Part 6

The fascination of islands is felt by all of us, but Bragman might not be to everybody’s taste. Some people might say it would have no taste. They would prefer an infested attic in Rotherhithe or Ostend, or any mean refuge with sufficient sin about it to prove they were alive and in danger of hell fire. Yet for others it would certainly give a sense of rest from the many advantages of Europe. They might feel that for the sake of peace they could endure it. What is more, we know that the pleasures of sin can be ridiculously overrated. The most doleful places in the world, where youth seeking joy in bright-eyed recklessness is sure to be soused in ancient and unexpected gloom, are what are known to the feeble-minded and to writers of moral tracts as “haunts of pleasure.” Nobody points out to the eager and guileless, who have been misled by the glamour which literature can cast over even a bath-room, and by the lush reminiscences of dodderers, that for gaiety of atmosphere the red lights of the places of pleasure are quite extinguished by the attractions of a temperance hotel on a wet night. The haunts of pleasure take their place in the museum of mankind’s mistakes alongside the glories of war.

That island of Maundeville’s, which is called Bragman, is only a curious name for one of the Hesperides, or the Fortunate Isles, or the Isles of the Blessed. Some name it Eden or Elysium. We place it where we will, and give it the name of our choice. But naturally it must be an island, uncontaminated by the proximity of a mainland. Every man has his dream of such a sanctuary, and every community its legend, because in our hearts we are sure the world is not good enough for us. Even the South Sea Islanders have word of a better place, the asylum they have never reached in all their thousand years of wandering from east to west about the Pacific. Perhaps man goes to war, or seeks pleasure with abandonment, merely because at intervals he becomes desperately disappointed in his search for what is not of this earth. What does that suggest? But we will leave the suggestion to the metaphysicians, who are as interesting when at such speculations as the fourteenth century cartographers were at geography. It may mean something highly important, but what that is we are never likely to see as we see daylight when the generalization of a mathematical genius illuminates and relates the apparently irrelevant speculations of his arduous but unimaginative fellows. If we would see the turrets of the Holy City, then a stroll round the corner to the Dog and Duck before closing-time may do as well as a longer journey. We only know that all the supreme artists appear to have been privileged, as was Moses, with a sight of a coast, glorious but remote, and that the memory of that unattainable vision gives to their music and verse the melancholy and the golden sonority which to us, and we do not know why, are the indisputable sigil of their greatness.

[Illustration: _Some name it Eden or Elysium._]

“To reach felicity,” says Mr. Firestone in his _Coasts of Illusion_, “we must cross the water.” There is no reason for this, but we know it is true, for felicity is where we are not. We must cross it to an island, and a small one. A large island would be useless. It ought to be uninhabited, too, or at the worst it should be very rarely boarded by other wanderers. What account could the company of the _Hispaniola_ have rendered of the pirates’ hoard if they had sought it on a mainland? Where would Robinson Crusoe be now if his island had been Australia? Lost among the dry records of geographical discovery. A large island could not hold the treasure we are after. I remember a shape on the horizon, which often was visible from a Devonshire vantage, though sometimes it had gone. Its nature depended, I thought, on the way of the sun and wind. It was a cloud. It was very distant. It was a whale. It was my imagination. But one morning at sunrise I put my head out of the scuttle of a little cutter, and the material universe had broken loose. The tiny ship was heaving on a groundswell, vast undulations of glass, and over us titanic masonry was toppling in ruin--I feared the explosions of surf would give a last touch to a collapsing island, and Lundy would fall on us. We landed on a beach no larger than a few bushels of shingle. It was enclosed by green slopes and high walls of rock; and we climbed a track from the beach that mounted amid sunlight and shadow. The heat of the upper shimmering platform of granite and heath above the smooth sea, and its smell and look of antiquity, suggested that it had been abandoned and forgotten, and had remained apart from the affairs of a greater and more important world since the creation. We were sundered from everybody. That was my first island, and I still think its one disadvantage is that it is only twelve miles offshore.

For perhaps an island landfall should come only after a long and uncertain voyage. Its coast must appear in a way which suggests as an absurdity that the captain could have performed a miracle with such casual exactitude. This landfall is a virgin gift to us by chance. Indeed most small islands, when lifted by a ship, have that suggestion about them. That is why they are the origin of the better legends of man, and the promise of earthly felicity. They are the dream surprised in daylight on the ocean by the voyager, caught napping in the sun, and we know that a foot set on those impalpable colours would wake the gods to their forgetfulness, and away the spectre would go. Not for us. That is why the ship always sails past.

