I

A year or two ago a lively book was published called The Happy Traveller. It is not an indispensable work if you have booked your passage, or are on a ship’s articles, for only Providence can help you then, yet it is a cheerful guide if you would know what long journeys are like, in parts, without making them. Its author, the Rev. Frank Tatchell, proves he has seen enough of the world to satisfy a crew of able seamen. He has seen it from the byroads, the highroads, the decks of local trading ships, and the windows of third-class railway carriages. He has seen it because, apparently, he wanted to; and he has enjoyed it all, or most of it. He has some heroic advice for those whom he judges may be infected by his own enthusiasm, and indeed his book would induce many young men to pull on their boots forthwith: “Be cheerful and interested in everything,” he tells us; and, “Do not bother too much about your inside.”

But what I sought in his volume was not the Malay for Thank you—which he gave me—but what set him going. Why did he do it? There is a word, frequently seen in glossy narrative, “Wanderlust.” The very lemmings must know it. It excuses almost anything in the way of travel lunacy, even to herding with Russian emigrants for fun. It is used as a flourish by those who hope we will fail to notice that they are uncertain what to do with themselves. Mr. Tatchell, however, does not use it once. Yet you see him hustling through the bazaar at Bhamo, where you do not meet many tourists; and he discovers that the half-castes of the Society Isles are especially charming, though he does not pretend that it is worth while voyaging to the South Seas to confirm that; or he peeps into the Malayan forest long enough to note “myriads of leeches in all directions humping and hastening towards the traveller.” He certainly saw those leeches. He saw them hump. But why did he foregather with them, and go to smell Bhamo? For out of so varied an experience he returns but to assure romantic youth sitting on the bollards of our quays and gazing seaward wistfully, “Elephants dislike having white men approach them from behind.” Or of this: “If you should become infested with fleas, sleep out on a bed of bracken one night, and in the morning you will be free from the pests.” Such fruits of travel seem hardly enough. Mr. Tatchell himself was decidedly a happy traveller, and the cause of happiness in others—his book can be commended in confidence—for he admits that his method of enjoying himself in a strange bed is to sing aloud the aria, “Why do the Nations?” But he does not tell us what sent him roving, nor does he produce any collection of treasures, except oddities such as the warning to white men about approaching the behinds of elephants, and Vinakka vinnakka! (Fijian for Bravo.)

Perhaps those little curiosities are enough. We are pleased to hear of them. What else was there to get? It would be very hard for most voyagers to explain convincingly why they became restless, and went to sea. Some do it to get away from us, some to get away from themselves, and some because they cannot help it. I shall not forget the silliness which gave me my first sight of Africa. The office telephone rang. “Oh, is that you? Well, we want you to go to Algeria at once.” I went downstairs hurriedly to disperse this absurdity. But it was no good. I had to go. And because I was argumentative about it they added Tripoli and Sicily, which served me right. After all, while in Africa, one is necessarily absent from Fleet Street. I should have remembered that.

Mr. Tatchell tells us that even a poor man, if he does not leave it till he is in bondage to the income-tax collector or the Poor Law officials, may see all the world. I suppose he may. With sufficient health, enterprise, and impudence, a young fellow could inveigle himself overseas without paying a lot of money to the P. & O. Company; though it wants some doing nowadays, under the present rules of the Mercantile Marine Board and the seafarers’ unions. Shipowners do not lightly engage to pay compensation for accidents to inexperienced hands whose sole recommendation is that they want to see the world so wide. As for getting a berth for the voyage cheaply, it would be foolish to suppose that agents for passenger ships are willing to forgive the fact that you are poor, and will shake Cornucopia about freely. Why should they? You have to pay across the counter in exchange for a ticket, and at the post-war rates. If anyone doubts that this is a hard world, let him cut the painter at Port Said, with a shilling in his pocket, and note what will happen. In some difficult regions you must travel on foot with the natives, and live with them; and that costs very little, even in a land otherwise expensive, but those unsophisticated coasts must first be reached. That simple way of a nomad is all very well in the wilderness, but I think any reasonable man, however thirsty he may be for a draught of primitive Life, would hesitate before sequestering himself in native cities like Calcutta and Singapore, counting cannily the lesser coins, and traveling about in third-class carriages. I noticed that even Mr. Tatchell shrank from the prospect of getting from island to island of Indonesia with the deck passengers. I am not surprised. One is easily satisfied with an occasional hour on the lower deck, in converse with a picturesque native elder. But to eat and sleep there for weeks, among the crowing cocks, the banana skins, the babies, the dried fish, and men and women spitting red stuff after chewing betel nut! It has been done, I believe, but the shipping companies and all their officers set their faces against it. They do not encourage Europeans to travel even second class in those seas, though there is hardly any difference between the cabins of the two classes. Of course, if one were anything of an Orientalist, it would be ridiculous to keep to the first saloon with the Europeans when there were Arab and Chinese merchants in an inferior saloon of the ship.

