Part 9

Conrad told me that not seldom seamen wrote to him to say that they knew Singleton well, though “that was not his name.” Of course they knew Singleton. The novelist was very pleased that he could say Singleton had been recognised. It was the kind of assurance he needed then. It is all very well for us to make a fuss now, but Conrad had given the public his best work years before he received from us any worthy signal. He was an extremely sensitive man, and shy and modest, and not so long ago he desired to learn from Englishmen that his addition to our literature of the sea was just, and the kind that we approved. We were in no hurry to give it. I met him first in the company of Norman Douglas and Austin Harrison, in the office of the _English Review_ in its earlier days. Because I knew he was a noteworthy man, and because he looked distinguished and a little haughty, and because only a few weeks before I had reviewed one of his books of the sea, I was nervous and merely looked on. Presently Douglas and Harrison began to talk of the affairs of their Review; Conrad then came over, and stood beside me. He touched my arm, apparently as nervous as I was myself. “Thank you very much for what you said about my book. You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”

I was then a journalist on the staff of a daily newspaper. I was at Sidney Street and elsewhere. But Conrad’s first words to me gave me one of the shocks of my life. Here was a man, whose work, however neglected by the public, was manifestly an admirable achievement. It would be living when much of what was being done in London, and many of the great men whose names were in the headlines daily, would be forgotten. It did not want much knowledge to divine that. And hardly a robust young writer who had a column to fill somewhere every other day but was assured of his place in the handsome scheme of things, and expected one to know his work. Yet this man, who had _Youth_ to his credit, and _Typhoon_ and _Lord Jim_, touched the arm of his junior and was pleased to say “You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”

A remark of that kind might go far to wreck one’s own career, if it sank properly in. Yet it is as well to point out that, though modest, Conrad could be quick enough in attack when folly or presumption was about. He was not the man to suffer gladly the more ruinous absurdities of his fellows. It was heartening to see that graciousness and diffidence suddenly go, and those dark eyes become lambent at the naming of an arrogant crudity.

I must say there is one of the company of the _Narcissus_ that I deplore. Conrad should never have shipped that man Donkin. He is not a man, but an unresolved dislike, a blot in a good book. Donkin does a little to spoil the voyage of the _Narcissus_, for Conrad imagined that he had shipped a Cockney; yet Donkin, whenever he speaks, distresses the ear of a Londoner. We do not know his dialect. I fear that Donkin may be, if examined, queer evidence of what was behind that veil which Conrad preferred to keep between himself and his readers.

Mr. Cunninghame Graham, in his preface to Joseph Conrad’s posthumous _Tales of Hearsay_, quotes with evident pleasure from one of the tales: “It requires a certain greatness of soul to interpret patriotism worthily--or else a sincerity of feeling denied to the vulgar refinement of modern thought which cannot understand the august simplicity of a sentiment proceeding from the very nature of things and men.” Vulgar refinement! A shining epithet. And how it would be quoted with unction by one group of ardent patriots, who would cheerfully shoot another group, with admirable sincerity of feeling, because the patriotism of their opponents, just as sincere if less admirable, stood in their way! Patriotism doubtless is like true religion. It may be entirely an expression of faith, and so need not be reasonable. And we know who have true religion. We have it.

No matter. “There is a fountain in Marrakesh,” says Mr. Cunninghame Graham, “with a palm tree near it, a gem of Moorish art, with tiles as iridescent as the scales upon a lizard’s back. Written in Cufic characters, there is this legend ‘Drink and admire.’ Read and admire; then return thanks to Allah who gives water to the thirsty and at long intervals sends us refreshment for the soul.” And we return thanks to Allah. There is that to go back.

II

When I return to a London suburb I think I shall try to cultivate something resembling one of the drains which occur here and there on the lower slopes of the Wessex moorland above the Chesil Bank. These ditches make our best horticultural efforts as vulgar as excessive begonias. The effect achieved by a ditch comes, apparently, without intent and labour. When a drain is constant over shelves of limestone from an upper spring, and then gathers into a shallow basin before losing itself in the porous desert near the sea; when it occurs so in a narrow combe with a southerly descent and is sheltered from the hard drive of westerly weather, then the still lower air is tropical, and English weeds flourish with an extravagance which hints at a fearful vitality suppressed by cultivation.