XIV

Let something survive on earth, if it be only the record of Maundeville’s island, which humanity cannot violate. I am glad Amundsen returned safely, but I am glad also because the North Pole compelled even our wonderful aeroplanes to treat it with respect. Without guessing what our trouble is, we may be growing too clever. Our very boldness may hide that fact from us. It would be a pity if the earth became tired of us, as once it grew weary of the dinosaurs, who appear to have overdone their part. They grew too big. A traveller who recently returned from the upper Amazon asks, for instance, what the future of that region is to be. “Unless oil,” says this gentleman, “renews interest in this part of the world, large sections may revert to savagery, as for instance in the Upper Napo, where already the rubber gatherers have withdrawn, and the Indian tribes who once occupied the territory have returned to their original haunts.” Clearly then the Indian tribes must once have deserted their original haunts. Was that because of the rubber gatherers? However, these savages may be compelled again to leave their original haunts. The explorer suggests that the forest trees could be readily converted into alcohol; though he adds that not much can be done without better transport, and his idea is that the use of flying boats, or hydroplanes, a use he describes as “intelligent,” would in that wasted region “make things possible which otherwise would be out of the question.” And then, to show that this beneficent development is really in the air, and may blossom soon, he reports that the Murato Indians of the Pastazo River have a curious saying. They say, “When the white man comes with wings we are going to die.”

We never doubt that what has been revealed only to the superior race of whites--or as Mr. E. M. Forster describes us, the “pinko-greys”--is better than any idea of an inferior colour. Alcohol and pulp, to our mind, are the better forms for trees, their spiritual transmutation as it were, and death in flying machines more desirable than what we call savagery. The white man with his burden feels that he has not reconciled himself to his god unless he has converted a mountain or a wood into something like Widnes or Dowlais. When the mountain is a mass of slag on which a community crowds into back-to-back hovels, living there in the sure and certain hope of the Poor Law as the crown to its labours, the man of western culture looks at the figures in a Blue-Book, and knows that he has fulfilled the divine injunction. He never suspects that he may be wrong in that. Impossible that the Murato Indians in their forest may be as pleasing as his flying machines and alcohol! Yet perhaps the firs and pines of Newfoundland are not necessarily worse than the rolls of paper into which they are converted. The conversion of a forest into a popular press may be inevitable, like war, but we should not deride the trees which help us to our enlightenment by calling them savage. That seems hardly fair. Let the Murato and all other Indians perish, if there is no other way of getting our alcohol, but to say they are uncivilized as we extinguish them seems a little priggish.

And so our regret is not moved as easily as it ought to be when we remember that the pioneer heroes who will venture to convert that Amazon solitude into oil and other commodities may, nay will, die in numbers of various fevers, along with the Indians who will die because of other things. That is not unjust. For we feel that the transformation of all the world into the likeness of the industrious Black Country need not be hastened on our account. There is a tributary of the Amazon I know, which once rewarded my admiration for it with some fever, but I do not want it to be punished into the likeness of the factories and slime of the Lea at Stratford-by-Bow. I shall never again see that river and its forest, but it is a pleasure to remember that, beyond Whitehall and Versailles, there still it flows between its cliffs of foliage, for whoever would like a complete change from the best that man has thought and done, and is willing to pay the price for it. The explorer of the Amazon who wondered whether it could be translated into a favourable balance sheet, says, “Alone in these dense green solitudes, harmless as they may appear, it is the unknown, the unseen, that terrifies. Man feels that he is battling with an invisible monster more horrible than the river, because the latter attacks in the open and its death stroke is relatively quick, whereas the forest ensnares its victim in the dark, and slowly draws its coils tighter, till death comes as a merciful relief.” But that, of course, is only the impression of a human creature in such a land who is not a forest Indian, and finds himself unable to call up a taxicab at the moment he needs it. To alcohol with the place! The truth is the forest was not meant for him. Whatever its design, it was not that. It does not wish to do him any harm; and though its countenance has the appearance of it, yet it was not composed as a look of doom. If he cannot survive, however, then he must die, and while he is dying it will maintain its aloofness and silence.

