Part 4

“‘Your oath.’ And a smile glinted in his shifty eyes. ‘You would never break your oath as a mason. I would not, and I should not call myself a man of honour. I know I am safe where a mason is concerned.’ And, leaning across the table he touched my sleeve, tugging it a little. ‘It will be so simple,’ he said softly. ‘There is only one sentry on the river. At five minutes to ten you go on your rounds. At ten o’clock the cook brings round a dixie full of cocoa. I could give you a little powder that you could drop in the sentry’s cup. He would faint. For an hour he would know nothing. In that time a boat could be brought up the river and taken away again. The sentry would recover. He would shake himself, would stand at his post again, and would say nothing. It is quite safe.’

“‘It’s no good your talking,’ I said; ‘I shan’t do it.’

“‘But why not? If you do not let me through, someone else will, farther up the coast. It is a question of waiting, and I would prefer not to wait, but sooner or later I shall find my friend. One can do anything with two thousand pounds.’

“‘Two thousand pounds!’

“‘That is what I am offering. Big profits can be made in opium.’

“‘But you won’t be able to bribe a British officer.’

“He laughed at that.

“‘Every man has his price, and it was the Prime Minister of Great Britain who said it. Even British officers are glad of a little pocket money. Well?’

“I said nothing. I picked up my hat and stick, and rose.

“‘All right,’ he said, ‘but don’t be in such a hurry, and remember, if you don’t, someone else will. Why should he have the money rather than you?’

“I walked quickly out of the restaurant, but I had hardly gone a hundred yards when, putting my hand into my pocket for a box of matches, I felt my fingers touch a smooth leather purse. I took it out, opened it, and saw inside a small grey envelope. Inside the envelope was a reddish powder.

“I shall never forget what I endured during the next few hours. I brought forward all the arguments that I could summon--duty, patriotism, my name, but there remained always at the back of my mind this thought: ‘Two thousand pounds means an income of a hundred pounds a year. I can resign my commission, and spend the rest of my life in quiet study.’ I began to picture the long evenings before a fire, with a lamp shedding a mild light upon my book, and I contrasted it with the smoky atmosphere of the mess and the Colonel’s interminable anecdotes. And there was no real reason why I should refuse this opportunity. Someone else would accept it. The opium was certain to be got through. This was the chance for which I had waited all my life: it would never come again.”

“But you did refuse?” I said.

“Yes. I did, and I do not know whether or not I did wisely. I went through agonies of mind, and when my orderly came at half-past nine to tell me that it was time for me to be starting on my rounds I knew that if I once got out there I should be unable to resist. So I took out a bottle of whisky, filled up my glass, spilt the powder into it, and before the red powder had had time to reach the bottom I had raised the glass to my mouth and emptied it.

“It was a good drug for the purpose for which it was required. I sat down in my chair. I did not feel ill, or sick, or dizzy. I just went off, and when I came round it was after half-past ten, and I was safe. I felt no ill effects.”

“And that was the end of it?” I said.

“As far as I was concerned. But I suppose that the story does not end there really. I met the same man a couple of months later in another café a few miles farther up the coast. He looked cleaner and smarter than when I had seen him before, and he greeted me effusively and stood me drinks. After a while he took me aside.

“‘You were a fool,’ he said.

“I shrugged my shoulders.

“‘I’m glad I was, then.’

“‘You were a fool,’ he repeated, ‘and what has happened? You fling away two thousand pounds--someone else picks them up.’

“‘So you got it through?’

“‘Of course. What did I tell you? The world is not full of Josephs.’

“And two weeks later one of the officers in my company applied for leave to go home to be married. We were all surprised, as he hadn’t much money--only his pay--and had often been heard to lament the length of his engagement. When someone asked if his grandmother had died and left him a fortune, he blushed awkwardly, and said something about a bit of luck on horses.

“He never rejoined us after his marriage.”

He stopped, and we looked at each other for a moment.

“And you wonder whether what you did was right, or not?”

“Yes; I’ve been wondering that for twelve years, and I shall go on wondering it to the end. If I had given the powder to the sentry instead of to myself I could have spent the end of my life as I should like to spend it. And I don’t know that it would have been wrong. I am inclined to think that the end justifies the means, and, anyhow, the stuff was bound to be got through.”

“But, after all,” I said, “you’ve been happy in the army on the whole?”

“Oh yes,” he said, “I’ve been happy enough, but it’s not the sort of life for which I was intended. It’s not easy to explain, but I feel that it could have so easily been so much more happy--if the rough edges had only been ever so slightly trimmed.”

And for a long while he sat in silence. He was thinking no doubt of the quiet tragedy of a life lived happily but not intensely. But I thought of the kindly Providence that takes the handling of our destinies out of our control, and had saved this curious old soldier from a career of speculation that could have ended only in pathetic failure.