I do not know how one plans a long voyage, and maintains the excellent plan scientifically through all its difficulties. I have never done any planning. A ship seems to have drifted my way at last by chance, and then, if I did not hesitate too long about it, I went in her, though always for a reason very inadequate. One bitter and northerly Easter I read, because gardening was impossible, Bates’ “Naturalist on the River Amazons.” The famous illustration of that spectacled entomologist in trousers and a check shirt, standing with an insect net in a tropical forest surrounded by infuriated toucans, fixed me when casually I pulled the volume off a library shelf. The book had not been specially commended to me, but its effect was instant. And the picture that artful naturalist drew of the pleasures of Santa Belem de Para, when contrasted with the sleet of an English spring, made me pensive over a fire. I had never seen the tropics. And what a name it is, the Amazons! And what a delightful book is Bates’!

Yet when I enquired into this enticement, Para might as well have been in another star. One may go cheaply to Canada, and risk it. That trick cannot be played on the tropics with impunity. I had the propriety to guess that. Then, one night, a sailor came home from sea, and just before he left he spoke of his next voyage. They were going to Para, and up the Amazon; and up a tributary of that river never before navigated by an ocean-going steamer. “Nonsense,” I said, “it cannot be done—not if you draw, as you say you do, nearly twenty-four feet. And it means rising about six hundred feet above sea level.”

“You can talk,” the sailor replied, “but I’ve seen the charter. We’re going, and I wish we weren’t. Sure to be fevers. Besides, a ship has no right inside a continent.”

I began thinking of Bates. My friend turned up the collar of his coat before going into the rain. “Look here,” he said, “if you have any doubt about it, you may take the trip. There’s a cabin we don’t use.”

I never gave that preposterous suggestion a second thought, but I did write, for a lively morning newspaper, my sailor’s mocking summary of what that strange voyage might have in store. The editor, a day later, met me on the office stairs. “That was an amusing lie of yours this morning,” he said. I answered him that it was written solely in the cause of science and navigation. What was more, I assured him earnestly, I had been offered a berth on the ship for the proof of doubters. “Well,” said the editor, “you shall go and prove it.” He meant that. I could see by the challenging look in his eye that nothing much was left about which to argue. He prided himself on his swift and unreasonable decisions.

Somehow, as that editor descended the stairs, showing me the finality of his back, the attractive old naturalist of the Amazon with his palms at Para, toucans, spectacles, butterflies, and everlasting afternoon of tranquillity in the forest of the tropics, was the less alluring. This meant packing up; and for what? Even the master of the steamer could not tell me that.

It is better to obey the mysterious index, without any fuss, when it points a new road, however strange that road may be. There is probably as much reason for it, if the truth were known, as for anything else. It would be absurd, in the manner of Browning and Mr. Tatchell, to greet the unseen with a cheer, and thus flatter it, yet when circumstances begin to look as though they intend something different for us, perhaps the proper thing to do is to get into accord with them, to see what will happen.

There was no doubt about that voyage, either. I take this opportunity to thank an autocratic editor for his cruel decision one morning on the office stairs, a trivial episode he has completely forgotten. It is worth the break, and the discomfort of a winter dock, and the drive out in the face of hard westerly weather, to come up a ship’s companion one morning, and to see for the first time the glow of sunrise above the palisade of the jungle. You never forget the warm smell of it, and its light; though that simple wonder might not be thought worth a hard fight with gales in the western ocean. Yet later, when by every reasonable estimate of a visitor accustomed to the assumption of man’s control of nature the forest should have ended, yet continues as though it were eternal—savage, flamboyant, yet silent and desolate—the voyager begins to feel vaguely uneasy. He cannot meet that lofty and sombre regard with the cheerful curiosity of the early part of the voyage. He feels lost. St. Paul’s cathedral does not seem so influential as once it did, nor man so important. And perhaps it is not an unhealthful surmise either that man may be only a slightly disturbing episode on earth after all, and had better look out; a hindering and humbling notion of that sort would have done him no harm, if of late years it had given him pause.

Well, something of that sort is about as much as one should expect to get out of the experience, that and the ability to call for a porter in Fijian or Chinese. But is it not sufficient? It is hardly as tangible as hearing earlier than the people at home of the wealth of oil at Balik-papan, or what comes of getting in at the Rand on the ground floor. Even as book material it is not so sparkling as Lady Hester Stanhope, or as exciting as sword-fish angling off the Bermudas. Nor does it provide any inspiration, once you are home again, to get to work to plant the British flag where it will do the lucky ones most good. There seems hardly anything in it, and yet you feel that you could not have done any better, and are not sorry it turned out just so.

