Hot Countries

by Alec Waugh

  After St. Barthelmey there was Guadeloupe. The hurried rush at Basse Terre to bathe in the hot springs at Dolé; at Pointe á Pitre a casual investigation of the cyclone’s damage, and afterwards there was four days of the noise and heat of Fort de France. I was very weary when the time came to move my luggage from the Hôtel Bediat to the boat, so weary that I stayed in my cabin unpacking slowly while the sirens went and the gongs were beaten along the passage. It was not till I could feel the vibration of the engines that I came on deck.

  It was a coloured scene. In the background the charbon-nières, black and weary, chattered together behind the stacks of coal. Between them and the water half the population of the town was gathered to wave farewell to friends and relations. The Frenchmen in their helmets and white suits, the negroes with their handkerchiefs tied in their hair. And hands were being waved and messages shouted, and the conventional familiar thought came to me: What did it mean, this parting? What was behind those waved hands and shouted messages? Relief, excitement, sadness; to everyone it must have a different meaning. Some heart must be breaking down there on the quay. And I felt sad and stood apart as the ship swung away from the docks, past the fort, into the Caribbean.

  §

  It was after six; in two more minutes the sun would have sunk into the sea. And it would be against a sky of yellow hyacinth that Belmont, leaning against the verandah of the little bungalow, would see the lighted ship pass by on its way to Pointe à Pitre. Through the dusk I tried to distinguish the various landmarks along the road: the white church of Case Navire, the palm trees of Carbet, the fishing tackle of Fond Lahaye. It was too dark. Martinique was a green shadow.

  A few minutes more and the sun would have set into the sea; already it had set in the London that I was bound for. In the suburbs people would be mixing themselves a nightcap. In Piccadilly the last act of the theatres would have just begun. At the dinner-parties that preceded dances there would be a gathering of wraps and coats. But westward, in the coloured countries, it would be shining still; pouring in the full radiance of early summer over the Golden Gate; streaming southwards a hundred miles or so through the open windows of a Spanish colonial house, on to a long, low room with circled roof, on to black Chesterfields, on to black-and-white squared carpet, on to blue Chinese porcelain, on to walls bright with the colouring of old Spanish maps. Lunch would just be over. The room would be filled with talk, with talk of plans, of golf or tennis, or a driving under the pines along the rugged Californian coast. There would be laughter there and hospitality and friendship; a bigness and an openness of heart.

  And westward and southward under that same sun Papeete would be drowsing away its hour of siesta. There would be shutters over the windows of the stores; the Mariposa Café would be empty. On the balcony of the club the Chinese waiter would be lying forward across a table, his head on his arms, asleep. The water of the lagoon would be like glass; in the districts there would be silence on the green verandahs.

  And westward and southward, further beyond the Heads through a mist, daylight would be filtering faintly over Sydney. There would be a chill in the air, the young women would be hurrying quickly to their shops and offices, the old men would be pulling their scarves tightly round their throats. While westward and northward, down the long, narrow peninsula of Malaya, a new day would be beginning. In Penang silent-footed boys would be preparing chota hazri; the tea, the bread, the fruit. On the verandahs of the plantation bungalows young planters would be rubbing their eyes sleepily, looking down on the straight rows of rubber trees; at the white line of sap along the bark; at the Tamils moving quickly from cup to cup. At Lumut the district officer of the Dindings would be sitting on his balcony looking out over the brown river and the hills, fresh and friendly in the clear morning light. And in all these places, in Malaya and Monterey, in Sydney and Tahiti, I have left something of myself, so that it was only a part of myself that was travelling back to London. For that is one of the penalties of travel; that nowhere can one feel oneself complete.

  And leaning against the taffrail of the Pellerin, watching the green dusk deepen over Martinique, I asked myself what exactly it is that one gets from travel. What stands on the credit to weigh against the debit balance? For looking back over the six months that had passed since I sailed from Plymouth, a characteristic six months in a traveller’s diary, it was idle to pretend that there was not a debit or at least an absence of credit entries.

