Chapter 2
There was no more noise outside. It was time, perhaps, to go up to see what had happened. I put a raincoat over my pyjamas, and went into the street. Some of my neighbours, who were special constables, hurried by. The enigmatic night, for a time, for five minutes, or five seconds (I do not know how long it was), was remarkably still and usual. It might have been pretending that we were all mistaken. It was as though we had been merely dreaming our recent excitements. Then, across a field, a villa began to blaze. Perhaps it had been stunned till then, and had suddenly jumped into a panic of flames. It was wholly involved in one roll of fire and smoke, a sudden furnace so consuming that, when it as suddenly ceased, giving one or two dying spasms, I had but an impression of flames rolling out of windows and doors to persuade me that what I had seen was real. The night engulfed what may have been an illusion, for till then I had never noticed a house at that point.
Whispers began to pass of tragedies that were incredible in their incidence and craziness. Three children were dead in the rubble of one near villa. The ambulance that was passing was taking their father to the hospital. A woman had been blown from her bed into the street. She was unhurt, but she was insane. A long row of humbler dwellings, over which the dust was still hanging in a faint mist, had been demolished, and one could only hope the stories about that place were far from true. We were turned away when we would have assisted; all the help that was wanted was there. A stranger offered me his tobacco pouch, and it was then I found my rainproof was a lady's, and therefore had no pipe in its pocket.
The sky was suspect, and we watched it, but saw only vacuity till one long beam shot into it, searching slowly and deliberately the whole mysterious ceiling, yet hesitating sometimes, and going back on its path as though intelligently suspicious of a matter which it had passed over too quickly. It peered into the immense caverns of a cloud to which it had returned, illuminating to us unsuspected and horrifying possibilities of hiding-places above us. We expected to see the discovered enemy boldly emerge then. Nothing came out. Other beams by now had joined the pioneer, and the night became bewildering with a dazzling mesh of light. Shells joined the wandering beams, those sparks of orange and red. A world of fantastic chimney-pots and black rounds of trees leaped into being between us and the sudden expansion of a fan of yellow flame. A bomb! We just felt, but hardly heard, the shock of it. A furious succession of such bursts of light followed, a convulsive opening and shutting of night. We saw that when midnight is cleft asunder it has a fiery inside.
The eruptions ceased. Idle and questioning, not knowing we had heard the last gun and bomb of the affair, a little stunned by the maniacal rapidity and violence of this attack, we found ourselves gazing at the familiar and shadowy peace of our suburb as we have always known it. It had returned to that aspect. But something had gone from it for ever. It was not, and never could be again, as once we had known it. The security of our own place had been based on the goodwill or indifference of our fellow-creatures everywhere. To-night, over that obscure and unimportant street, we had seen a celestial portent illuminate briefly a little of the future of mankind.
III. Islands
JANUARY 5, 1918. The editor of the _Hibbert Journal_ betrays a secret and lawless passion for islands. They must be small sanctuaries, of course, far and isolated; for he shows quite rightly that places like the British Isles are not islands in any just and poetic sense. Our kingdom is earth, sour and worm-riddled earth, with all its aboriginal lustre trampled out. By islands he means those surprising landfalls, Kerguelen, the Antarctic Shetlands, Timor, Amboyna, the Carolines, the Marquesas, and the Galapagos. An island with a splendid name, which I am sure he would have mentioned had he thought of it, is Fernando de Noronha.
There must be a fair number of people to-day who cherish that ridiculous dream of an oceanic solitude. We remember that whenever a storyteller wishes to make enchantment seem thoroughly genuine, he begins upon an island. One might say, if in a hurry, that Defoe began it, but in leisure recall the fearful spell of islands in the Greek legends. It is easily understood. If you have watched at sea an island shape, and pass, forlorn in the waste, apparently lifeless, and with no movement to be seen but the silent fountains of the combers, then you know where the Sirens were born, and why awful shapes grew in the minds of the simple Greeks out of the wonders in Crete devised by the wise and mysterious Minoans, who took yearly the tribute of Greek youth--youth which never returned to tell.
How easily the picture of one's first island in foreign seas comes back! I had not expected mine, and was surprised one morning, when eastward-bound in the Mediterranean, to see a pallid mass of rock two miles to port, when I had imagined I knew the charts of that sea well enough. It was a frail ghost of land on that hard blue plain, and had a light of its own; but it looked arid and forbidding, a place of seamen's bones. Turning quickly to the mate I asked for its name. "Alboran," he said, very quietly, without looking at it, as though keeping something back. He said no more. But while that strange glimmer was on the sea I watched it; I have learned nothing since of Alboran; and so the memory of that brief sight of a strange rock is as though once I had blundered on a dreadful secret which the men who knew it preferred to keep.