Besides, there were the men one met. It would not be easy to analyse the impulse which sent one travelling, an impulse strong enough, if vague, to overcome one’s natural desire to be let alone. What did one want, or expect to learn? It would be hard to say. But you are aware, in rare moments, that you have got something almost as good as a word about a new oil-field, through some chance converse with a stranger, about nothing in particular. For it might have been night in the Malacca Strait, with little to give reasonable conviction of the realities except the stars, the tremor of the ship’s rail, and the glow of a shipmate’s cigar; and the other man might not have said much. You had previously noticed he was not that kind. But his casual relation of an obscure adventure—rather as if the droning of the waters had become a significant utterance—gave an abiding content to the shadows.

II

What right have we to travel, when better men have to stay at home? But it would be unwise to attempt an answer to that question, for certainly it would lead, as did the uncorking of the bottle that imprisoned the Genie, to much smoke and confusion. We should not poke about with a naked light amid the props which uphold the august and many-storied edifice of society, even to make sure of our rightful place there. It was a reading of Lord Bryce’s Memories of Travel that started so odd a doubt in my mind. When I had finished it I did not begin to think of packing a bag. I felt instead that I had no title to do that. Lord Bryce, that learned man, had been remembering casually Iceland and the tropics, Poland, the Mountains of Moab, and the scenery of North America. But he did not make me feel that those places should be mine. He, that great scholar, made them desirable, yet infinitely remote, and reservations for wiser men, among whom, if I were bold enough to intrude, my inconsequence would be detected instantly. After reading his book of travel I felt that it would be as wrong in me to possess and privily to treasure priceless Oriental manuscripts as to claim the right to see coral atolls in the Pacific or prospects of the Altai.

We may lack the warrant to travel, even if we have the means. Lord Bryce made it coldly clear that few of us are competent to venture abroad. He made me feel that much that would come my way would be wasted on me, for I have little in common with the encyclopædias. The wonders would loom ahead, would draw abeam, would pass astern, and I should not see them; they would not be there. The pleasures of travel, when we are candid about them, are separated by very wide deserts and tedious, where there is nothing but sand and the dreary howling of wild dogs. An Eastern city may grow stale in a night. “‘Dear City of Cecrops’ saith the poet; but shall we not say, ‘Dear City of Zeus?’” There are days when the ocean is a pond. Its relative importance then appears to be that of a newspaper of last week. Sometimes, too, you do not want to hear that there are three miles of water under you; no less. What of it? In nasty weather the end so far below you of the last two miles is of less importance than the beginning of the first.

It may also happen that when at last your ship reaches that far place whose name is as troubling as the name of the star to which you look in solitude, that—what is it you do there? You gaze overside at it from your trite anchorage, unbelievingly. The first mate comes aft, leisurely, rubbing his hands. You do not go ashore. What has become of the magic of a name? You go below with the mate, who has finished his job, for a pipe. To-morrow will do for Paradise, or the day after. One morning I reached Naples by sea, and I well remember my first sight of it. The stories I had heard of that wonderful bay! The ecstatic letters in my pocket from those who were instructing me how nothing of my luck should be missed! But it was raining. It was cold. I had been travelling for an age. There was hardly any bay, and what I could see of it was as glum as a bad mistake. There was a wet quay, some house fronts that were house-fronts, and a few cabs. I took a cab. That was better than walking to the railway station, and quicker. It is quite easy for me to describe my first sight of Naples and its bay.

But Lord Bryce was not an incompetent traveller. He could see through any amount of rain and dirt. He was competent indeed; fully, lightly, and with grace. To other tourists he may have appeared to be one of the crowd, trying hard to get some enjoyment out of a lucky deal in rubber or real estate, and not knowing how to do it. But he was not bored. He was quiet merely because he knew what he was looking at. What to us would have been opaque he could see through; yet I doubt whether he would have said anything about it, unless he had been asked. And why should we ask a fellow-traveller whether he can see through what is opaque? We never do it, because our own intelligence tells us that what is dark cannot be light. What we do not see is not there.

Yet how much we miss, when on a journey, Lord Bryce reveals. There was not often a language difficulty for him. When he looked at the wilderness of central Iceland he knew the cause of it, and could explain why tuffs and basalts make different landscapes. When he was in Hungary and Poland the problems we should have brushed aside as matters no Englishman ought to be expected to understand, became, in the light of his political and historical lore, simple and relevant. Among the islands of the South Seas, with their unsolved puzzles of an old continental land mass and of race migrations, so learned a traveller was just as much at ease. Once I remarked to an old voyager, who in some ways resembled Lord Bryce, that it was in my dreams to visit Celebes. “But,” he remarked coldly, “you are not an ethnologist.” No; and I can see now, after these Memories of Travel, that I have other defects as a traveller.

Yet I cannot deny that a craving for knowledge, when abroad, may sometimes come over me, with a dim resemblance to the craving for food or sleep. But if I go to my note-books in later years and discover that though I had forgotten them I had many interesting facts stored away, nevertheless it is evident the valuable information does very well where it is. It will never be missed. Its importance has faded. There are other things, however, one never entered in a notebook, and never tried to remember, for they were of no seeming importance then or now, things seen for an instant only, or smelt, or heard in the distance, which are never forgotten. They will recur from the past, often irrelevantly, even when the memory is not turned that way, as though something in us knew better what to look for in life than our trained eyes.

