A Writer's Notebook Page 15

  The sand on the beach has really the silver whiteness that you read of in descriptions of South Sea islands, and when you walk along in the sunshine it is so dazzling that you can hardly bear to look at it. Here and there you see the white shells of dead crabs or the skeleton of a sea-bird. At night the beach seems to be all moving; it is at first quite strange, this perpetual, slight movement, weird and uncanny; but when you light your torch you see that it comes from the incessant activity of innumerable shelled things; they move hither and thither on the beach slowly, stealthily, but there are such vast numbers of them that the whole beach seems alive.

  The Reef. It is a broad causeway along which you can walk all round the island, but it is so rough and uneven that it tears your feet to pieces. In the pools fish dart about and now and then an eel raises a vicious head. Lobster-catching: you go along the reef at night with hurricane lamps and walk, peering right and left, into every nook and cranny; fish slither away frightened by the light; and you have to walk carefully, since everywhere are great sea-hedgehogs capable of causing nasty wounds on the feet. There are great numbers of lobsters and you do not walk far before you see one. You put your foot on it and then a native comes, takes it up quickly and throws it in the old kerosene can which he has strapped on his shoulder. Walking thus in the night one loses all sense of direction, and on the way back it was not easy to find the boat. For a few minutes it looked as though we should have to stay on the reef till dawn. There was no moon, but the sky was unclouded and the stars were bright.

  Fishing on the Reef. At one point, near the passage, the reef is abrupt, like a precipice, and you look down directly into I know not how many fathoms of water. The natives had spread a net among the coral rocks of the lagoon and we had a number of fish to use as bait. It was rather horrid to see the natives killing them. They hit them with their fists on the belly or banged them with a piece of coral. When we reached the fishing-place, the canoe was attached to a coral rock, and the headman proceeded to pound up a couple of fish and threw the fragments in the water. This soon attracted a lot of small fry, thin, worm-like, active little things, and then a number of large black fish. In a few minutes a couple of sharks’ fins showed themselves on the surface and we saw the brown sharks circling round with a kind of horrible stealth. The rod was merely a bamboo, and to this a line was attached. The big black fish circled round the bait and took it voraciously, so that one pulled them out of the water one after the other. The sharks were greedy too and we had to snatch the bait away from them since the line was too thin to hold them. Once I got a shark on my hook and he snapped the line in a twinkling. We put down a couple of lines with the innards of fish on them and caught a tunny that must have weighed the best part of forty pounds.

  Catching sharks. Toward evening you attach the lights of a large fish to a hook and then tie the line to a tree. Not long elapses before you hear a great splashing, and going down to the beach you find that a shark is caught. You drag him in and when you get him on the beach he struggles and beats about. The native takes his large knife, a descendant of the cutlass brought by the first discoverers of the islands, and strikes at the head to get to the brain. It is an ugly, malicious-looking beast with hideous jaws. When it is dead the hook is cut out. Then the Chinaman cuts off the fins to dry them in the sun and a kanaka hacks out the jaw with its terrible teeth. The dead fish is cast back into the sea.

  The natives often tie the line to one of their legs before they go to sleep and are awakened by the tugging.

  Fish. Their variety is indescribable. Bright yellow fish, fish black and yellow, fish black and white, fish striped, fish curiously patterned. One day the natives went fishing and when they raised their net I saw their catch in all its brilliance. I had a sudden thrill, for it reminded me of the casting of a net in one of the stories in the Arabian Nights and among that astonishing confusion of colour and strange shapes I half expected to find a bottle sealed with the seal of Suleyman, the prison of a powerful djin.

  The colour of the sea. It is deep blue in the open sea, wine-coloured under the setting sun; but in the lagoon of an infinite variety, ranging from pale turquoise to the brightest, clearest green; and there the setting sun will turn it for a short moment to liquid gold. Then there is the colour of the coral, brown, white, pink, red, purple; and the shapes it takes are marvellous; it is like a magic garden, and the hurrying fish are like butterflies. It strangely lacks reality; it has the fantastic air of the product of some extravagant imagination. Among the coral are pools with a floor of white sand, and here the water is dazzling clear.