One such tiny combe is a short walk above the tamarisks and the white wall of my house. It is easy and even pleasant to carry thither those books some wilful editors consider that I ought to read, unluckily for the books and for them; because if I get well above the ditch then the smell of thyme makes the synthetic odours of a modern novel, as from a dressing table, seem a little queer. No getting round that criticism. And if I stay by the ditch then I waste all the morning standing about in that luxuriant tangle, as fascinated by it as the hover-flies appear to be. No good then to try to read any book. Foolish to expect the wit of recent prose to prove like a dragon-fly, or a lyric to soar and poise like a red admiral. On a hot day, too, the smell of the water mint would make the strongest inducement of Mille Fleurs seem very silly. Besides, one has first to get to the ditch. It is quite near, but the time one takes to reach it is ridiculous. The ditch lies on the other side of an old wall, which is built--or created, for the wall bears no evidence of design--of loose slabs of a limestone of the Lias.

That wall is the trouble. It is hard to get over it, and impossible to get round it. Most of it is hidden in a torrent of bramble, which pours headlong downhill. That wild of bramble is itself a domain in its own right. I have discovered that it is an inhabited tunnel, and the waves of hooked branches form its roof. One morning a stoat, which was leaping about in a game that needs but one player, saw me coming, and dived into a lower door of the mass. Out of other doors, till then unknown, rabbits shot at once, as by magic. It was as though this earth could erupt all the life it needs, at any moment. I suspect these hills could do very well without us, and if Downing Street were to become permanently untenanted perhaps our island would not look any the worse, from one point of view.

A good length of the wall is exposed, at one place. That part of it is, as an orderly mind would say, in need of repair. I hope it will never get it. It is a delightful ruin. Slabs of limestone are scattered about the foot of a ruin of loose rock. They vary in colour. They may be a pale buff, or a bluish grey. The surface of a slab is frequently water-worn, and then it is smooth and silky to the touch, and is lustrous. It looks warm and rich, as though the bones of earth had an unctuous marrow. And any chance fragment makes the age of the tumuli on the hill-top as recent as yesterday, for it will be loaded with fossils, the relics of a sea in which the dinosaurs lived. The chance cross-sections of many nacreous shells give such a tablet of rock the appearance of being marked with shining hieroglyphics; what reading matter for us! No wonder it takes some time to get over it, this wall! Lizards whisk into its crevices, the flickering of shadows where all is still.

Below the overturned wall is the combe in which runs the ditch. There is a dark screen of stunted Scotch firs on the edge of its far side to keep any of the Channel gusts from spilling over. The weeds below have no need to adjust themselves to the draughts. They grow as they please. Teazle and hemp-agrimony flourish into small trees. Once you begin to climb uphill through that jungle, out of the lower fringe of mint and flea-bane--it is time a better name was found for that pleasant little yellow herb of the waste and damp lands--you feel that the heat of the sun is really a direct and incessant burning. The air is humid, and strongly aromatic. The growth in that hollow might be the work of a spell. It does not move. It seems theatrical and even a little threatening in its absolute quietude and stillness. Some resolution is needed for an advance into it. The pinkish murk of the crowns of hemp-agrimony rises above the cream plumes of the meadow-sweet, and though one knows of no attraction in its flower-heads, the butterflies do. I suppose it gives them an upper platform in the light. Out in the wind you may not see a butterfly all day, but here it is usual on a sunny morning to find a gathering of scores of tortoise-shells, peacocks, and red admirals. Perhaps it is a tradition with them that this is the best retreat on the coast. It is a good tradition and should be preserved. I am not sure which of those insects is the most handsome, but I think whichever one of them happens to be arranging itself on the nearest crown, heliotropically, really presenting to the sun its coloured design, yet behaving--if I remain as still as the garden itself--as though it were doing its best to get into the right light for my benefit. Well, it is for my benefit, as well as for my humiliation, because I realise that such a design, though worked to no useful purpose that I can guess, being in that respect inferior to my own designs, yet still might be considered superior to the art of my own well-directed efforts. In any case, while that assembly of useless living colours is winged and convulsive above the weeds, on a good morning, it seems a sort of idleness to make the usual notes of a critic of books.