III

Travel, we are often told, gives light to the mind. I have wondered whether it does. Consider the sailors. They are supposed to travel widely. They see the cities of the world, and the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep. And—well, do you know any sailors? If you do, then you may have noticed that not infrequently their opinions seem hardly more valuable than yours and mine. Yet it must be said for them that they rarely claim an additional value for their opinions because they have anchored off Colombo. They know better than that. They know, very likely, that all the cities of the world can no more give us what was withheld at our birth than our unaided suburb. As much convincing folly may be heard at Penang as at Peckham. The sad truth is, one is as likely to grow wiser during a week-end at Brighton as in a “black Bilbao tramp

The fascination and illusion of that Out Trail! The other day, a man, a wise and experienced traveller, who knows deep water better than most of us, who has hunted whales, and even enjoyed being out of soundings in literature, overheard a voice near us on a dock-head exclaim in delight at the sight of a ship outward bound: “I wish I were aboard her.” He said to me quietly, “I felt like that, too, but really, you know, I don’t want to be aboard. I’m a little bit afraid of the sea.”

So am I. That is one thing, at least, I have learned in travel. I do not love the sea. The look of it is disquieting. There is something in the very sound of it that stirs the apprehension we feel when we listen to noble music; we became inexplicably troubled. It is not the fear of mishap, though that may not be absent. It is more than that, for after all one is much safer in a good ship than when crossing the road at Charing Cross.

It may be a surmise of one’s inconsequence in that immensity of sky and water. And our inconsequence has not been always obvious to us. The ministrations of a city nourish the pride of the social animal and yet make him a dependable creature. Turn him into the open and he shrinks from all that light. The dread problems that our energetic fellow-men create in the cities of the plain make us myopic through the intensity of our peering alarm. We become sure that even the empyrean must watch our activities with grave interest. Yet we may be deceived in that; for on blue water one cannot help noting that the sky does not appear to act with any regard for our interest, and the sea itself is so inscrutable, so vast, and moves with a rhythm that so diminishes one’s own scope and measure, that a voyager may imagine he is confronted by majesty, though an impersonal majesty, without ears or eyes or ruth. That is not comfortable to a sense of self-importance.

Do we travel to learn such things? Of course not. The promise to diminish a feeling of self-importance in a traveller is not one of Messrs. Cook’s happy inducements. We do not travel for that. If we get it at all, we are welcome to it, without extra charge. You must pay more if you want to have a cabin to yourself. There are additional charges, too, if you would deviate from the schedule of your voyage. Should you put off at Penang for a week, and continue by the next ship, that fun must be paid for. Eager still for the end of the rainbow—which, so far on a long voyage, you have not reached, to your surprise and disappointment—you leave your ship at Barbadoes, consult the chart, and judge that what you really want is at Yucatan, at Surinam, at Trinidad, or some other place where you are not; and at a great expense of time and money you go. No use. There again you find that you have taken yourself with you. No rainbow’s end!

I have often wondered what people see who travel round the world in a liner furnished with the borrowings of a city’s club-life and other occasions for idling; Panama, San Francisco, Honolulu, Yokohama, Hong-Kong, Batavia, and Rangoon, all those variations of scenery for the club windows; and so home again. What do they see? The anchorage of Sourabaya is no more revealing than that of Havre, if warmer: a mole, ships at rest, some straight miles of ferro-concrete quays in the distance, flat grey acres of the galvanised roofs of sheds, and a tower or two beyond. True, there are the clouds of the tropics to watch, and a Malay polishing the ship’s brass. Only the mate and the captain are at lunch, for the others have gone ashore. You may make what romance you can out of that.

The others have gone ashore? All the great seaports I have seen have been very much alike; and these liners rarely stay at one long enough to make easy the discovery of a difference. You have no time to get lost. You arrive, and then an inexorable notice is chalked on the blackboard at the head of the ship’s gangway, to which a quartermaster draws your attention as you leave the ship. The old city is two miles away, and the ship sails in two hours. No chance, you see, to get comfortably mislaid and forgotten. Besides, you run off with a car-load of other passengers. Unless the car skids into a ditch the game is up.

Well, after all, that grudging sense of disappointment comes of intemperance with fascinating place-names and illusions. We expect to have romance displayed for us, as though it were a greater Wembley, and it is not. Travellers who “dash” round the world, as the febrile interviewers tell us, who dash across the Sahara or the Atlantic, then get into other speedy engines and dash again, expectant of a full life and their money’s worth, might as well dash to Southend and back till they run over a dog; or dash their brains out, and thus fulfil their destiny. But I am not decrying travel, though sailors, I have been made painfully aware, are much amused by the expectations of those to whom a ship is an interlude of variegated enchantment between the serious affairs of life. I enjoy travel, and a little of it now and then is good for us, if we do not make demands which only lucky chance may fulfil.

