those squalling,
pathetic, imploring, slightly flat love songs, the best of all love
songs, because they express real love without any nonsense, plain love,
unendurable, excruciating love.
“Excruciating” is the word. It is the love Catullus sings of in one of
the shortest of poems:--
“Odi et amo, quave id faciam fortasse requiris
Nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior.”
I hate and I love; and if you want to know how that can be, I can’t
tell you, but I feel it, and I am excruciated--that is to say, I am in
agony.
I imagine Catullus living at Naples and sailing on the bay in his
yacht (_phaselus ille_) and going out to dinner and drinking too much
wine, and being witty and sometimes insolent to important people such
as Julius Cæsar, and squalling love songs, bitter-sweet, desperate,
passionate songs, in the gardens of his Lesbia, whose real name was
Clodia.
She was the wife of a politician called, I think, Metellus Celer,
and the professors say she was very, very bad. I don’t trust the
professors. I don’t believe they know what the Romans, and especially
the she-Romans, were like. I distrust their knowledge. But I trust
Catullus’s verse, and from that it is evident that he was very much in
love, indeed, and very unhappy. Wretched Catullus, as he calls himself.
And she, Lesbia, didn’t care a rap. And in his misery he calls her hard
names, which were probably well deserved. The note you hear in his
poetry is the same you get in certain Neapolitan songs you hear in the
street. You can get them on the gramophone, sung by Anselmi.
“At Florence,” according to an Italian saying, “you think; at Rome,
you pray; at Venice, you love; at Naples, you look.” There is plenty
to look at, especially in the evening, when Vesuvius turns rosy and
transparent and the sea becomes phosphorescent; and plenty even in the
daytime, when you watch
“The blue Mediterranean where he lay
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers.”
The poets do hit it sometimes. And that is an exact description of
Capri. It quivers in the wave’s intenser day. As you drive along to
Posilippo, the hills of Sorrento seem like phantoms; the vegetation on
the hill is gorgeously luxuriant and green; you pass donkey carts laden
with bright-coloured fruits; the driver carries a huge yellow or green
parasol; every now and then somebody shouts; trams whistle by. It is
hot, swelteringly hot, but freshness comes from the sea. Vesuvius is
dormant, but crowned by a little cloud which pretends to be an eruption
and isn’t.
You are glutted with sunshine and beauty and heat and colour. This is
Italy, the quintessence of Italy, a panorama of azure, and sun, and
dust. To-day, in any case, there is nothing disappointing about it--and
I wish I were going to bathe in the reaches near Posilippo, and to sail
in a boat at night and listen to the squealing, love-sick Neapolitan
songsters.
When I get back to the ship, the passengers are all looking on at the
boys diving for pennies, and carefully distinguishing between copper
and silver, under the sea; till at last we leave behind the noise, the
chatter, and the importunate vendors who want to sell you opera-glasses
for almost nothing, and steam past Vesuvius, Sorrento, and Capri, away
into the blue Mediterranean. _Addio, Napoli._
_Port Said: July 3_
We call for the mails at Taranto and then nothing happens till we get
to Port Said--except that the stewards who had never been to sea before
have recovered from seasickness, and the passengers are all well enough
now to organise games and competitions in order to break the monotony,
or to mar the peace (whichever you like), of the voyage.
At Port Said we coal. Black men do it, singing the whole time. When one
has seen the black men coal at Port Said one realizes how the Egyptian
pyramids were built. I don’t mean how the engineering was done, but the
kind of way in which the people who had to make bricks without straw
set about it; for in the East nothing changes.
Conjurers and fortune-tellers come on board. I have my fortune told.
I am amazed by the accurate description of my character and the
probability of the foretold fortune, until a friend of mine has his
fortune told, and on comparing notes, we find the man told us word
for word the same thing about our characteristics and fortune, past,
present, and future. On reflection, I see that the way to tell people’s
character is to have one list of characteristics and to use it for
every one without the slightest variation. It is bound to succeed. For
instance, supposing Falstaff and Hamlet had their fortunes told by this
Nubian, I imagine he would have told Hamlet’s character as follows (I
assume Hamlet and Falstaff to be on board _incognito_):--
You are not so fortunate as you seem. You have a great deal of sense,
but more sense than knowledge. You can give admirable advice to other
people. Your judgment is excellent as regards others, but bad as
regards yourself. You never take your own good advice. You are fond of
your friends. You prefer talk to action. You suffer from indecision.