  Among the letters that I had found waiting for me at Martinique were two from Inez Holden.

  One bore the vast blue embossment of the Ambassadors Hotel, New York.

  “I have just arrived here,” it ran, “which is even more strange than it may seem at first, since my departure was arranged at midnight at the Embassy Club, which is, after all, the American manner of travelling. And nothing kills one’s enthusiasm more than long preparations. …”

  She had done this, she was planning that. She had met this and the other person.

  “The old policeman moving-on stunt is the order of every day. No sooner is one in Palm Beach than it is time to be on Long Island. Once there, it is time to go on to Europe….

  “I return on the Berengaria in ten days. I hope by then to be improved, modernised and dollar-dotty.”

  The second letter was from Berlin.

  “We are here,” it said, “as the guests of Otto Kahn … the advent of the talkies has subdued life considerably. We went round the U.F.A. studios, to find the usual scrambling, shouting, megaphone madness missing.”

  There was an account of trips to Wannsee in a speedboat, of interviews on reparations, of gloomy Russians “spy-shy and furtive, glancing over their shoulders nervously.”

  And as I had read those letters I could not help feeling that Inez Holden’s life had been more full than mine had been, during the six months that had passed, since we had said good-bye to one another at the small farewell dinner I had given on my last evening in London at the Gargoyle Club. For six months I had been out of touch with the main currents. I had read no newspapers. I had seen no plays. I had been spared experience as Bloomsbury and Greenwich Village understand the term. Nor would boyhood account as experience those arguments with porters, those races down rough and winding roads, with the last siren of the steamer sounding; such dangerless discomforts as drenchings far from home and the pitch and roll of a canoe when the sea is choppy that comprise the sum of adventure for the modern traveller. There had been the seeing of lovely places. But I do not think that it is through any conscious seeking of accepted beauties that you come across those moments of sheer rapture that leave life permanently enriched. We cannot come fresh to the places in whose service the pens of innumerable poets have been held in trust. We are too much on our guard. It may be, though, that as you return from a morning at Pompeii, interested but unthrilled, to loiter for an hour or two through the streets of Naples, a chance turning of the head will bring you one of those moments whose beauty is so complete that it seems possessed of eternal properties.

  Of itself the thing is nothing. A long, narrow, climbing street with tall houses and green-hung balconies, lit and shadowed by a shaft of sunlight. Before one of the doorways there is an old man sleeping. A girl sings as she sews. In the gutter a child is playing. It is nothing, it is everything. By some happy accident of light and grouping this ordinary, familiar street has been lifted out of time and space to partake of an immortal quality. It is sheer effect. Five minutes before it was not. In five minutes’ time it will have passed. The sun will have moved westward, the girl will have ceased to sing. The old man will be awake, the child in tears. Such moments are imperishable and fleeting. And one is as likely to meet them in Tooting as in Tangier. I do not expect ever to see anything lovelier than Constantinople. There are places where beauty is achieved by Nature in spite of man, and others by man in spite of Nature, but once in many times Nature and man combine to create something that is beyond beauty, that transcends the power of pen and brush. At fir
st I could not believe that it was real. From a distance it may be lovely enough, I thought, but seen from this or that other spot the details will grow distinct. There will be mean houses and dingy streets. I shall see it for the thing it is. But the boat drew closer. One by one against a saffron-coloured sky the buildings grew separate and clear, the low sea wall, the Doric columns, the round morgue, the dignity of San Sofia. Slowly the boat swung round into the harbour, and there it lay, the city that was loved of Loti, a far-flung crescent, aureoled in a faint haze of smoke with the sunlight pouring down the Corne d’Or, on to that exquisitely proportioned line of mosque and minaret. “Rose of cities” was Flecker’s phrase for it, and there is a flowerlike quality in its effortless perfection, a flowerlike bloom on the golden mist that hovers over it.