The best things in travel are all undesigned, and perhaps even undeserved. I had never seen a whale, for instance, and recently was watching the very waters of the Java Sea where one of them might have been good enough to reward me. Nothing like a whale appeared. Too late for that sort of thing, perhaps. This is the day of the submarine. Or perhaps I stared from the ship listlessly, and with no faith, not caring much whether there were whales and wonders in these days or not. Anyhow, my last chance went. On my way home, while just to the south of Finisterre, I came out of my cabin a little after sunrise merely to look at the weather (which was fine) and a tiny cloud, rounded and defined, was dispersing over the waves, less than a mile away. Shrapnelling? Then a number of those faint rounded clouds of vapour shaped intermittently. The ship was in the midst of a school of whales. There was a sigh—like the exhaust of a locomotive—and a body which seemed to rival the steamer in bulk appeared alongside; we barely missed that shadow of a submerged island. The officer of the watch told me afterwards that the ship’s stem nearly ran over it.

That was a bare incident, however, and perhaps not worth counting. Yet all the significant things in travel come that way. Once in heavy weather I saw a derelict sailing ship; our steamer left its course to inspect her. But she was dead. There was no movement aboard her, except the loose door of a deckhouse. It flung open as we drew near, but nobody came out. The seas ran as they pleased about her deck fixtures. It was sunset, and just when we thought she had gone, for she had slipped over the summit of an upheaval, her skeleton appeared again in that waste, far astern, against the bleak western light. I felt in that moment that only then had the sea shown itself to me.

It is the chance things in travel that appear to be significant. The light comes unexpectedly and obliquely. Perhaps the gods try us. They want to see whether we are asleep. If we are watchful we may get a bewildering hint, but placed where nobody would have expected to find it. We may spend the rest of the voyage wondering what that meant. A casual coast suddenly fixed by so strange a glow that one looks to the opposite sky fearfully; the careless word which makes you glance at a stranger, and doubt your fixed opinion; an ugly city, which you are glad to leave, transfigured and jubilant as you pass out of its harbour; these are the incidents that give a sense of discovery to a voyage. We are on more than one voyage at a time. We never know where Manoa may be. There are no fixed bearings for the City of Gold.

IV

The reader of travellers’ tales is a cautious fellow, not easily fooled. He is never misled by facts which do not assort with his knowledge. But he does love wonders. His faith in dragons, dog-headed men, bearded women, and mermaids, is not what it used to be, but he will accept good substitutes. The market is still open to the ingenious. Any lady who is careful to advise her return from the sheikhs is sure to have the interviewers surprise her at the dock-side. She need only come back from Borneo, by the normal liner, and whisper “head-hunters” to the ever-ready note-books; and if she displays a parang which some Dyak never used except for agricultural purposes, that will be enough to rouse surprise at her daring.

But what are facts? There are limits, as we know, to the credulity of our fellows, as once Mr. Darwin, who considered exact evidence so important, discovered with a shock. What we really want is evidence we can understand, like that most discreet and wary old critic, the aunt of the young sailor. She quizzed him humorously about his flying fish, but was serious at once over that chariot wheel which was brought up on a fluke of his ship’s anchor in the Red Sea. She knew well enough where it was Pharaoh got what he asked for. Give us evidence in accord with our habits of thought, and we know where we are.

Even I have discovered that there are readers of travellers’ tales who decline anything to which there is no reference in Whitaker’s Almanac. A very prudent attitude of mind. I cannot find fault with it because it does not accept mermaids from us, but I do suggest there may be things in the world which have not yet come under Mr. Whitaker’s eye. A little scepticism preserves the soul, though infertility would result if the soul were encased in it; which it rarely is, because luckily sceptics only disbelieve what is foreign to them, and accept in unquestioning faith whatever accords with their philosophy. It is true that more scepticism in the past might have saved us from many dragons and visiting angels, which in its absence spawned and flourished with impunity. On the other hand it would have shut out Mount Zion for ever. It must be said, too, that the good readers who repudiate with blighting amusement those narratives of travel which do not accord with Mr. Whitaker’s valuable index, will yet take, and with their eyes shut, much that compels seasoned travellers to smile bitterly.

