The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing

  The night is wonderfully silent. The stars shine with a fierce brilliancy, the Southern Cross and Canopus; there is not a breath of wind, but a wonderful balminess in the air. The coconut trees, silhouetted against the sky, seem to be listening. Now and then a seabird gives a mournful cry.

  RUSSIA

  IN THIS YEAR I was sent to Russia on a secret mission. That is how I came to make the following notes.

  Russia. I have been led to an interest in Russia for pretty well the same reasons as most of my contemporaries. The obvious one was Russian fiction. Tolstoi and Turgenev, but chiefly Dostoievsky, offered an emotion that was different from any offered by the novels of other countries. They made the greatest novels of Western Europe look artificial. Their novelty made me unfair to Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope, with their conventional morality; and even the great writers of France, Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert, in comparison seemed formal and a little frigid. The life they portrayed, these English and French novelists, was familiar; and I, like others of my generation, was tired of it. They described a society that was policed. Its thoughts had been thought too often. Its emotions, even when extravagant, were extravagant within ordered limits. It was fiction fit for a middle-class civilization, well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed, and its readers were resolute to bear in mind that all they read was make-believe.

  The fantastic nineties stirred the intelligent from their apathy, making them restless and discontented, but gave them nothing satisfying. Old idols were shattered, but those set up in their place were papier mâché. The nineties talked a great deal about art and literature, but their works were like toy rabbits that hop about for a while when you have wound them up and then suddenly with a click stop dead.

  Modern Poets. I should be content with less cleverness if only they had more feeling. They make little songs not from great sorrows but from the sober pleasures of a good education.

  The Secret Agent. He was a man of scarcely middle height, but very broad and sturdy; he walked on noiseless feet with quick steps; he had a curious gait, somewhat like a gorilla’s, and his arms hung from his sides a little away from his body; he gave you the impression of an almost simian creature prepared at any moment to spring; and the feeling of enormous strength was disquieting. He had a large square head on a short thick neck. He was clean-shaven, with small shrewd eyes, and his face was strangely flattened as though it had been bashed in by a blow. He had a large, fleshy, flat nose and a big mouth, with small discoloured teeth. His thick pale hair was plastered down on his head. He never laughed, but he chuckled often, and then his eyes gleamed with a humour that was ferocious. He was decently dressed in American reach-me-downs, and at first sight you would have taken him for an immigrant of the middle class who had established himself comfortably in a small way of business in some thriving city of the Middle West. He spoke English fluently, but without correctness. It was impossible to be with him long without being impressed by his determination. His physical strength corresponded to his strength of character. He was ruthless, wise, prudent, and absolutely indifferent to the means by which he reached his ends. There was in the end something terrifying about him. His fertile brain teemed with ideas, and they were subtle and bold. He took an artist’s delight in the tortuous ways of his service; when he told you a scheme he contemplated or a dodge that had succeeded his little blue eyes glistened and his face lit up with a satanic mirth. He had an heroic disregard for human life, and you felt that for the cause he would not have hesitated to sacrifice his friend or his son. None could doubt his courage, and with an equal mind he was capable of facing not only danger – that is not so difficult – but discomfort and boredom. He was a man of frugal habit and could go for an incredible time without food or sleep. Never sparing himself, he never thought of sparing others; his energy was amazing. Though ruthless, he was good-humoured, and he was capable of killing a fellow-creature without a trace of ill-feeling. He seemed to have but one passion in life, if you omit an extreme desire for good cigars, and that was patriotism. He had a great sense of discipline and obeyed as unquestioningly his leader as he exacted obedience from his subordinates.