IV

But it is not only nor indeed even chiefly through meeting new types of people that we can arrive at that angle of detachment. We need an entire change of setting. It would be hard to overrate the subconscious influence on us of our surroundings. A sudden sensation of taste and smell will recall to us a cycle of associated memoirs. The glimpse through a railway-carriage window of a gabled roof, a square church tower, a particular shade of sunlight on red brick will open the pages of a chapter whose existence we had almost forgotten; will reveal in relief, in perspective--with an objective reality that at the time it did not hold for us--a facet of the past. The obvious, the superficial reflection on such occurrences would be an expression of surprise that so trivial an affair as the taste of cocoa, the smell of wet stone, the glimpse of a square-towered church, should become a window opening on childhood. But probably nearer to the truth would be the assumption that these moments of sight and taste of which, at the time, we hardly more than recognised the existence, and to which we attached no value, were an essential part of the framework of our thoughts, and our hopes, and our actions, and that it was from them that what we have come to regard in our lives as personal and important drew its nourishment, its colour, and its direction.

As the novels of Alphonse Daudet are steeped in the sunshine of the south and the simple, lazy kindliness that it engenders, so are Maupassant’s stories children of the mud, the lights, the rain, the gallantries of Paris. And so over the poetry and novels of Thomas Hardy lies the deep shadow of the Wessex countryside. And among these many influences that tend, unknown to us, to make our lives gay or sombre, deep or shallow, or it would be more true perhaps to say that tend to accentuate in us those characteristics that are gay or sombre, deep or shallow, there are few that touch us more surely or more closely than that of the nature of the buildings, the streets, the shops, the churches among which we live.

It would be worth while, indeed, discussing whether the classical scholar of some old foundation derives the sense of antiquity, that knowledge that we are parts of a pattern, the threads of which pass out on either side of us, which forms so human, so tolerant a basis for his ideas and his actions, more from the study of Homer and Catullus than from the tranquillising presence on every side of him of old buildings, gothic arches and cloisters, and curious quadrangles. British administration, whatever may have been said against it, has been credited always with a genial tolerance, an admirable refusal to be perturbed by trifles, a policy of “let it pass.” A capital social lubricant, this characteristic. And I wonder whether it would be too fanciful to attribute a part, at any rate, of this placidity in the class from which the majority of officers and civil servants are drawn, to the mellowing influence of the school buildings among which are spent their most impressionable years. Some such effect there must be, I am very sure. A mind continually encountering the survivals of early generations acquires a detachment from the immediate present. A boy who, on his way from one classroom to another, from the dayroom to the cricket field, and the library to the chapel, has always before him the silent grey-brown witnesses of continuity and tradition, cannot help thinking often consciously, and unconsciously times without number: “all this was going on two hundred years ago and, without any very considerable alteration, it will be going on two hundred hence.”

That sensation we rarely if ever get in London. I doubt if there is in the road I live in a single brick that is fifty-five years old. Twenty years ago Golders Green did not exist. I can barely picture this North End road as it was in the spring of 1907 when my father decided to build a house here, and to call it Underhill. A muddy, unpaved affair it was, with fields on either side of it as far as I remember: and it would remain so, we were told, for the Hampstead tube was in process of construction, and it would be impossible to build houses on the narrow gap between it and the road. Land’s End for a while it seemed to us after our nine years in a dingy West Hampstead thoroughfare. There were no shops then at the Cross Roads. We had to walk across the heath to Hampstead. Indeed, only one train in every four or six came through to Golders Green. Hampstead, Highgate, Golders Green; that was the electric sign then on the Euston platform. There were no non-stops. And one had to decide whether it would be quicker and pleasanter to walk across the heath or to wait for a Golders Green train.

And then the Garden Suburb came, and the builders discovered that there was ample room for a row of houses between the railway and the road, and Smith and Boots and Sainsbury added each of them another branch to their activities. And ’buses ceased to stop at Child’s Hill and tubes at Hampstead. And within four years the cross roads became as good a spot as Piccadilly for the unwary to be run over.

When I came home at the end of the first term at my prep. I could hardly recognise the North End Road. I believe that had I been transported there by a motor in the night I should not have known where I was, any more than I should have known where I was had I found myself in the spring of 1920 suddenly beside Potije Chateau on the road from Ypres to Zonnebeke. Golders Green sprang into life as speedily and as haphazardly as have the devastated areas. That immense hippodrome that confronts you as you turn to the left out of the station; they had not begun work on it when I went back to Sherborne in the autumn of 1913; but the curtain rang up on Boxing-Day. In less than three months they built it; working from start to finish against the clock. They had no time to instal a heating apparatus. On that first evening we shivered in greatcoats; but within a week the fires were banked up. The heat dripped on to us from the ceiling. An achievement, undoubtedly. Golders Green is a comfortable and commodious spot. There is the heath for exercise; the hippodrome for amusement; there are barbers and baths and cinemas, and trams and tubes and ’buses, and a taxi rank; an illuminated clock at the cross roads; two restaurants. A place, I am told, where one may dance, that even.

An impressive outpost, doubtless of Newer London: a fine tribute to progress, and mechanical invention. But there is one thing that, search how you may, you will never find at Golders Green. You will not find anywhere any indication that the world was inhabited a hundred years ago.

Nor will you find any such indication at Tottenham, or Balham, or at Upper Clapton; new streets; new shops; new houses; travel by what road you choose through any of the London suburbs: you will find everywhere the same cross-roads, with their policemen, and their electric cars; and the white sham stone-fronted cinema; and the local empire, and the long stretch of detached and semi-detached villas, with their garages and garden plots, very pleasant, very clean, very comfortable: cheap amusement and good amusement; such as grandparents knew not. But that sense of antiquity; those reminders in the gables at street corners of other men and other fortunes, that is lost to us. The old streets and the old buildings are being swept away. History in London can only be found in the places where one cannot afford to live, and the places where one would not want to live. We have no eternal landscape to speak to us of the passage of human life. We have no equivalent for the Sussex Downs; the Downs that have hardly altered since the Romans camped on them. We have neither the modesty nor the pride of heritage. Family feeling dies where there are no family seat and no family possessions. We are parvenus, we townsfolk. It is only through a detaching of ourselves from our surroundings, through travel, or the company of books, most particularly, perhaps, through moments of intense self-realisation when we are in touch with eternal instincts or eternal forces, that we recover our sense of values, that we see ourselves simply as part of a pattern, a footfall in the sound of passage.

And it may have been that it was in search of some such amulet that Clifford Bax and I set out last April across the North Sea to Norway.

A long journey it was, with a good twenty-four hours of open sea, twenty-four hours in which to wonder what crazed splendour, what folly of irresponsible ambition, urged our Viking forefathers to desert their sheltered fjords in those flat-bottomed, high-prowed craft of theirs. A long unheroic journey on my part, at any rate. I lay supine and neither stirred nor ate, consoling myself as best I might with Geoffrey Moss’s entertaining if scandalous _Sweet Pepper_.

It was worth it, though, that harassing, exacting journey, for the sake of the two hours of quiet passage in the late evening through the fjords. There is no country that welcomes its guests less ostentatiously than Norway does, that stands more simply on its own attainments. There is no parade of harbours and high buildings and imposing statues. Just the long stretches of receding waterways, motionless, many coloured waterways, green and grey and purple; a purple that shimmers now and then to the rich transparent red of Homer’s sea, Homer’s wine-coloured midland sea; the fading waterways, and about them the long, endless, low-crested circling hills. Hardly a sign of life, only now and then below the promontories of rock, a warning light, and near it on the land some small wooden house.

But then Norway is an empty country. It is as large as England, and it has a population of three million. You will see no towns on the long fourteen-hour journey from Bergen to Christiania. Only here and there a collection of scattered hutments and the long stretches of the fjords. And it is remarkable that so small a nation should have made such a considerable contribution to the literature of Europe. A useless, hopeless task it must sometimes seem, we felt, to the young Norwegian. “I am writing,” one can imagine him to say, “in a language that only three million people are able to understand. It is possible that my work may be some day read and appreciated in the foreign cities of Europe; but it will be read there in translation; and the phrasing, the colour, the rhythm, on which I have expended so much labour, will have gone out of it. If only I had been born in America!”

And then we remembered that the population of England when Shakespeare wrote was little greater than that of Norway is to-day; that it seemed worth while to him to write for three million people; that these, as all other, things are relative; that it would be impossible without detachment, without a sense of the eternal values, to produce a masterpiece; and that such a one as Björnson would know out of the direct simplicity of his nature, that it is enough to plough one’s furrow to the end.

We were bound for Finse and its winter sports, and it was exciting to look for the first signs of ice and snow at the edge of the water, to watch at each halt on the way the fall of the thermometer. We seemed to get little colder, though, for that is the charm of Norway. The sun shines out of a blue sky, and your face tingles with the glare that the snow flings up on it. It is a pity, though, that you have to wear darkened glasses to protect your eyes. It robs the sky of its colour, and if such a phrase may be permitted, it seems to bleach the snow, with the effect of an unreal twilight. Only now and again in glimpses, through windows for the most part, can one see the landscape as it really is.