So I am glad when the North Pole turns back our aeroplanes. The day will come when they will land there, no doubt. A quantity of black grease, our mark of trade, will be left on the snow, as evidence that man at last has come. But it is just as certain that he will not stay there. Nothing can be done with that place, and it will be left to stare in white emptiness at the stars. We find some comfort, which need not be pure misanthropic lunacy, in the thought of unprofitable deserts and waste lands. Some parts of earth, we are assured, will remain exempt forever from the blight of our appalling activities. Let us pray for more power to the mosquito’s elbow on the Amazon and such places. It is pleasant to remember that he is guarding those regions against saw mills and plant for distilling alcohol from the pulp of the forest. Another sort of traveller, Mr. Norman Douglas, made this confession in a review he wrote of that noble travel narrative, Doughty’s _Arabia Deserta_--for I would prefer a little society in this misanthropy. I do not want to be solitary in my desert. Says Mr. Douglas, with feeling, “I recall my first view of the Chott country, that sterile salt depression in Tunisia, and my feelings of relief at the idea that this little speck of the globe, at least, was irreclaimable for all time; never to be converted into arable land, or even pasture; safe from the intrusion of potato planters and what not; the despair of the politician, the delight of any dreamer who might care to people its melancholy surface with phantoms, mere illusions, of his own.”

I sing with him, Hosanna! A great region of South Africa is sinking into a like melancholy surface, for which we may thank whatever desiccating Power there may be. It is returning to the dust. Its water is leaving it. Its stones are now unturned. Its prospect is the deceptive mirage. So kingdoms of Central Asia, once the arenas for the battle glories of turbulent Huns and Tartars, have got tired of us, and now turn to the moon her own aspect of parched and shining dunes. And there is that part of Arabia known as the Empty Quarter--the Great Red Desert. What a name that is, the Empty Quarter! It is as satisfying to the mind as the Canadian Barren Grounds, a name so much more moving in its implications than all the statistics of the Wheat Belt.

XV

The traveller was homeward bound, and his liner made its landfall, and turned for Portland and its London pilot. There was no welcome in that look of the coast of home. The shadow of land to port might have been the end of all the headlands of the seas. It was as desolate as antiquity by twilight. There was no rain, but the chill cut to the bone. The sky was old and dark. This frown of the north-land subdued the comfortable life of the ship; it fled below. The little cheerful groups dissolved without a word. The decks were deserted, except for two odd figures, muffled like mummies in a shelter on the lee side. He could find nobody who would face it with him. He strolled aft to the shelter where some men who knew the East used to meet, before dinner, to smoke and yarn, but only a steward was there, a disillusioned familiar who was brusquely piling the unwanted wicker chairs--throwing them at each other.

Somehow even the satin-wood panelling of the stairway to the saloon, with its bronze balustrade, appeared now to be out of place. It did not accord with cold draughts. The glow lamps shone in emptiness, the palms in the corners were dingy. He suspected the life of the ship had suddenly absented itself, and was behind closed doors, whispering of a crisis to which he could get no clue. As he descended to his cabin he paused to watch an officer, muffled in a greatcoat, pass from one side of the ship to the other on a deck above him, but the man was pre-occupied and hurried, and did not notice that the ship had another lonely ghost wandering about her.

In his cabin the little gilt image of a Buddha, Putai Ho-Shang, the god of children and earthly joys, passive and happy, regarded him cheerfully from the clothes chest. That token of the East had more sun in it than all the world into which the steamer had now come. The image was old, perhaps as old as that fading recollection of a land along which the ship was now cruising for haven. Might not that recollection fade utterly before the haven was reached? Was that image cheerful with tidings that were nearer to the springs of life than anything known under the skies of the north? Was it that knowledge which made it confident? There was a suggestion of derision about its happy smile, as though it had a word which made it invulnerable to this bleak air, and to the driving darkness that was the headlong confusion of a region which had lost its light and faith.

The bugle called to dinner. He took no notice of it. He thought he would sooner pack up; at least he could then confirm, putting away some good things he had found in Brunei, Palembang, and Canton, that somewhere life was ardent and young, and was light-hearted while making beautiful things. He placed a porcelain bowl beside Buddha. The two were worth looking at. If you stood in a certain way a golden dragon was hinted in the azure of the bowl. The man who made that did not work in a north-east wind. When he opened his camphorwood chest it filled his cabin with a suggestion of warm nights, of a still sea in which the reflections of the stars were comets rising from the deeps, of the figures of motionless palms drowsing with their heads above a beach. Well, that was over. But he had seen it. Time, now, to put it away, except as a private thought.