But there is a West Indian Island which for me is the best in the seas, because the memory of it is but a reflection of my last glimpse of the tropics. That landfall in the Spanish Main was as soundless as a dream. It was but an apparition of land. It might have been no more than an unusually vivid recollection of a desire which had once stirred the imagination of a boy. Looking at it, I felt sceptical, quite unprepared to believe that what once was a dream could be coming true by any chance of my drift through the years. Yet there it remained, right in our course, on a floor of malachite which had stains of orange drift-weed. It could have been a mirage. It appeared diaphanous, something so frail that a wind could have stirred it. Did it belong to this earth? It grew higher, and the waves could be seen exploding against its lower rocks. It _was_ a dream come true. Yet even now, as I shall not have that landfall again, I have a doubt that waters could be of the colours which were radiant about that island, that rocks could be of rose and white, that trees could be so green and aromatic, and light--except of the Hesperides, which are lost--so like the exhilarating life and breath of the prime. A doubt indeed! For every whisper one hears to-day deepens the loom of a gigantic German attack.
IV. Travel Books
JANUARY 19, 1918. What long hours at night we wait for sleep! Sleep will not come. A friend, who grows more like a sallow congestion of scorn than a comfortable companion, warned me yesterday, when I spoke of the end of the War, that it might have no end. He said that we could not escape our fate. Our star, I gathered, was to receive a celestial spring-cleaning. There would be bonfires of litter. We had become impeded with the rubbish of centuries of wise and experienced statecraft, and we had hardly more than begun to get rid of it. A renaissance with a vengeance! Youth was in revolt against the aged and the dead.
But what an idea to look at when waiting for sleep! I turned over with another sigh, and recalled that William James has advised us that a deleterious thought may be exorcised by willing another that is sunny. I tried to command a more enjoyable picture for eyes that were closed but intent. Yet you never know where the most promising image will transport you through some inconsequential association. I recalled a pleasing day in the Eastern Mediterranean, and that brought _Eothen_ into my mind, by chance. And instantly, instead of seeing Sfax in Tunis, I was looking down from a window on a black-edged day of rain, watching an unending procession of moribund figures jolting over the _pave_ of a street in Flanders, in every kind of conveyance, from the Yser. There I was, back at the War, at two in the morning, and all because I had read _Eothen_ desperately in odd moments while waiting for the signs which would warn me that the enemy was about to enter that village.
No escape yet! I could hear the old clock slowly making its way towards another day. I heard a belated wayfarer going home, his feet muffled in snow. Anyhow, I never had much of an opinion of _Eothen_, a book over which the cymbals have been banged too loudly. Compare it, as a travel book, for substance and style, with _A Week on the Concord_; though that is a silly thing to ask, if no sillier than literary criticism usually is. But though all the lists the critics make of our best travel books invariably give Kinglake's a principal place, I have not once seen Thoreau's narrative included.
What is the test for such a book? I should ask it to be a trustworthy confidence of a kingdom where the marches may be foreign to our cheap and usual experience, though familiar enough to our dreams. It may not offer, but it must promise that Golden City which drew Raleigh to the Orinoco, Thoreau to Walden Pond, Doughty to Arabia, Livingstone to Tanganyika, and Hudson to the Arctic. The fountain of life is there. We hope to come to our own.
We never notice whether that country has good corn-land, or whether it is rich enough in minerals to arouse an interest in its future. But its prospects are lovely and of good report. It is always a surprise to find the earth can look so good, and behave so handsomely, on the quiet, to a vagabond traveller like Thoreau, who has no valid excuse for not being at honest work, as though it reserved its finest mornings to show to favoured children when really good people are not about. The Sphinx has a secret only for those who do not see her wink.
V. Signs of Spring
FEBRUARY 16, 1918. A catalogue of second-hand books was sent to me yesterday. A raid warning, news of the destruction of Parliament House, or a whisper of the authentic ascent of Mr. Lloyd George in a fiery chariot and of the flight of God, would do no more to us than another kick does to the dead. But that catalogue had to be handled to be believed. It was an incredible survival from the days before the light went out. Those minor gratifications have gone. I had even forgotten they were ever ours. Sometimes now one wakes to a morning when the window is a golden square, a fine greeting to a good earth, and the whistle of a starling in the apple tree just outside is as tenuous as a thread of silver; the smell of coffee brings one up blithe as a boy about to begin play again. Yet something we feel to be wrong--a foggy memory of an ugly dream--ah, yes; the War, the War. The damned remembrance of things as they are drops its pall. The morning paper, too, I see, has the information that our men are again cheerfully waiting for the spring offensive.