  The patriotism of the Russians is a singular thing; there is a great deal of conceit in it; they feel themselves different from other people and flatter themselves on their difference; they speak with self-satisfaction of the ignorance of their peasants; they vaunt their mysteriousness and complexity; they repeat that with one face they look to the west and with the other to the east; they are proud of their faults – like a boorish man who tells you he is as God made him – and will admit with complacency that they are besotted and ignorant, incoherent of purpose and vacillating in action; but in that complex feeling which is the patriotism one knows in other countries, they seem deficient. I have tried to analyse what this particular emotion in myself consists of. To me the very shape of England on the map is significant, and it brings to my mind pell-mell a hundred impressions, the white cliffs of Dover and the tawny sea, the pleasant winding roads of Kent and the Sussex downs, St. Paul’s and the Pool of London; scraps of poetry, the noble ode of Collins and Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gipsy and Keats’ Nightingale, stray lines of Shakespeare’s and the pages out of English history, Drake with his ships, and Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth; Tom Jones and Dr. Johnson; and all my friends and the posters at Victoria Station; then some vague feeling of majesty and power and continuity; and then, heaven knows why, the thought of a barque in full sail going down the Channel – Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding – while the setting sun hangs redly on the edge of the horizon. These feelings and a hundred others make up an emotion which makes sacrifice easy, it is an emotion compact of pride and longing and love, but it is humble rather than conceited, and it does not preclude a sense of humour. Perhaps Russia is too large for sentiments so intimate, its past too barren of chivalry and high romance, its character too indefinite, its literature too poor, for the imagination to embrace the country, its history and culture, in a single emotion. Russians will tell you that the peasant loves his village. His outlook goes no further. And when you read histories of Russia you are amazed to find how little the feeling of nationality has meant to one age after another. It is a startling incident when a wave of patriotism has arisen to drive out an invader. The general attitude has been one of indifference to his presence on the part of those not actually afflicted by it. It is not by chance that Holy Russia bore so long and so submissively the yoke of the Tartar. Now it causes no indignation that the Central Powers may seize portions of Russian soil: the possibility is dismissed with a shrug and the words: “Russia is large enough anyway.”

  But my work throws me in close contact with the Czechs, and here I see a patriotism that fills me with amazement. It is a passion so single and so devouring that it leaves room for no others. I feel that awe rather than admiration is due to these men who have sacrificed everything for the cause, and not in twos and threes, fanatics among an apathetic herd, but in tens of thousands; they have given everything they had, their peace, their home, their fortune, their lives, to gain independence for their country. They are organized like a department store, disciplined like a Prussian regiment. Most of the patriots I have come across among my own countrymen, alas! too often have been eager to serve their country, but determined it should not be without profit to themselves (who will ever tell of the hunting for jobs, the intrigues, the exertion of influence, the personal jealousies, that have distracted the nation when its very existence was in peril?), but the Czechs are completely disinterested. They think as little of payment as does a mother of reward for the care of her child. With alacrity they accept drudgery when others are given the opportunity of adventure, mean offices when others are awarded posts of responsibility. Like all men of political mind, they have parties and programmes, but they submit them all to the common good. Is it not a marvellous thing that in the great Czech organization which has been formed in Russia, all, from the rich banker to the artisan, have given
a tenth part of their income to the cause throughout the war? Even the prisoners of war – and heaven knows how precious to these were their few poor kopecks – found they could spare enough to amount to some thousands of roubles.

  THE NEVSKY PROSPEKT

  NEVSKY PROSPEKT. Bond Street has the narrow tortuousness of the medieval city, and it reminds one always of the town to which great ladies came for the season; it was in Bond Street that the last Duchess of Cleveland boxed her footman’s ears. The rue de la Paix has the flamboyance of the Second Empire; it is wide, handsome, coldly stately and gay withal, as though the shadows of Cora Pearl and Hortense Schneider still smiled brightly at the gathered gems. Fifth Avenue is gay too, but with a different gaiety, of high spirits, and it is splendid with the rich, unimaginative splendour of youth in its buoyancy. Though each has its character and could belong only to the city in which it is, these great streets have in common a civilized opulence; they represent fitly a society which is established and confident. But none of them has more character than the Nevsky. It is dingy and sordid and dilapidated. It is very wide and very straight. The houses on either side are low, drab, with tarnished paint, and their architecture is commonplace. There is something haphazard about the street, even though we know that it was built according to plan, and it has an unfinished air; it reminds you of some street in a town of the Western States of America which has been built in the hurry of a boom, and, prosperity having departed from it, has run to seed. The shop windows are crowded with vulgar wares. They look like bankrupt stock from the suburbs of Vienna or Berlin. The dense crowd flows ceaselessly to and fro. Perhaps it is the crowd that gives the Nevsky its character. It does not, as in those other streets, consist chiefly of one class of the population but of all; and the loiterer may there observe a great variety of his fellow-creatures, soldiers, sailors and students, workmen and bourgeoisie, peasants; they talk incessantly; in eager throngs they surround the men who sell the latest edition of a paper. It looks a good-natured crowd, easygoing and patient; I shouldn’t imagine that they had the quick temper of the crowd in Paris which may so easily grow ugly and violent, and I can’t believe that they would ever behave like the crowd of the French Revolution. They give the impression of peaceable folk who want to be amused and excited, but who look upon the events of life chiefly as pleasant topics of conversation. Outside butchers’ and grocers’ these days are the long food lines, women with kerchiefs over their heads, boys and girls, grey-bearded men and pale youths, waiting hour after hour, waiting patiently.