If you refer to Mr. Whitaker for the Spice Islands, or the Moluccas, for instance, you will fail to find concerning them one little fact: it is not advertised by Mr. Whitaker; not important enough, perhaps. I should never have known it myself, only I was there, once. I am not at all sure the fact is so insignificant that it should pass without notice, so I will record it here. At Ternate, an island which has been forgotten since white men ceased to kill each other for its cloves, it is easy to believe that you have really escaped from the world. Great gulfs of space and light separate you at Ternate from all the agitations by which civilized communities know that they are the buds, full of growing pains, on the tree of life. They are excellent gulfs of light. There are no agitations. Even the typhoons which herald the changes of the seasons, and not so far away, leave Ternate alone. Its volcano—the volcano is all the island—may blow up some day; but we should not expect earthly felicity to shine tranquilly for ever. Therefore while the isle persists it is delightful to walk the strands and by-paths of that oceanic garden of the tropics, and to feel the mind, so recently numbed by the uproar caused in the building of the Perfect State, revive in quietude. One day, on Ternate, I passed through the shade of a nutmeg grove, and came upon a lane at the back of the village. I could smell vanilla, and looked about for that orchid, and presently found it growing against a sugar palm. Behind that odorous shrubbery was a native house, and beyond the house, and far below it, the blue of the sea. Nobody was about. It was noon. It was hot. The high peak of Tidore across the water had athwart its cone a cloud which was as bright as an impaled moon. I saw no reason why this earth should not be a good place for us, and, thanking my fortune, idled along that lane till I saw another house, set back among hibiscus. It was a Malay home, but larger and better than is usual, for it had more timber in it. Along the front of the verandah was a board with a legend in Malay, the Communist Party of India. This confused me, so I strolled in to look closer, and saw hanging within the verandah portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, and Radek; there were others, though I was not communist enough to recognise them; but there they were in my lonely tropical garden, isolated by those gulfs of light and space from Moscow. The Dutch Resident, on hearing later of my extraordinary discovery, merely shot out his lower lip and spread his hands. Why yes, those little meeting houses were all over the East Indies. Such places, as well as the cinematograph.

It is possible that that little fact, as a minor incident of travel, even if it is unknown to Mr. Whitaker, yet may qualify in its own time a number of those facts which are quite well-known to him and to us.

When we are gazing about us in a strange land it is not easy to distinguish what is of importance from what is of no account. You can never tell whether the words of deepest significance are whispered at Government House or in some low haunt near the docks. It is a matter of luck. Time will show. In any case, even if you feel sure you have been vouchsafed a peep into the Book of Doom, and there saw, in the veritable script of an archangel, what you are at once anxious to announce to your fellows for their good, you may save yourself the trouble. If it is not already known, nobody will bother. There is precious little information of importance in the newspapers that has not been long matured in the wood. It is already as old as sin before the man in the street, poor fellow, gapes at it as news.

It may be possible that the hunters of big game miss much while looking for lions, though their thrilling adventures naturally attract most of our attention. And how their records surprise into envy those shy travellers who think lions are quite all right as they are and where they are! The luck of some well-provided travellers is astonishing. They are never bored. They are never still. Only recently I was reading the book of a traveller back from the wilds, whose time had been occupied, while away, in leaping into the jaws of death and out again, which most of us would have found very trying in that heat. Some exercise is good for us, even in the tropics, but cutting that caper too often might do a man serious harm. That equatorial journey appears to have been a long series of frantic but jolly leaps from one threat of extinction to another—the crocodiles, lethal floods, gigantic fish, venomous snakes, and unarmed savages, were everywhere. It was a land where you have to wear top-boots to keep off the anacondas, as one might wear a steel helmet when meteors are about. But such a story is not so surprising as the serious delight with which it is received on publication, and perhaps with entire belief in its ordinary character for a land of that sort. I well understand it; for I can guess from the eager questions that have been put to me about the ubiquity of leopards by night, the serpents which festoon the forest, and the other noticeable wayside affairs of the wilderness, what could be done with a cheerful and fertile fancifulness. It would never do to disclose the plain truth, which is that one can grow as weary of the sameness of Borneo as of that of Islington. I know of one intrepid sojourner on far beaches, a novelist, who fascinates a multitude of readers with livid and staccato fiction in which figure island princesses whose breasts are dangerous with hidden daggers. Head-hunters and dissolute whites move there in a darkness which means Winchesters, but no sleep; even the intense beauty of those beaches is so like evil that only reckless men could face it. Yet in reality those islands are as placid as though laved by the waters of the Serpentine. A migration from Piccadilly to their shores would make the lovely but tigrish princesses show for what they are, no more dangerous than the young ladies peeling the potatoes at Cadby Hall. Indeed, their bold chronicler, who stimulates feverish longing in the dreary lassitude of England’s wage earners with a violent drug distilled from the beach refuse of that distant archipelago, does most of his work in the bed of a rest-house, which is never approached by a danger worse than a falling coconut.

It seems possible for a romanticist, if he is cynical enough, and if he injects his stimulant with a syringe of about the measure of a foot-pump, to have a nice success with those who suffer from the speed and distraction of our homeland; for though the sufferers will take any stimulant, yet their nerves respond to very little that is not as coarse as a weed-killer. This should not be regretted. It would be dismal, indeed, if they were completely insensitive. The high speed of our weeks driven by machinery, the clangour of engines, crime, and politics, the fear which never leaves the poor victims, for they have been parted from the quiet earth which gives shelter and food, have depraved their bodies and starved their natural appetites. It is a wonder that they feel anything, or care for anything. They are left with but a vague yearning for some life, for any life different from their own; but they are so far gone that they cannot conceive that it might be a life of peace and goodwill. Their very sunrises must be bloody, like their familiar news, or they would not know it for the dayspring; yet the full measure of their fall from grace, which only an alienist could rightly gauge, is that they are not satisfied with a dusky bosom unless it conceals a knife.