Cheerfully! But, of course, the editor knows. And the _spring_ offensive! I have seen that kind of vernal gladness. What an advent! When you find the first blue egg in the shrubbery behind your billet in Artois; when the G. S. O. 2 comes into the mess with a violet in his fingers, and shows it to every doubter, then you know the time has come for the testing of the gas cylinders, and you wonder whether this is the last time you will be noteworthy because you had the earliest news of the chiffchaff. The spring offensive! Guns are now converging by leagues of roads to a new part of the Front, to try to do there what they failed to do elsewhere. The men, as all important editors know, are happily waiting for the great brutes to begin bellowing again in infernal concert. So there accumulates at breakfast in these spring days all that evidence which makes one proud to share with one's fellows the divine gift of reason, instead of a blind and miserable animal instinct. No wonder the cuckoo has a merry note!
That is the way we idle and hapless civilians now begin our day. I look up to the sky, and wonder whether this inopportune spell of fine weather means that some London children will be killed in bed to-night. As I pass the queues of women who have been waiting for hours for potatoes, and probably won't get any, though the earth doubtless is still abundant, if we had but the sense and opportunity to try it, I cannot help wondering whether it would not have been better for us to have refused the gift of reason from which could be devised the edifying wonders of civilization, and have remained in the treetops instead, so ignorant that we were unaware we were lucky.
Another grave statement by a great statesman, and, when we are fortunate, a field postcard, are to-day our full literary deserts. Is it surprising that catalogues of old books do not come our way? We do not deserve them. Hope faintly revives, when the postman cheers us with an overdue field postcard, of a morning to dawn when the abstraction we name the "average intelligence" and the "great heart of the public" and the "herd mind," will not only regret that it made a ruinous fool of itself the night before, but solemnly resolve to end all disruptive and dirty habits. This wild hope was born in me of such a postcard (all right so far!) coinciding with the arrival of the list of old books. It seemed at that moment that things could be different and better. Then, when closing the front door that morning--very gently--not slamming it on the run--I saw something else. The door noiselessly closed, an easy launch into a tranquil day, as though I had come down through the night with the natural process of the hours, and so had commenced the day at the right moment, I noticed the twig of a lilac bush had intruded into the porch. It directly indicated me with a black finger. What did it want? I looked intently, sure that an omen was here. Aha! So that was it! The twig was showing me that it had a green nail.
Four young officers of the Flying Corps passed me, going ahead briskly, and I thought that an elm under which they walked had kindling in it a suggestion of coloured light. But it was too delicate to be more than a hope. It must be confessed that the men who fight in the air were more distinct than that light. Then the four officers parted, two to either side, when marching past another figure. They went beyond it swiftly, taking no notice of it, turned into the future, and vanished. I drew near the bowed and leisurely being, which had a spade over its shoulder.
It stopped to light a pipe, and I caught up to it. The edge of the spade was like silver with use, and the big hand which grasped it was brown with dry earth. The lean neck of this figure was tinctured with many summers, and cross-hatched by the weather and mature maleness. I caught a smell of newly-turned earth. The figure moved as though time were nothing. It turned its face as I drew level, and said it was a good morning. The morning was better than good; and somehow this object in an old hat and clothes as rough as bark, with a face which probably had the same expression when William was momentous at Hastings, and when Pitt solemnly ordered the map of Europe to be rolled up, was in accord with the light in the elm, and the superior and convincing insolence of the blackbirds. They all suggested the tantalizing idea that solid ground is near us, in this unreasonable world of anxious change, if only we had intelligence enough to know where to look for it.
VI. Prose Writing
MARCH 16, 1918. A critic has been mourning because good prose is not being written to-day. This surprised him, and he asked why it was that when poetry, which he pictured as "primroses and violets," found abundance of nourishment even in the unlikely compost these latter days provide, yet prose, which he saw as "cabbages and potatoes," made but miserable growth.