  I think that the most astonishing thing in these crowds is the diversity of appearance; these people have not the uniformity of look which you find commonly in the crowds of other countries; it is as though the passions of the soul were written more plainly on their faces, and the faces were not a mask but an index, and walking along the Nevsky you saw the whole gallery of the characters of the great Russian novels so that you could put a name to one after the other. You see the thick-lipped, broad-faced merchant with his exuberant beard, sensual, loud-voiced and coarse; the pale-faced dreamer, with his pinched cheeks and sallow skin; you see the stolid woman of the people with a face so expressionless that it is like an instrument of music for wilful hands to play on, and you divine the cruelty of her sex’s tenderness. Lust walks abroad like the personified abstraction of an old morality, and virtue and anger and meekness and gluttony. The Russians say constantly that the world can as little understand them as they understand themselves. There is a little vanity in the mysteriousness upon which they dwell. I have no idea of explaining what so many have claimed to be inexplicable, but I ask myself whether the mystery does not lie in simplicity rather than in complexity. They are strangely primitive in the completeness with which they surrender themselves to emotion. With English people, for instance, there is a solid background of character which emotion modifies, but which in turn reacts on emotion; with the Russians it looks as though each emotion took complete possession of the individual and swayed him wholly. They are like Aeolian harps upon which a hundred winds play a hundred melodies, and so it seems as though the instrument were of unimaginable complexity.

  I often see brooding over the crowd on the Nevsky an extraordinary, a horrifying figure. It seems hardly human. It is a little misshapen dwarf, perched strangely on a tiny seat at the top of a stout pole high enough to bring him above the heads of the passers-by; and the pole is upheld by a sturdy peasant who collects the alms of the charitable. The dwarf sits on his perch like a monstrous bird and the effect is increased by something birdlike in his head, but the strange thing is that the head is fine shaped, the head of a young man, with a great hooked nose and a bold mouth. The eyes are large, rather close together, and they stare with an unwinking fixity. The temples are hollow, the cheeks wan and sunk. The strange beauty of the features is more than commonly striking because in Russia as a rule features are indistinct and flat. It is the head of a Roman of the Empire in a sculpture gallery. There is something sinister in the immobility of the creature, watching the crowd with the intentness of a bird of prey and yet seeing nothing, and that fierce bold mouth is curved into the shadow of a sardonic smile. There is something terrifying in the aloofness of the creature, contemptuous and yet indifferent, malicious and yet tolerant. It is like the spirit of irony watching the human race. The people pass to and fro and they put into the peasant’s box kopecks and stamps and notes.