III

There is no harbour on the curved sweep of this bank of shingle for many miles in either direction. The line of the beach in the north curves so imperceptibly that to the eye it looks straight; towards the southern end it sweeps round like the blade of a sickle, and is as sharp in the run. The five-fathom mark is close inshore, so the first line of breakers is direct upon the shingle. The usual weather, of course, is westerly; nearly always south of west. And in that direction I suppose the next land would be the Bahamas, but I have only local maps, and can lay no exact course to what landfall is in the eye of the wind. Anyhow, there is so much ocean between us and the next land that the waves come in, with any seaward breeze, in regular and massed attacks. They growl as they charge. In summer weather like this it is a cheerful noise, for they are only playing roughly. Then they break and make the shingle fly, with a roar; and a myriad little stones, as a wave draws back, follow it with thin cries.

Both the sea and the coast look bare and barren. Terns in couples patrol up and down, and so close to me that I can see their black caps. Occasionally one will dive--two seconds under water--and it comes up with something which glitters for an instant. On the ridge of the shingle bank a little vegetation is recumbent, forming close mats and cushions, with sere stalks that quiver in the wind, as though apprehensive of their footing. The sea looks even more infertile than the desert of stones. You feel that you and your book, and the terns which now and then find something which glitters, are all the intruding life there is. But some distance away there are a few boats drawn up high and dry--they make good shelters to leeward of sun and wind, and they have a strong but pleasing smell--and at odd times, usually towards evening, a crew of six men will come along to get one out. She is launched down the slope on wooden rollers, in short runs. Half the crew go in her, and one of them throws a seine net steadily overside. The other fellows have the shore end of the seine. The boat goes round a considerable bight, and then lands the other end of the net. If you imagine that hauling in that net and its floats, when any tide is running, is nothing but fun, the men will not object if you put on your weight. That way there is much to be learned.

The gradient of the shingle is steep, and when climbing it with a line in tow the feet slip back into the polished stones at every step. What has this to do, you ask, with a reader of books? Well, what do you suppose a bookman learns at a study table about life? Make him sail a boat now and then, or haul on a net, or herd cows, or dig clay, or weed a field instead of new novels; make him work, if not for a living, then just for a change. What does he imagine keeps London’s chimneys smoking? Once I heard a rude fellow interrupt a famous political economist, who was deploring the sad ways of coal miners. “If you,” he said, “could keep warm in winter only by hewing your own coal out of the rock, you know very well you’d sooner buy a pair of dumb-bells.”

The feet crunch and slip, steadily, while the floats of the net seem to bob no nearer the shore. The weight comes with a rush just about when you feel it is better to read books than to handle seine nets. There is a heaving and a slapping on the stones. To most of us, of course, fish is fish. There is only fish. Yet one haul of the net is almost sure to bring in forms that are fishes, certainly, but which demand to be named. They are so challenging that they stick in the memory, and must be exorcised with names, as we resolve, by putting names to them, all the mysteries that trouble us.

I love fish markets. I enjoy even Billingsgate, though one does get pushed about there, early mornings, and its rain of slobber is bad for neat raiment. One of the most beautiful and terrifying scenes on this earth is a fish market of the tropics. When next you are in Tanjong Priok, do not forget, as you did last time, to go to its fish market. But this English shingle beach, barren as its stones look, is a good substitute for the Tanjong, when the seine net is fruitful. For occasionally it is fruitful, though a deal of wet and heavy labour may be wasted on six mackerel and some squids. The fishermen have no use for the squids, nor have I, but they may be enjoyed. You need only look at them, for they are like odd Chinese shapes in polished and transparent quartz, but magically illuminated from within by the principle of life. Life flushes each hyaline figure. And though, to one way of thinking, six mackerel are not so good as six thousand, yet from another they are just as good. A wonderful family, that of the mackerel! You no sooner begin to remember tunny, albacore, and bonito, than you are translated to a distant sea. There is something else, too. We never see mackerel--or, for that matter, any other fish, in London. We see only provender there. On the stones of this beach, when the red globe of the sun sits almost a-top of the western headland, and the air grows bleak, a mackerel fresh from the sea might be a big fire-opal lost to the ocean’s enchantment. Yes, you may feel a shudder of fear when overlooking the heaving pocket of the seine net.