  Varo. In the Pacific they call it the sea-centipede. It is like a small lobster, but pale cream in colour. Two of them live in each hole. The female is larger and stronger than the male and somewhat more brightly coloured. They are found only in very fine sand and to catch them we went over the lagoon, about a mile, I should think, to one of the islands of which the group of Tetiaroa is composed. The natives had prepared a singular instrument. It consisted of the strong fibre from the central stem of the coconut leaf, about two feet long, and pliable; to this was tied a circle of hooks, turned upwards, so that it had a sort of umbrella effect; and about this was tied a piece of fish as bait. We walked along looking into the shallow water of the beach for the small round holes which marked the varo’s dwelling, and then let down the hooks. The native said an incantation, asking the varo to come up out of his hole, then flipped the water with his fingers; mostly nothing happened, but sometimes the fibre was pulled down and then we knew a varo had seized the bait and was entangled in the hooks. Very cautiously he was hauled up, and it was quite exciting to see the little beast emerge on the surface clinging to the fibre. He was released and put into a basket which the headman rapidly made from a coconut leaf. However it was not quick work and in three hours we only caught eight.

  Evening on the Lagoon. At sunset the sea turns to a bright purple; the sky is cloudless and the sun, burning red, sinks into the sea, rapidly, but not so rapidly as writers lead one to believe, and Venus shines. When evening comes, clear and silent, an ardent, frenzied life seems to break out. Countless shelled animals begin to crawl about at the edge of the water, and in the water every living thing seems to be in action. Fish leap, there are mysterious splashings, and a sudden swift turmoil as a shark frightens everything within sight of its cruel stealthiness. Small fry leap by hundreds into the air and sometimes a large coloured fish gleams above the surface with a momentary glitter. But the most impressive thing is that feeling of urgent, remorseless life. In the quiet of the lovely evening there is something mysterious about it and vaguely alarming.

  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 sea-bird gives a mournful cry.

  1917

  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 civilisation, well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed, and its readers were resolute to bear in mind that all they read was make-believe.

  The fantastic n
ineties 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 maché. 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 side 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 organised 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 organisation 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 nineties appealed only to the mind, and that is a running stream that purifies what passes through it, but the literature of today appeals to the heart, and that is a well that grows foul. They wore their heart on their sleeve, a fantastic orchid in Solomon’s window, but our contemporaries carry it about in a slop basin. It may have been absurd to burn with a hard gem-like flame, but it is tedious to be bread-sauce.

  I read Anna Karenina when I was a boy in a blue-bound translation published by Walter Scott, long before I began to write myself, but my recollection of it was vague, and when I read it again many years afterwards, interested then from a professional standpoint in the art of fiction, it seemed to me powerful and strange, but a little hard and dry. Then I read Fathers and Sons, in French; I was too ignorant of Russian things to appreciate its value; the strange names, the originality of the characters, opened a window on romance, but it was a novel like another, related to the French fiction of its day, and for me at all events, it had no great significance. Later still, when I found myself definitely interested in Russia, I read other books by Turgenev; but they left me cold. Their idealism was too sentimental for my taste, and unable in a transl
ation to see the beauty of manner and style which Russians value, I found them ineffectual. It was not till I came to Dostoievsky (I read Crime and Punishment in a German version) that I received a bewildering and arresting emotion. Here was something that really had significance for me and I read greedily one after the other the great novels of Russia’s greatest writer. Finally I read Chekov and Gorki. Gorki left me indifferent. His subject matter was curious and remote, but his talent seemed mediocre: he was readable enough when he set down unaffectedly the lives of the lowest orders of the population, but my interest in the slums of Petrograd was soon exhausted; and when he began to reflect or philosophise I found him trivial. His talent sprang from his origins. He wrote of the proletariat as a proletarian, not as do most authors who have dealt with the subject, as a bourgeois. In Chekov on the other hand I discovered a spirit vastly to my liking. Here was a writer of real character, not a wild force like Dostoievsky, who amazes, inspires, terrifies and perplexes; but one with whom you could get on terms of intimacy. I felt that from him as from no other could be learned the secret of Russia. His range was great and his knowledge of life direct. He has been compared with Guy de Maupassant, but one would presume only by persons who have read neither. Guy de Maupassant is a clever story-teller, effective at his best—by which, of course, every writer has the right to be judged—but without much real relation to life. His better known stories interest you while you read them, but they are artificial so that they do not bear thinking of. The people are figures of the stage, and their tragedy exists only because they behave like puppets rather than like human beings. The outlook upon life which is their background is dull and vulgar. Guy de Maupassant had the soul of a well-fed bagman; his tears and his laughter smack of the commercial room in a provincial hotel. He is the son of Monsieur Homais. But with Chekov you do not seem to be reading stories at all. There is no obvious cleverness in them and you might think that anyone could write them, but for the fact that nobody does. The author has had an emotion and he is able so to put it into words that you receive it in your turn. You become his collaborator. You cannot use of Chekov’s stories the hackneyed expression of the slice of life, for a slice is a piece cut off and that is exactly the impression you do not get when you read them; it is a scene seen through the fingers which you know continues this way and that though you only see a part of it.