  I never expect to see anything lovelier. But the thrill with which I looked at it from the steamer’s deck was no greater than the thrill with which at certain moments I have seen London in rain and sunlight. Nor, were I to return to Constantinople, should I find the same city waiting for me. It was the moment that made it beautiful. Once when I was crossing the bridge over the lake in St. James’s Park, I thought that Whitehall, through the lilac mist of a November afternoon, was an enchanted city out of the Arabian Nights. I have sought often for that city since, and have never found it. During my six months in the West Indies I had seen many lovely places. But I think I should have had just as many moments of surprised delight had I stayed in London. The sight-seeing part of travel scarcely compensates for the expense of spirit that seeing them involves.

  There are pictures enough for the wanderer to bear home with him. But it is not these that are the rewards of travel. It is not these that every morning make one read enviously through the list of mails and shipping; that whenever one hears of a ship sailing make one long to sail with it. It is not for these one travels.

  The charm of travel, as of most things for that matter, is, I think, something intrinsic to itself, to be pursued as that of art for its own sake. It is not so much the places you visit as the getting there, not the end but the means that matters. In the very sailing of a liner there is a thrill for which life has no equivalent. It is its very absence of drama that is so dramatic.

  You are at a dinner-party in New York. Eleven o’clock has passed. Watches are being glanced at. “Are you coming on to the Wellingtons’?” someone asks. You shake your head. “I’m sorry,” you say, “I sail to-night.” “Really,” your hostess answers, “then you’ll be able to see Miss Gathers home.” And as you drive westward in the taxi, you chatter of mutual acquaintances and the party you have come from. And it is all a little shadowy, like a blurred film. You cannot believe that it is quite real, this party and this talk of parties. It is a world that exists, that will go on existing, but that in a day’s time will have ceased to exist for you. In half an hour you will be on a ship. And yet you cannot believe that you are really sailing, that at last the long-awaited adventure has begun. You had expected it to be different. You cannot even believe it when you are in your state-room, when the steward is unpacking your trunk. You look incredulously at the porthole. Is it really through that circle of glass that you are to see the swaying palm trees and the golden sands of the West Indies?

  Or, maybe, it is from Marseilles that you are sailing. You have been travelling all night by train. It was windy and wet in Paris, and the breakfast car, that is bright with sunshine, is full of people chatting excitedly about the glories of the Côte d’Azure, Cannes, Monaco, Antibes; names that are for months now to mean nothing to you; to you who are travelling ten thousand miles across the Atlantic through Panama to a green island in the Pacific.

  And as you drive through the winding cobbled streets towards the docks, there is a curious contrast between the excitement you are feeling and the indifference of everyone about you. There is an utter absence of all fuss. There is no commotion, no crowd upon the wharf. Your ship is just one out of a score of ships. There they are in rows, with the blackboards hung upon their gangways. “Le ‘Louqsor’ partira à 11.30 pour Pointe à Pitre.” Just that, the bare wording of a notice. And you think of all that those words convey of time and distance. While to the officials round the dock the sailing may be a matter of mere routine, to you it is the big adventure of your life. And yet there is nothing to show it is. Is this really the way, you ask yourself, that you say “Goodbye” to everyone and everything that hitherto has comprised life to you? Is this the way you set out into the unknown? You had expected that such moments of your life would be accompanied by the conventionally appropriate trappings, some equivalent to the old fanfare of trumpets that heralded departure. And even as you wonder, you know that it is better so, that nowhere else could you get the acuteness of the thrill with which you hear the groan of a weighed anchor. It is a thrill only to be compared with the excitement of arrival; a thrill that is independent of the beauty and attractions of the place that you are bound for; that is great or little in accordance with the length of the journey you have made. Æsthetically, San Francisco is at its loveliest as you come to it from the Pacific, through the Golden Gate, but the first sight of it to the traveller from Honolulu will not produce the same tightening of the muscles round the heart that you get when you reach it by ferry boat from Oakland Pier, after seven days of the Atlantic and four days of train across a continent. In the same way that one’s enjoyment of a meal depends on the amount of time that has elapsed since one ate one’s last, so does one’s excitement on reaching a new place depend on the measure of effort that one’s arrival there has cost.