And how little one knows of such a gathering from the gardens of the pulse! A red gurnard, with its staring eyes of violet, and the livid violet margin to its pectorals, never suggests anything for the pot. Those steady eyes look at you with disconcerting interest. There are red mullet and grey, gar-fish like green snakes, horse mackerel, herring, plaice and dabs, and fry that might be leaping shavings of bright metal. The other afternoon a salmon came in with the rest, a very king, a resplendent silver torpedo of a fellow, who scattered the shingle before he was overcome. And now, because I have been warned that I may look for even stranger messengers from the world we do not know, I am waiting for the opah, the _chimæra mirabilis_, the angel fish, Darkie Charlie, and the oar-fish or sea-serpent.

IV

That overcrowding of which we complain--declaring first that our cities are much too great, and then blaming our officials because the buildings do not spread quickly enough--is something we really enjoy, I suppose. We could not live without the support of the multitude. We love to walk down Fleet Street, jostling each other on the inadequate sidewalks, pressed together between the motor-buses and the shop fronts. We find the crowd, and keep with it on instinct. The fruits of solitude are astringent and we do not like them. Nothing else will explain why we would sooner sit uncomfortably with fifty strangers in a charabanc, for a journey through a land we cannot see, to a place which is exactly like the one from which we started, than stroll across country in peace at our own gait.

Yesterday I had to go to town again. It ought to have been a pleasure trip, because the town nearest to me is described on the posters, with coloured illustrations, as the kind of place for which men forsake even their London employment. When I remembered its many advertised attractions I felt almost glad that I was out of tobacco. At last I should see this notable pleasure resort with its golden sands and its joyous throng. The change would be interesting, because nothing had happened in my neighbourhood for some time, except weather. True, the tamarisk pennants had begun to rust, and in the next field there was stubble instead of oats. But, except the admonitions of a few selected books, the only sounds at an isolated cottage had been the occasional mewing of the gulls and the mourning of the sea. I had an idea, too, that the wind, as it came ashore, was glad to find our key-hole, for it desired a local habitation and a voice. The voice of the wind, I noticed, was in keeping with the monody of the sea. It is rare for any stranger to pass this house, though some porpoises went by the other afternoon. Just beyond a most individual sea-stock, which somehow is rooted and exalted on the wall at the foot of the garden, daring the light of the ocean, I saw the black forms of the little whales arch past, close in. And the other day a float, from one of the submarine nets of the days that were, drifted ashore, to have a chat with me about old times. It was the only distinguished stranger on the beach.

The pleasure resort, therefore, I expect to bring me back to a conscious existence. Not far from its station there is a magnificent hotel, with a glass verandah and palms, under which I saw men in golfing dress sitting in wicker chairs brooding appreciatively across a broad asphalted road to the gathering ground of the charabancs; and, just beyond the motor vehicles, multitudes of red and yellow and blue air-balloons were swaying aloft, though their attachment to earth was out of sight. I threaded the charabancs, pushed aside men in white ulsters who shouted at me that it was only two bob, and brought up against some iron railings. I leaned on the iron railings for support; they were providential. The beach was below; I mean that I suppose it was, for it all was out of sight except a pailful of it immediately under my eyes, which a child was treasuring. A man was beside the child, in a canvas chair. How he got there it was impossible to see, but he looked worried about it, though resigned. Rank on rank of deck chairs stood between him and the sea, all occupied by people reading newspapers, or asleep, or dead; the intermediate spaces were filled with children. The very sea was invaded. It was impossible to discern where it reached the land. The crowds went out to meet it. They slurred its margin. And on either side of that holiday-maker below me, for miles apparently, the deck chairs extended and shut him in; the sea wall rose behind him. Would he starve to death? Nobody seemed to care. Nobody lowered a rope. When I left him he had fallen asleep, luckily; perhaps to dream of freedom.

Whoever that man was, he was a voluntary prisoner. He must have sought it. If that had been the only beach on that coast, the only view of the sea to be got in the neighbourhood, it would be fair to guess that he had gambled with his hour, and had drawn a blank. Such an accident might happen to anybody, even in the desperate matter of catching the only train of the day, which one had hoped was late. Yet that will not explain his wretched position, because, whether he knew it or not, there is a beach not a great distance from where he was a prisoner on which could be lost the population of a city; but, as I happened to know, no life was there that morning except a few fishermen and some parties of sea-birds. Moreover, the views from that untenanted strand are incomparably finer and wider. It is possible to see from there what a desirable island we have, an island very far from being as overcrowded as we imagine.