You are fond of the stage. You are susceptible to female beauty.
You are witty, amiable, and well educated, but you have a weakness
for coarse jokes. You are superstitious and believe in ghosts. You
can make people laugh; you often pretend to be more foolish than you
are. At other times you will surprise people by your power of apt
repartee. Your bane will be an inclination to fat which will hamper
you in fighting. You are unsuccessful as a soldier, but unrivalled as
a companion and philosopher. You will mix in high society, and have
friends at Court. You will come off badly in personal encounter, and
your final enemy will be a king.”
Now, imagine him saying exactly the same thing to Falstaff. Doesn’t
it fit him just as well? Can’t you imagine Falstaff saying, “He has
hit me off to a T,” and Hamlet murmuring, “My prophetic soul”? In
fact, I believe the profession of a fortune-teller, after that of a
hair-specialist, to be the finest profession in the world, and the
easiest. In the first place it is almost impossible to prevent the
patient from telling you the whole of his past and present of his own
accord; and even if he doesn’t do this, a little deft cross-examination
involved in a mass of vague generalization will extract a good deal.
This particular Nubian in the course of the process asked me my age, my
profession, whether I was married, what my financial prospects were,
and whether I had any children. However, I refused to answer questions;
but I very nearly did once or twice, so insinuatingly were the
questions put. I further tested the process by having my fortune and
character told by a second seer, and he said exactly the same things as
the first had said, and I afterwards found out that he also had said
exactly the same thing to some one else.
_The Red Sea: in July_
The first day you say it is pleasant. The second day you say the
stories about the heat you have heard are gross exaggerations. The
third day you feel the heat; and the fourth you realize that you
are morning, noon, and night in a Turkish bath that hasn’t got a
cooling-room. And yet the energetic played cricket and quoits.
One morning (quite early in the morning) a tragedy happened. One of the
stokers, a Maltee, went mad, owing to the heat, and jumped overboard.
The steamer stopped, but nothing could be done. The sea is full of
sharks.
The air is full of little particles of dust which makes your hair
gritty. The best way to spend one’s time is, I think, to remain
obstinately motionless in a chair, dressed in the lightest of clothes,
and to read novels, stories which engage without unduly straining the
attention.
How grateful one is on such occasions to the authors who have written
books of that kind!
Somebody once said that there were books which it is a positive
pleasure to read. To my mind the most precious of all books are those
which seem to do the work for you. You don’t have to bother; you are
not aware that you are reading. Nobody could say this of the works of
George Meredith or of Henry James. You may be interested, delighted,
and moved, but you know you are reading.
Anthony Trollope and William de Morgan do the work for me, personally;
so do Victor Hugo, George Sand, Count Tolstoy, and Rudyard Kipling.
Then there are books which one can’t stop reading. To this class
belong, in my case, the works of Dumas: “Monte Cristo,” “La Reine
Margot,” and the many volumes which tell of the Musketeers.
“Monte Cristo” is the only book which for me has ever annihilated
time, space, and place, and everything else.
I read it at school at Eton, on a whole school-day. At three you had to
go into school, which lasted till four. I began reading, or rather flew
back to my book, as soon as luncheon was over, about half past two.
I had just got to the part where Dantès is escaping from the Château
d’If. I sat reading in a small room in my tutor’s house. A quarter to
three struck; three struck; Dumas silenced those bells, whose sound
your whole unconscious self, as a rule, automatically obeyed. You
couldn’t forget that sound if you wanted to, any more than a soldier
forgets the bugle-calls that mark the routine of the day, or the sailor
forgets the boatswain’s whistle. The sound is in his flesh and bones as
well as in his ears. Nature responds to it automatically, unconsciously.