But, as he packed away his silks and porcelain the image steadfastly quizzed him. That token of another order of things reclined luxuriously, as if asking him what he was going to do about it, though knowing he could give no answer. He put away everything but the image. He left that in the seat it had occupied all the voyage. He would not touch that yet. The voyage was not quite over. That idol was like an assurance of good. It might be the sign of a wisdom which understood all that he knew, and yet still could contemplate affairs with equanimity, though the sun and the lotus were far away. The image was completely foreign, as incongruous in a ship as he himself would be in a temple; yet you could believe that Putai Ho-Shang was in a place his philosophy comprehended, though that place was chill and cold to him; that in his cheerful mind every extension of the mechanics of industrial progress was provided for, and all the important devices of the busy men who motived that machinery. It would appear as simple to him as the acts of children. He would know all about it, and the end to which it was destined.

The face of the little Cockney steward was at his elbow, with its sardonic smile. “Your tea, sir. We’re nearly in.”

“Where are we?”

“Just orf Southend. Fine morning, sir. The pier’s plain.”

It certainly was a fine morning. The captain passed him on the deck. “Hullo, here we are again. Looks good, doesn’t it? We’ve done nicely, too. She came along last night like a scalded cat, though there was just an off-chance we missed the tide. We’re going up on top of it all right.”

Was that Essex? No land in the East ever had a brighter sparkle. This place was not only alive, but boisterous. It was as young as a star. Their liner was slipping past a collier with a noise of brisk waters which was startling to one who had just left the quiet seclusion of a cabin. The river and its men were about their business. Great ships were moving quickly on a river that was spacious and resplendent. The very sunlight seemed dangerous, with its swift gleaming in a lively breeze. That challenging shouting from a sailing barge was the voice of a young and vigorous land. To that land morning was native; and full tide, pouring with bustling winds and floods of sudden light, made merely the pulse of it. He got the impression that the globe was spinning almost too buoyantly. Gravesend was soon ahead of them, a touch of smoking rose. He dived below, at something like a speed proper to this newly discovered land, to see whether or not his baggage had gone out for the Customs inspection. It had gone. No time had been lost, and even while he looked round his cabin he saw from his port light that the liner was slowing ... she had anchored.

No hurry. Nobody would be waiting for him; not at that hour of the morning. He idled outside. The long vista of the lower deck was vacant. Eh? As he looked aft a tall figure turned into it, leisurely and confident, glancing in curiosity about the ship, a figure that was familiar, yet changed by time. Was that his own boy?

The stranger strolled along and saw him. “Hullo, dad!” And then flushed, and was shy. “She’s a topping ship, isn’t she? I watched her coming up the river. She looked fine. Where’s your cabin?”

They went into it. “The luggage is all set out on the other end of the ship. I came over in the tug with the Customs Officers. They tried to turn me out. What a jolly cabin. I like this. And what’s that funny smell, like spice? I wish I’d been with you.”

They stood looking at each other intently, asking questions, forgetful of time. The boy, smiling and confident, like an assurance of good, regarded him cheerfully from a superior height.

“Here, my lad. Time we were off. There’s a special train for the passengers. Come along, and talk afterwards.”

The boy gave a quiet look round. “Here, is this yours?” He grinned, and picked up the image of Putai Ho-Shang. “What a comic little chap! Is he yours? Righto!” He put Buddha in his pocket.

II. OUT OF TOUCH

We could go no further. Our steamer had left the sea weeks before, and had slowly serpentined her way into the heart of a continent. She had been persuaded over bars, she had waited patiently till floods gave her a chance to insinuate herself against the river current still deeper into that forest of the tropics. She had rounded bends so narrowly that her crew cheered derisively when her gear brought down showers of leaves and twigs from the overhanging front of the forest. When the monkeys answered our syren the bo’sun gave me a look, half appealing, half startled. But now we could go no further. We were nearly two thousand miles from the sea, and just ahead of us was an incline of foaming water. No ship had intruded into that solitude before; beyond the cataracts ahead of us, up into the unexplored wilderness, that river had its origin somewhere in the Andes of Bolivia.

There we anchored. Both anchors were out, because two were necessary. It was doubted that two were enough. Mr. Bullock, the mate, was complaining bitterly. I was standing with him on the forecastle head, and we were both watching the taut cables, which at times were tremulous in the strain of the current. “A nice thing,” he said, “a nice thing. Ever see anything like it before? It isn’t right.”