  I shall never forget the excitement of my second arrival at Tahiti. In the course of six and a half weeks we had only stopped three times and for a few hours. For twenty days we had not seen land; if I had been told that we should have to spend another two weeks on board I should have, I think, gone mad. For days we had been watching the flag move forward on the map, calculating how long it would take to reach Papeete, wondering whether by some happy hazard of wind and current, we might not arrive ahead of time, suspecting that in all probability we should be hours late.

  It all seemed worth it, though, on the day that we arrived, We were to reach Papeete shortly after one. And at half-past five I was on the bridge peering ahead through the dissolving dusk. Slowly the sky brightened; slowly the sun came out of the sea behind us. Eagerly I looked ahead. Was that a cloud there, or a line of mountains? It was so faint and shadowy. Was it really the outline of the Diadem, or just a cloud that shortly would dislimn? And when, at last, I realised that that lilac shadow was not a cloud, but was in very truth—Tahiti—that moment paid and repaid the score of those long six weeks.

  That is the thing about travel. It is not so much that one sees the world through it as that one comes to a whole new series of sensations that are to be won to nohow else. For, in point of actual worldliness, the sailor, though he has touched at so many corners of the world, knows little of it

  §

  I have travelled, I suppose, in all on something like thirty ships, varying in size from the vast Atlantic ferry boats to the little trading steamers that coast round the lagoons of the New Hebrides; I have seen something of the sailor’s life, and, however much the actual conditions governing it may change, in its essentials it remains the same.

  We listen enviously at first to the sailor’s account of the seas he has crossed and the lands that he has visited, but in actual fact he sees nothing of those far countries except their coastline. He rarely remains for longer than five days at any port. There is work to be done upon the ship; there is no time to go far inland. He has only a few hours at his disposal. He has no friends ashore. As likely as not the language is foreign to him. The cafés are the only places that he can go to; there is not much difference between one café and another.

  “My word, but I could tell you some stories about this place!” said once to me a certain companionable second steward, as we were strolling down the main thoroughfare of Manzanillo, that m
ost lugubrious of all the lugubrious coffee ports which stretch along the Mexican coastline between Mazatlan and Acapulco. It is a one-street affair with a couple of cafés, a store or two, a shambling hotel, and the kind of dance place where only a fool would flash a ten-dollar bill; where everyone carries a revolver on his hip, and the evening is as likely as not to end with the sound of bullets.

  “I could tell you some stories about this place,” said the second steward. “Seven whole weeks I spent here once.”

  He was a Peruvian, half-native and half-American, with a quick wit and a twinkling eye, who had spent thirty-five years coasting between Seattle and Valparaiso. He had had his share of improbable experiences. But even so the prospect of listening to his confession did not fill me with the curiosity that two years earlier it would have done. I knew in advance the details of that story.

  There had been a heavy night, with a boat to sail at six; there had been drinking, there had been a quarrel. And at half-past seven he had found himself in a back alley, his pockets empty, his comrades gone, and not another ship due for seven weeks. He had reported to his Consul, who listened wearily to a wearily familiar tale, and promised him twenty-five cents a day till succour came. Then there had been a girl.

  “As fine a girl, sir,” he would insist, “as you would be likely to find anywhere along the Lincoln highway. I cried my eyes out when I said good-bye to her. I swore I’d come back; and the things I promised to send her when we got to San Francisco! I meant to send them. I swear I did. But you know what sailors are. You go ashore with six months’ pay, within six hours there’s not a penny left of it; and there’s nothing for you to do but to find another ship and sign on quickly.”

  The land life of the sailor is narrow, uninteresting, and, in the true sense of the word, unromantic. It is, however, an inessential part of the sailor’s life. You can get no true picture of his real life by watching him in a ‘dive’ in Colon, or in the chop sueys that are north of the West India Docks. He is a seaman and his life is on his ship.