  The Lavra of Alexander Nevsky. As you reach the end of the Nevsky Prospekt it grows shabbier and more dingy. The houses have the bedraggled look of those on the outskirts of a town, they suggest a sordid mystery, until the street ends abruptly in an oddly unfinished way and you come to the gateway of the monastery. You enter. There is a cemetery on each side of you and then you cross a narrow canal and come to the most unexpected scene in the world. It is a great quadrangle. Grass grows fresh and green as though you were in the country. On one side is a chapel and the cathedral and then, all around, the low white buildings of the monastery. There is something exquisitely strange in their architecture; the decoration is very simple and yet gives a sensation of being ornate; they remind you of a Dutch lady of the seventeenth century, soberly but affluently dressed in black. There is something prim about them, but not at all demure. In the birch trees rooks were cawing, and my recollection was carried back to the precincts of Canterbury; for there the rooks cawed too; it is a sound that never fails to excite my melancholy. I think of my boyhood, unhappy through the shyness which made me lonely among a crowd of boys, and yet rich with vague dreams of the future. The same grey clouds hung overhead. I felt homesick. I stood on the steps of the Greek church, looking at the long line of the monastery buildings, the leafless birches, but I saw the long nave of Canterbury cathedral with its flying buttresses and the central tower more imposing and lovely to my moved eyes than any tower in Europe.

  OPIUM DREAM

  SINGAPORE: OPIUM DREAM. I saw a road lined on each side with tall poplars, the sort of road that you see often in France, and it stretched in front of me, white and straight, immensely far; I saw farther than I had ever thought it possible to see, and still the white road continued with green poplars on either side. And then I seemed to go along it, rapidly, and the poplars fled past me more quickly, infinitely more quickly than the telegraph poles fly past when you are in an express train; and still they went and still they were ahead of me, the long rows of poplars. Then, on a sudden, there were no more poplars, but shady trees with large leaves, chestnuts and planes; and they were spaced out, and I went at no breakneck speed, but leisurely, and presently I came upon an open space and then, as I looked down, far below me, was the grey calm sea. Here and there a fishing-boat was sailing into harbour. Yonder, on the other side of the bay, stood a trim and tidy granite house with a flagstaff in the garden. It must have been the coastguard’s.

  THE SULTAN

  THE SULTAN. It was arranged that we should be received by the Sultan in his audience chamber at ten, and as we walked along
we saw him and his suite coming out of the place where he lives, which is above and at the side of the audience chamber, and we waited for a moment to allow him to enter. He was accompanied by two middle-aged men and a suite, all higgledy-piggledy, with a man holding an umbrella over his head. The audience chamber was a long low room with a gaudily-painted throne at one end. In front of this was a table with half a dozen dining-room chairs round it, and from this, on each side of the table, two rows of chairs ran down the hall. We were introduced to the Sultan and then to the two regents. The Sultan is a little boy of thirteen with a long face like a horse, a pale ivory skin, a large mouth which shows his long teeth and gums when he smiles, and very quick beady eyes. He was dressed in yellow silk, a coat, trousers and sarong, and on his head he wore a black fez decorated with an appliqué pattern of gold cloth enriched with imitation diamonds. Round his neck were a number of gold strings and chains and a large gold medal. The regents, who are his close relations, wore blueish-grey patterned silk handkerchiefs made into a kind of turban on their heads and dark trousers, bajus and sarongs. One of them had a very pronounced squint and wore spectacles of blue glass. The younger brother of the Sultan, a little pale-faced boy of eight, was carried in by an attendant on whose lap he sat throughout the audience. The Sultan looked every now and then at the cross-eyed regent to see what he was to do, but seemed to have self-assurance and to be not at all shy. He sat in an armchair at the head of the table, with the regents on one side of him and the British Resident and ourselves on the other. Behind him stood a group of officials in very shabby clothes. One of them bore a state sword of execution and there was another who bore a spear, a third with a cushion and a fourth with the apparatus for chewing betel-nut. Large native cigarettes were handed round, about the size of an ordinary candle, coarse Borneo tobacco wrapped in nipah palm leaves; but they smoked easily and coolly. The rest of the councillors sat on chairs on each side of the hall and appeared to be listening intently to the conversation that went on at the round table. At the side of the throne behind the Sultan stood two enormous burning candles in large brass candlesticks, and these were supposed to indicate the purity of the Sultan’s sentiments towards us. The little boy, the Sultan’s brother, stared with all his eyes. The regent on behalf of the Sultan paid us elaborate compliments, and then the Resident on my behalf made a long speech telling them all about me and who I was. After this there was a little desultory conversation, each side trying to think of something to say. Then after a final compliment from the regent and a graceful return from the Resident we took our leave.