But then it is not for the sake of its scenery that one goes to Finse; the long sheets of snow have, it is true, a certain remote, cold loveliness of their own; but the continued sight of snow is apt by itself to be depressing. Finse is not, shall we say, an ideal place for the ancient and infirm; it would be unexhilarating for them to sit all day long, looking out of the drawing-room window. Finse is very nearly the highest place on the Bergen-Christiania railway. It is well above the vegetation line. It consists of a station, an hotel, and some half-dozen hutments. It is quite simply an encampment among the hills, and from the windows of the hotel one sees nothing but snow and mountains.

But one does not go to Finse to sit in drawing-rooms, not, that is to say, till nightfall, when one collapses among cushions, exhausted after a day on skies. Finse is the greatest place in the world for ski-ing; in its season, that is to say, in March and April and the first weeks of May. During the Swiss season it is a place of fog and mist and some three hours’ precarious sunlight, but the snow is fine and hard there, when Mürren has become a bog.

We went there as novices, Clifford Bax and I. And it is a good place, Finse, for the novice. It is built beside a lake, frozen over for the great part of the year; and the banks that slope gently down to it provide a scale of ascending difficulty. For the first morning one stumbles helplessly within a hundred yards of the hotel on a slope with a gradient of something, I suppose, like one in fifty. By the afternoon one has come to master it. And as one returns tired to one’s tea, one looks southwards beyond the lake and one says, “I think we’ll try that slope to-morrow.”

One cannot, or at least we could not, cease in six days to be a novice. But we managed to amuse ourselves thoroughly climbing up slopes and falling down them. Perhaps, had we been more proficient, we should have enjoyed it less. A thing ceases to be exciting when you are certain of success, and you avoid the slope that you have been down ten times in succession without disaster. How thrilling a bicycle was in those early days. How proud we were to free-wheel down a hill, how we looked forward to the day when we should be able to mount and unmount without damage to our trousers. How we envied the blasé tradesboy who just seemed to pick up the handlebars and jump on the machine. And now that we can bicycle, the last thing that we would do would be to ride on one for pleasure.

But then that is hardly a fair parallel. Cycling is a form of athletics limited in scope by cross-roads and motor regulations and police. You cannot enlarge your craft. But ski-ing must be like cricket, and must be always new. As soon as you can do a thing one way, you learn to do it in another. We spend hours in the nets at school learning to drive a straight half volley over the bowler’s head or past midoff along the grass. And then as soon as we have got it, we start trying to turn it to mid-wicket, so that I do not suppose we could drive the thing straight now even if we wanted, any more than Nevinson, an accurate draughtsman and a prizewinner at the Slade, could draw a horse that would resemble a photograph of one.

And at Finse there must be always new worlds to conquer. And always there must be that splendid compensating sense of exhilaration that comes from a complete physical fitness. It would be hard to imagine a more healthy life. There is no bar there; and no late hours. You are in bed an hour before midnight. And you wake wonderfully fit to the most colossal breakfast that I have ever seen.

In the middle of the dining-room there is a large table on which is spread an incredibly diverse collection of dishes. We counted them one morning: there were forty-eight; all manner of cold meats, all manner of cheese, all manner of _hors d’œuvres_. And there are shrimps, and prawns, and lobsters, and fish puddings; there are egg omelettes and ham omelettes, curious cold game, and fruit and jams and marmalade. Breakfast was a very great adventure. You were, in addition, served with a boiled egg and a beaker of cold milk. We never quite knew whether it was intended to be drunk as a cocktail or a liqueur or a table wine. We tried it in all three ways; and it was in each equally delightful. The Norwegian breakfast is the finest type of meal that I have, I think, ever eaten; and I was delighted to find certain personal peculiarities endorsed by Norwegian taste. I always, when I lunch at home, eat marmalade and cheese, preferably gruyère cheese, together. It is a protective taste developed gradually since the days when I was made to eat at my preparatory school milk-pudding every day for four years. It was doubtless a very admirable form of discipline. But I have not since eaten any pudding of any kind, and have instead developed what is, my brother tells me, a disgusting habit, but one which the Norwegian would apparently approve. At any rate, they place side by side on their middle table mountains of gruyère cheese and basins of marmalade. _Coldt bord_ they called it, that centre table, and we thought of inscribing a ballad to it, in whose every line should be the name of some new dish.

A noble foundation, that breakfast, for a long day in the open; and when evening came one was glad to sit and talk quietly; one’s brain fresh and one’s body tired. It is no part of my intention here--and I half hope that it never will be--to draw pictures of my friends. Enough to say that the evenings passed very happily in such casual intermittent talk as can only be exchanged between two friends who know each other so well as to have left scarcely a secret from one another.