But the sound of the clock striking three escaped me; and the clanging
echoes of the school clock chiming the quarters struck in vain for
me through my open window on that June afternoon: and a quarter past
three, half past three, and quarter to four. I may have heard, but I
heeded not; my mind was far away. Now to shirk school altogether was
an unheard-of thing. You could do it in the early morning and say you
were ill, and “stay out” under the protection of the matron, who always
certified that you were ill. (Who knows? it might be measles!) But if
you shirked afternoon school, it meant probably writing out four books
of “Paradise Lost.” A little time after the quarter, the boys’ maid
came into my room and asked me whatever I was doing. I was brought back
from the Château d’If, and my heart stopped still. I raced downstairs,
across the street to the schoolyard, up the wooden stairs into the
old Upper School, where beneath the busts of famous old Etonians, our
little lessons dribbled on. I found school just over, and oh! miracle
of miracles! my absence hadn’t been noticed! In every division there
was a boy called the _Præpostor_ whose duty it was to see that every
boy was present at chapel and in school (that is to say, in the various
classrooms). The office was held for a week by every boy in the
division, in turn. If you were absent, he had to find out whether it
was due to certified illness or whether you had any other reasonable
excuse. If not, your name went in to the Head Master. He hadn’t noticed
my absence, nor had the master, and I walked away with the other boys
as though I had been there all the time instead of at the Château
d’If. I sometimes think that perhaps the spirit of Dumas impersonated
me during that hour in Upper School, so that my rapture in reading of
Dantès’s escape for the first time might be complete, perfect, and
uninterrupted. If Dumas could make one forget the chimes of the school
clock at Eton, he could make one forget anything.
Another book which has (in addition to many other glorious qualities
such as poetry, pathos, and passion) the same riveting power is, to my
mind (if you skip the historical dissertations), Victor Hugo’s “Les
Misérables.” Mr. Basil Thomson says it is the favourite book of the
convicts in Dartmoor Prison, and that they call it “Less Miserable.”
It is a favourite book among the Russian peasants also--among those
who read and write. So is, as a matter of fact, “Monte Cristo.” Most
literary critics say the latter part of “Monte Cristo” is a pity. Not
so the Russian peasant, and not I. The proof is in the reading. Whoever
heard of anybody not finishing “Monte Cristo,” and stopping halfway,
bored?
In reading what Mr. Basil Thomson says of the books liked and the
books disliked by the prisoners in Dartmoor Prison, I was startlingly
reminded of what I had heard and seen myself of the literary taste of
the Russian peasants.
They both dislike books which are “full of lies” (including many
excellent modern stories). “Monte Cristo” has the seal of romantic
truth. I met a man in a steamer later on in my journey who said that
“Monte Cristo” was the best book in print. I agree.
In the Red Sea it was almost too hot to read, and I murmured to myself
those lines from H. Belloc’s epic, “The Modern Traveller”:--
“O Africa, mysterious land,
Surrounded by a lot of sand--
Far land of Ophir, mined of old
By lordly Solomon for gold,
Who sailing southward to Perim,
Took all the gold away with him,
And left a lot of holes:
Vacuities which bring despair
To those confiding souls,
Who find that they have bought a share
In desolate horizons where
The Desert, terrible and bare,
Interminably rolls.”
Perim we passed in the night, and then there suddenly came a moment
when it got cooler. We had turned a corner and the breeze began to
blow. A hot breeze, but a breeze. And it’s something even to get a hot
breeze after four days and four nights in a Turkish bath.
_The Gulf of Aden: July_
Everybody up to now has been vaguely discussing what kind of monsoon
it would be. The most dismal prophecies were made. We were told it
would be very rough, very hot, and very wet. As it turns out, it is not
rough, not wet, but still hot: steamy and damp, that is to say.
I now feel as if I had been all my life on board. The passengers, the
officers, and crew seem to be the only people in my universe; the rest
are shadows and dreams. There are not many passengers on board. People
fight shy of the Red Sea and the monsoon in July. I think they are
wrong. There are just enough people for company and not too many for
comfort. There is a pleasant variety of passengers; a few Australians,
two Germans, a Frenchman and his wife, an Irishman,--once a mining
expert and now a professional painter who paints bold and capable
landscapes in oil, full of colour and light,--a Scotch family, a
High Commissioner (whatever that may be), an American lady singer, a
missionary, and two young North-Country Englishmen.
If one travels for over a month on a liner, one’s fellow passengers
sometimes may become something more than what Bourget calls _profils
perdus_: meaning the chance acquaintanceships of the _table d’hôte_ and
the railway train. In a steamer one can, if one chooses, get to know
people really well.
Every evening a small crowd play whisky poker for cocktails; after
dinner there is a good deal of bridge; sometimes some music. But from
ship’s music, as a rule, one can “withdraw one’s attention” without
difficulty.
I am told a good deal about Australia and the Australians by people who
have been backwards and forwards. They agree to its being a splendid
country, full of openings for the emigrant. “In Australia,” some one
tells me, “people don’t ask you for references. If you ask for a job
they give it you, and as long as you show you can do it, they let you
do it, and as soon as you show signs of not being able to do it, they
fire you out.”
That is, indeed, a different system from what obtains in the mother
country, where references are regarded with awe, and where a thousand
small side issues often contribute not only to a square peg remaining
in a round hole, but to an utterly hopeless peg remaining in any kind
of hole.
One also hears that the Australians (_a_) resent criticism on anything
Australian; (_b_) are very critical of what they see in other countries.
[Illustration: FROM SHIP’S MUSIC, AS A RULE, ONE CAN WITHDRAW ONE’S
ATTENTION WITHOUT DIFFICULTY]
What irritates the Australians, no doubt, and what justly irritates
them, is when globe-trotters rush round the country in a few days
and then write a book of critical impressions. In England (and in
America, I should think) the people have got over being irritated by
that particular form of literature. They don’t care. If a visitor,
after spending a fortnight in England, writes a book called “The Rotten
English,” or “Those Damned English,” or the “God-forsaken Country,” we
don’t much care. And as for criticism, if it be well founded and well
expressed, it will be certain to obtain a wide popularity in England.
Witness Mr. Collier’s “England and the English.” Personally there is
nothing I enjoy reading more than the critical impressions of my own
country written by an intelligent foreigner. It opens the window on all
sorts of shut-up points of view, and it calls one’s attention to what
one had never noticed because it was too obvious; because we ourselves
are in it.
But the Australians appear to be sensitive to the criticism of the
foreigner, even when it is just and well founded. My very slender
experience has convinced me that they are often unduly critical with
regard to the objects of interest in other countries. One day, on
board, one of the Australians expressed disappointment and censure
with regard to London architecture. I thought at first he meant the
new public offices; but not at all; he meant Westminster Abbey, which
compared unfavourably with the cathedral in Adelaide.
I was inclined to think this critical point of view which was
attributed to the colonials was perhaps imaginary, or in any case
exaggerated. It certainly is exaggerated; it isn’t imaginary.
Here, for instance, are some extracts taken from a book written by
A. W. Rutherford, of New Zealand, on Europe. I quote them from a
review which appeared in an Australian review, “The Bookfellow.” Mr.
Rutherford, says the reviewer, was disappointed with Paris; “the
streets are not equal to those of any of our cities; the respectable
restaurants are mean, shabby affairs; the swell restaurants are the
haunts of gilded vice and supported by vice; the Seine, like the Thames
within its city boundary, is just a dirty ditch--neither of them to be
compared with the Waikato. Most Parisians look dowdy. Our Maoris could
teach the French a lesson in politeness. Meat is not safe in France....
Much of the wine is vile; no colonial could possibly drink it; the
cheap wines of France are deadly rubbish.”
Of the tombs in Westminster Abbey he says they are dirty, untidy,
inartistic; “some of them look like great cooking ranges.”
He is disappointed in Venice, but he gives a clear reason for his
disappointment in the gondola. “I had imagined the latter a frivolous,
giddy thing, gaily painted, and the gondoliers clothed as in the
play of that name. The gondoliers are just plain sailormen, in their
work-a-day clothes.”
That explains everything. Everything, as I said about Naples, depends
on what you expect, on your standard. If you expect a gondola to be
gilded and giddy and it turns out to be black, you are disappointed.
If you expect the Seine and the Thames to be vast rivers, outside
their cities and not in them, you are disappointed. What such authors
never seem to bother about is whether their standard is likely to be
indorsed by the rest of the human race or not. Their standard may be
an excellent one for some things. The things which everybody else in
the world would acknowledge to be good. For instance, in this case, the
manners of the Maoris. The Maoris are the most courteous and chivalrous
race in the world. But if they can teach manners to the French, there
are many people in the colonies who would benefit by a lesson from
them also. Another thing which the author of this book does not seem
to realize is that there are many people who prefer a gondolier should
look like a sailor, which he is, than like a singer in operetta. They
prefer him to be dressed in his ordinary work-a-day clothes. They think
it not only more appropriate to his task, but more picturesque. They
think a man who is dressed in the clothes which befit his profession
will look more dignified than a man who is dressed up as for a pageant.
The reviewer ends by saying, “Mr. Rutherford is a representative New
Zealander, and in many ways a typical New Zealander. His interesting
book is worth reading. It is compounded of keen observation, shrewd
judgment, parish prejudice, and pure ignorance ... in its narrowness
and in its depth, its arrogance and its enlightenment, it comments upon
New Zealand as effectively as upon Europe; it shows us why Dominion
standards are condemned in Britain, sometimes justly, and it may
suggest to British readers how the Dominions feel in regard to the
comments of hasty British tourists with frequently less ability than
Mr. Rutherford displays.”
Yes, it does suggest that. It also suggests to one to hope that free
trade and liberty may be maintained in the matter. Let the colonial
say exactly what he thinks about Europe, but let the European say
exactly what he thinks about the colonies, and then neither side
can have a grievance. But when the colonial complains of the hasty
and narrow judgment of the European, let him have a thought for the
possible beam in his own eye.
Another time, on board, another Australian complained that the works
of G. K. Chesterton were bosh. “Thank God,” he added, “he’s not an
Australian.”
But fancy if G. K. Chesterton had been an Australian. One wonders
what would have been the effect on his figure, his style, and his
philosophy. Instead of his romantic, adventurous optimism, would his
genius have been sultry, pessimistic, and rebellious?
[Illustration: IF G. K. CHESTERTON HAD BEEN AN AUSTRALIAN]
I think he would have written gigantic epics on the Blue Mountains,
the Bush, and gum-trees; wild romances about bush-rangers, and
beach-combers, and swinging songs about Botany Bay.
I can imagine G. K. Chesterton, looking lean and spare, riding a horse
bareback. One of his qualities would have certainly developed in the
same way, had he been born and bred over the sea, and that is his
geniality, his large, hospitable nature, his belief in goodness; for
hospitality and friendliness grow if anything quicker on Australian and
colonial soil than they do in England.
Here is a fragment of verse supposed to be written by G. K. Chesterton,
had he been born and bred in the country which Adam Lindsay Gordon
sang:--
_“The Melbourne Cup,” or “Hippodromania”_
The crowd came out of the Eastern lands
To see the Melbourne Cup,
Like Titans under tiger skies
They were as simple as surprise
And pleased as a bulldog pup.
Beyond the twisted gum-trees
They suddenly ceased to swarm;
Like statues the wild crowd stood still,
Like soldiers little children drill,
And silence came upon the hill
More loud than a thunderstorm.
And the bell rang a little,
And the riders were up at the post,
Full of strange fire the racers strip
And ramp and rock and boil and skip
Each like an angel in a ship
That charges the tall white coast.
The emerald course was a course indeed,
Between that crowd of men.
And every steed became a steed.
“Say when, old boy, say when!”
The flag is lowered, they’re off! They come!
Like clouds on a roaring sky.
Jim Whiffler swirls his whip away
And the tall grey horse goes by.
His face is like a newspaper
That many men take in;
The colours of his sleeve are mixed
Like cocktails made with gin.
Now Strop falls back, they’re neck and neck,
Now Davis, Whiffler, ride;
Jim Whiffler with his brainless face
Is spun and swirled aside.
Jim Whiffler’s lost! but as he fails
He screams into the din,
The mare has still more heart to lose
Than you have heart to win.
And Whiffler sits high in the saddle,
A broken-hearted jockey;
And our Jim Whiffler, robbed of fame,
Singed by the bookmakers with blame,
Cries out, “I’ll change my trade and name
And take to playing hockey.”
_The Indian Ocean: during the Monsoon_
It’s not at all like the Indian Ocean of which Kipling sings, “so soft,
so something, so blooming blue.” It is grey; there’s a swell, and it’s
muggy. But at night you can see the Southern Cross, and that’s an
excitement.
How did Dante know there was such a thing as the Southern Cross? He
certainly did know it, because when he emerged from hell, somewhere
near the South Pole, he says he looked at the polar sky and saw
four stars which had never been seen before save by the first
people--whoever they were (the inhabitants of Paradise?)--
“All’ altro polo, e vidi quattro stelle
Non viste mai fuor che alla prima gente.”
I dare say, and I believe some commentators do say, that his meaning
was allegorical, and that by the four stars he meant Woman’s Suffrage,
or the battle of Waterloo. I take leave to differ. I’m sure he meant
the Southern Cross. Perhaps it is in Herodotus, whose geography, long
suspected of being fantastic, is proved to be more and more accurate.
For instance, Herodotus said the source of the Nile was in the Silver
Mountain. This was pooh-poohed for centuries, until the discovery of
Mount Ruwenzori proved that Herodotus was perfectly right.
Dante was a great traveller, and the greatest pen impressionist who
ever wrote. He describes a landscape in a line so that it stays with
you forever. He uses the smallest possible number of words, hardly
any adjectives, and the picture leaps up before you, immortal and
unforgettable.
Who can do this among the moderns? Keats could sometimes. Tennyson
gives you English landscape. If you read “In Memoriam” you have lived a
year in the English country and seen the march of the English seasons.
Crabbe can do it. Who reads Crabbe? Nobody. And yet he is a wonderful
poet, as realistic as Tolstoy and Arnold Bennett, as poignant as
Gorky. Byron called him the best painter of nature. (And Byron was a
good judge.) He can give you a landscape in a line. For instance:--
“And on the ocean slept th’ unanchored fleet.”
He writes about the poor as they are, without sentimentality, and
without exaggeration; and as a painter of English landscape he still
remains the best.
What has the poet Crabbe got to do with the Indian Ocean? Nothing. But
it can do nobody any harm to be reminded of the poet Crabbe, although
he was born in 1754 and died in 1832. He may not be read by the modern
generation, but he is not forgotten. A Frenchman wrote a long and
excellent book about him not long ago. He is safe in the Temple of
Fame, which once you have entered you cannot leave. And this temple
is like a wheel. It goes round and round, and sometimes some of its
inmates are in the glare of the sun, and sometimes they are in the
shade, but they are there; and they never fall out. This is comforting.
It also teaches us not to laugh at the taste of our fathers, because
that taste which we despise may be the rage once more in the days of
our grandchildren.
How we used to despise everything connected with the Early Victorian
period. Now people have their rooms done up in Early Victorian style,
and Early Victorian furniture is collected; rep sofas are precious,
green tablecloths and antimacassars. They have passed the period of
being like an out-of-date fashion plate; they have reached the hallowed
moment of being picturesque and Old World. It is Late Victorian art
that is now despised--William Morris and Burne-Jones. But they are
safe in the temple, too, and a day will come when people will admire
Burne-Jones’s pictures and collect Morris designs as a great curiosity,
and say, “This is a very fine specimen of 1880 chintz.”
During this monsoon period I read more than ever. I once asked a
famous politician what he did on a sea voyage. He said, “The first
day I am civil to my fellow passengers, and after that I read Scott’s
novels.” I adopted this plan.
_Ceylon: July_
A line of palm trees over a tumultuous fringe of silver foam, which
leaps up on a dull opal-green sea, is your first impression as you get
near the island. When you come into harbour, a quantity of narrow black
boats swarm round the steamer. Then the tug comes alongside, and after
waiting in it till it is no longer worth while to go on shore in a
boat, I finally, in a burst of impatience, get into a boat and am rowed
ashore. No sooner am I in the boat than the tug starts. However, the
four black men in my boat pull hard and we reach the pier almost at the
same time as the tug.
The first thing to do is to take a rickshaw. It is fine, but
fortunately cloudy; the sun is hidden. In spite of this, it is hot,
very hot. The streets are made of red sand, the houses of Venetian
red stone. You pass palm trees, and trees which look like acacias,
only they have mingled with the intense green of their foliage a
quantity of scarlet flowers. I go scudding along the street to the
Galleface Hotel. You pass babus in white European clothes, and frail
black Cingalese dressed in diaphanous silks, and Anglo-Indians in
pith helmets. The world of Kipling is revealed to one in a trice. A
long drive along the sea leads to the hotel, This is the fashionable
esplanade of Ceylon. Carriages pass up and down full of wealthy
natives. The sea throws up a huge long wash of booming surf. The
hotel is a large white building, like the section of an exhibition.
The bedrooms are high wooden cubicles. As soon as you arrive a tailor
springs from somewhere and asks you if you want any clothes--thin
clothes--made in the night. I don’t think I do. As soon as I have got
a room and disposed of my luggage, I take a rickshaw and drive through
the native part of the town. It becomes more and more like Kipling. You
pass little bullocks, and natives bathing and washing clothes in a
pool; shops full of fruit; natives squatting, natives talking, natives
smoking. You hear all manner of cries, and you smell the smell of the
East.
I wander about until it is dark and then come back to dinner. The
tailor appears again. I don’t want any clothes: but it is no use, one
has to order them, so importunate is he. He measures me and promises to
have the complete suit ready by the next morning at 6.30.
It is when you are dressed for dinner and you come down into the large
high dining-room, full of electric fans, that you realize that it is
impossible to be cool. It is an absorbing, annihilating damp heat that
saps your very being.
The first thing to do is to eat a mango. Will it be as good as you
are told it is? Yes, it is better. At first you think it is just an
ordinary apricot, and then you think it is a banana; no, fresher; a
peach, a strawberry, and then a delicious, sharp, fresh, aromatic
after-taste comes, slightly tinged with turpentine, but not bitter.
Then you get all the tastes at once, and you know that the mango is
like nothing else but its own incomparable self.
It has all these different tastes at once, simultaneously. In this
it resembles the beatific vision as told of by St. Thomas Aquinas.
The point of the beatific vision, says St. Thomas, is _its infinite
variety_. So that those who enjoy it have at the same time the feeling
that they are looking at a perfect landscape, hearing the sweetest
music, bathing in a cold stream on a hot day, reaching the top of
a mountain, galloping on grass on a horse that isn’t running away,
floating over tree-tops in a balloon, reading very good verse, eating
toasted cheese, drinking a really good cocktail--and any other nice
thing you can think of, _all at once_. The point, therefore, of the
taste of the mango is its infinite variety. It was probably mangoes
which grew in Eden on the Tree of Knowledge, only I expect they had
a different kind of skin then, and were without that cumbersome and
obstinate kernel, which makes them so very difficult to eat.
There are a good many people at dinner--Englishmen and Englishwomen.
Their faces are washed absolutely chalk-white by the heat, as if
every drop of blood had been drained from them. That is what comes
from living in such a climate. One thinks of Kipling once more. The
room seems to be full of his characters. There is Mrs. Hawksbee; I
recognised her at once. There is Otis Yeere and Pluffles, and Churton
and Reggie Burke, and Pack, and I believe that conjuror in the verandah
is Strickland in disguise. He comes nearer and does the mango trick,
and then begins to charm a snake; but we all refuse to see the snake
charmed, charm he never so wisely, having a horror of snakes.
It gets hotter and hotter; one feels one’s bones melting.
The next morning punctually at 6.30 the tailor arrives with the suit
of clothes finished, as he promised, and by eight we have to be on
board the steamer.
To-day the sun is shining with all his might, and one realizes that if
one had stayed a few hours longer in this beautiful island, it would
have entailed either buying a pith helmet or getting a sunstroke.
The harbour is a lovely sight in the early morning. Church parties
from a British man-of-war are on their way to church. The sea is
like an emerald to-day. The little narrow native boats, full of
gorgeous-coloured fruits, are slipping about round the liner. I am
sorry to leave Ceylon.
_From Colombo to Fremantle: July_