But when you are out in these barbarous lands you find that princesses, unluckily, are even less noticeable than the leopards, and when seen are less beautiful. They do not wear knives in their bosoms for the same reason that other charmers dispense with them. Indeed, there is no end to the difference between what you have been led to expect in a place, and what is there. Compare the reality of a tropical forest with its popular picture. That popular notion of it did not grow in the tropics, but in the pages of imaginative fiction and poetry. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it is not so easy to read. One may see more orchids in Kew Gardens in a day than in a year of the tropical woods. If the Garden of Eden had been anything like the Amazon jungle, then our first parents would never have been evicted; they would have moved fairly soon on their own account, without giving notice. A few coloured snakes, on some days, would break the brooding monotony of that forest. They are, however, rarely seen. The animals of these fastnesses seldom show themselves. When they do, it is done inadvertently, and they are off at once. If you meet a tiger when on a ramble by daylight, you may consider yourself lucky if his sudden departure gives you two seconds of him before he is gone for ever. After dark, of course, you would take care that he could not meet you alone, for that place is not yours after sunset, and he knows it.

Tigers, snakes, lovely but malignant nymphs, and head-hunters, are not the dangers. What kills men in the outer wilderness is anxiety, undernourishment, and mosquitoes. The mosquito, the little carrier of malaria, is a more exacting enemy of the adventurer than the harpies and dragons of the fairy tales ever were to knights-errant. He is worse than all the cannibal tribes. Head-hunters, it must be confessed, are far better for conveying liveliness to the pages of a travel book, if it is to be worth the great price usually charged for it. Naturally, a reader wants his money’s worth. A mosquito will not go far, if you are an author, and are writing high romance. When, however, you are dealing personally with the realities of the Congo, you will discover a tendency to feel more concern over the small flies which carry fevers and sleeping sickness than for all the lions and cannibals in Africa. A statue to St. George killing a mosquito instead of a dragon would look ridiculous. But it was lucky for the saint he had only a dragon to overcome.

Now the travellers who accompany cinema operators to the outer dangers are always careful to explain to their eager interviewers, for the lucrative object of a publicity as wide as it can be got, the horrific perils of human flesh-pots, poisoned arrows, giant reptiles, and the other theatrical properties which are recognised instantly by everybody with the requisite awe. On the other hand, we learn from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine that the young men who go to Africa to hunt down that elusive creature the trypanosome of sleeping sickness, venture out unannounced, though they have spent years, and not weeks, in preparing themselves for their perilous quest. They go unannounced, are granted but £100 a year as a reward, and return—if they have that luck—less recognisable than the firemen of their ships; for the very firemen, as we know, have been the subject of happy verse. Yet compared with the skill and enterprise and courage needed for the hunting of that trypanosome, the killing of lions is no more than the handing of milk to kittens. The threats and terrors of the mythologies, the cynocephali, anthropophagi, gorgons, and krakens, were but coarse grimaces to the premonition which would make a modern traveller scuttle home, if he allowed it to numb his heart when he is alone, and hungry and fatigued, in the place where the tiny harbingers of fevers and dissolution are at their liveliest. St. George, with all the sacred incantations of the Church, could not fight such a dragon. But there the difficulty is. It cannot be made into a dramatic picture. It is merely an invisible presence, a haunting diffusion, like doom itself. It cannot be fought. There can be no heroics. There can be no escape. It is one with the sly hush of the wilderness.

V

A friend who lives on Long Island says in a letter: “A tall Cunarder putting out to sea gives me a keener thrill than anything the Polo Grounds or the Metropolitan Opera can show.” No doubt; for he is not a sailor but a man of letters. It is proper that to him the sight of a distant ship, outward bound, should be more appealing than anything he would see at the Opera House. He knows those operas, which are like nothing on earth except operas; but the tall ship, as he calls it, standing out into windy space, rarefied by overwhelming light, to him is Argo; but to a sailor Argo is a legend and nothing on earth, for he is moved by that sort of thing only when he sees it in opera. The ship may look as unsubstantial and legendary as she likes; she may, because she is outward bound, suggest to a man of letters the happy release he will never get from all his contracts with publishers and house-agents; but she is as hard, and is conditioned by as much that is inexorable, as a money-lender’s mortgage.

But what a poster an artist can make of her! No artist, however gifted, could do that with a publisher’s contract or a mortgage. So a ship, after all, whatever nautical and engineering science may do with her, aided by the tastes and habits of millionaires, and the rules and regulations of many committees of exacting experts, must be a symbol which still suggests to men in bondage an undiscovered golden shore, or fleece, of which they will continue to dream, as they dream irrationally of peace while never ceasing to fashion war.

