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”:—
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.