It is hard to explain it, for I must own that the image of the potato confuses me. One has seen modern verse which was, florally, very spud-like. If those potatoes were meant for violets then they suggest more than anything else a simple penny guide-book for their gardeners. Here we see at least the danger of using flowers of speech, when violets and onions get muddled in the same posy, and how ill botany is likely to serve the writer who flies heedlessly to it for literary symbols. Figures of speech are pregnant with possibilities (I myself had better be very careful here), and those likely to show most distress over their progeny are the unlucky fathers. For the first thing expected of any literary expression is that it should be faithful to what is in the mind, and if for the idea of good prose writing the image of a potato is given, then it can but represent the features of the earthy lumps which are common to the stalls of the market-place. What is prose? Sodden and lumbering stuff, I suppose. And what is poetry? That fortunate lighting of an idea which delights us with the belief that we have surprised truth, and have seen that it is beautiful.
The difficulty with what the textbooks tell us is prose is that many of us make it, not naturally and unconsciously like the gentleman who discovered he had been doing it all his life, but professionally. Consider the immense output of novels--but no, do not let us consider anything so surprising and perplexing. The novel, that most exacting problem in the sublimation of the history of our kind, not to be solved with ease, it now appears may be handled by children as a profitable pastime. Children, of course, should be taught to express themselves in writing, and simply, lucidly, and with sincerity. Yet all editors know the delusion is common with beginners in journalism that the essay, a form in which perhaps only six writers have been successful in the history of English letters, is but a prelude to serious work, a holiday before the realities have begun. They all attempt it. Every editorial letter-box is loaded with essays every morning. Yet the love of learning, and wisdom and humour, are not usual, and the gods still more rarely give with these gifts the ability to express them in the written word; and how often may we count on learning, wisdom, and humour being not only reflected through a delightful and original character, but miraculously condensed into the controlled display of a bright and revealing beam? It is no wonder we have but six essayists!
There is no doubt about it. If we mean by prose much more than the sincere and lucid written expression of our desires and opinions, it is because beyond that simplicity we know the thrill which is sometimes given by a revelation of beauty and significance in common words and tidings. The best writing must come of a gift for making magic out of what are but commodities to us, and that gift is not distributed by the generous gods from barrows which go the round of the neighbourhoods where many babies are born, as are faith, hope, and credulity, those virtues that cause the enormous circulations of the picture papers, and form the ready material for the careers of statesmen and the glory of famous soldiers. It is more unusual. We see it as often as we do comets and signs in the heavens, a John in the Wilderness again, pastors who would die for their lambs, women who contemn the ritual and splendour of man-slaying, and a politician never moved by the enticements of a successful career. It is therefore likely that when we see great prose for the first time we may not know it, and may not enjoy it. It can be so disrespectful to what we think is good. It may be even brightly innocent of it. And as in addition our smaller minds will be overborne by the startling activity and cool power of the prose of such a writer as Swift, its superiority will only enhance our complaining grief.
VII. The Modern Mind
JULY 6, 1918. A Symphony in Verse has just come to me from America. The picture on its wrapper shows a man in green tights, and whose hair is blue, veiling his eyes before a lady in a flame-coloured robe who stares from a distance in a tessellated solitude. As London two days ago celebrated Independence Day like an American city, and displayed the Stars and Stripes so deliriously that the fact that George III was ever a British king was lost in a common acknowledgment that he was only another violent fool, this Boston book invited attention. For ladies in gowns of flame, with arms raised in appeal, may be supposed to want more than the vote; and American poets wearing emerald tights who find themselves in abandoned temples alone with such ladies, must clearly have left Whittier with the nursery biscuits. Longfellow could never grow blue locks. Even Whitman dressed in flannel and ate oranges in public. Nor did Poe at his best rise to assure us:
"This is the night for murder: give us knives: We have long sought for this."
Well, not all of us. The truth is some of us have not sought for knives with any zest, being paltry and early Victorian in our murders. Yet in this symphony in verse, _The Jig of Forslin_, by Mr. Conrad Aiken, there are such lines as these:
"When the skies are pale and stars are cold, Dew should rise from the grass in little bubbles, And tinkle in music amid green leaves. Something immortal lives in such air-- We breathe, we change. Our bodies become as cold and bright as starlight. Our hearts grow young and strange. Let us extend ourselves as evening shadows And learn the nocturnal secrets of these meadows."
It is not all knives and murder. The Jig, in fact, dances us through a world of ice lighted by star gleams and Arctic streamers, where sometimes our chill loneliness is interrupted by a woman whose "mouth is a sly carnivorous flower"; where we escape the greenish light of a vampire's eyes to enter a tavern where men strike each other with bottles. Mermaids are there, and Peter and Paul, and when at last Mr. Aiken feels the reader may be released, it is as though we groped in the dark, bewildered and alarmed, for assurance that this was nothing but art.