So long as men who must stay ashore are thrilled when they see a liner going out, or do no more on a half-holiday than idle about the docks and speculate around the queer foreign names and ports of registry that show on steamers’ counters, or sit on a beach and throw stones into the water, we may still hope to change the ugly look of things. There is precious little sustenance of hope in whatever keeps us industrious, but there is a chance for us whenever we cease work and sink into idle stargazing.

Stuck on a corner of the morning railway station, where we cannot miss it though usually we have not the time to stop and look at it, is a large poster inviting us to See the Midnight Sun. It shows a liner, and she is heading towards an Arctic glory as bright as any boy’s dream of a great achievement. But it is not stuck there for boys to look at it, though they do. It is meant for those who have been so practical and level-headed in a longish life that they can afford a yachting cruise to the Arctic Circle. Doubtless, therefore, they make those cruises. I can account for that poster in no other way. It is one of the strangest and most significant facts in industrial society. All very well for some of us to read—wasting time as wantonly as if we had a dozen lives to play with—every volume on Arctic travel we can reach, knowing as we read that we shall never even cross the Pentland Firth.

But that station poster is addressed to those who are supposed never to dream, for they have attained to Threadneedle Street. What do they want with the Midnight Sun? Haven’t they got the “Morning Post”? But there you are. Even now they feel they have missed something, and whatever it is they will go to the Arctic to look for it. Cannot they find it in Threadneedle Street? Apparently not. That poster on a suburban station, though I cannot afford to miss the train to examine it for useful details, is like a faint promising hail from a time not yet come. Man is still in his early youth. He may come back from an Arctic holiday some day, or a recreation in China, push over Threadneedle Street with a laugh, and begin anew.

Men of letters who gaze longingly after departing ships, and men of business who are in those ships without the excuse of business, are proof enough that their many inventions, so far, have not got them what they wanted. For London is not quite the loveliness we meant to make it, and we know it. The ruthless place dismays us. In our repulsion from it we say it ought to be called Dementia, and invent golf and the week-end cottage to revive the soul it deadens without recompense. All to no purpose. There is nothing for it but to destroy London and rebuild it nearer to the heart’s desire or else to escape from it, if we can; though no guarding dragon of a grim prison was ever such a sleepless, cunning, and ugly-tempered brute as the machine we have made with our own hands. No wonder it pays to decorate the walls of the capital with romantic but seditious pictures of palms, midnight suns, coasts of illusion and ships outward bound. Nothing could so plainly indicate our revolt from the affairs we must somehow pretend to venerate.

It is not the sea itself, not all that salt water, which we find attractive. Most of us, I suppose, are a little nervous of the sea. No matter what its smiles may be like, we doubt its friendliness. It is about as friendly as the volcano which is benign because it does not feel like blowing up. What draws us to the sea is the light over it. Try listening, in perfect safety, to combers breaking among the reefs on a dark night, and then say whether you enjoy the voice of great waters. No, it is the wonder of light without bounds which draws us to the docks to overcome the distractions and discomforts of departure. We see there is wide freedom in the world, after all, if only we had the will to take it. And unfailingly we make strange landfalls during an escape, coasts of illusion if you like, and under incredible skies, but sufficient to shake our old conviction of those realities we had supposed we were obliged to accept. There are other worlds.

VI

My journeys have all been the fault of books, though Lamb would never have called them that. They were volumes which were a substitute for literature when the season was dry. A reader once complained to me, and with justice, that as a literary feuilletonist I betrayed no pure literary predilections. “You never devote your page,” he said fretfully, “to the influence of the Pleiades. You never refer to 18th century literature. You never look back on names familiar to all who read Latin. What is interesting to truly curious and bookish people might not exist for you. I wonder, for example, if Nahum Tate were mentioned in a conversation, whether you would be able to say what it meant.”

Well, not exactly that. I fear my readiness for the challenge would not pass the test. All that would happen to me would be a recollection of white walls, bright but severe, on which are scattered black memorial tablets, one of them with a ship over it carved in alabaster. An interior as cool and quiet as a mausoleum. There are shadows moving on the luminous white; June trees are murmuring outside. There is a smell of clothes preserved till Sunday in camphor and in sandalwood boxes. A big venerable man is perched high in a rich and glowing mahogany box, whose lifted chin, jutting saliently from white sideboard whiskers, has a dent in its centre; he is talking, with his eyes shut, to one he calls Gard, and I listen to him with deep interest, for once that old man served with John Company, which to a minor figure in his congregation seems miraculous. Then we all stand, and sing the words of a poet strangely named Tate & Brady. Would anyone wish me to quote the words, in proof? Certainly not. There is no need. When we come out of that building there is a stone awry on the grass by the door, commemorating one who was a “Master-Mariner, of Plymouth,” and a verse can be just deciphered on it, which reads: