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  HOT COUNTRIES

  ALEC WAUGH

  A Travel Book

  This book was originally published in 1930 under the title The Coloured Countries. It is the account of a series of journeys that I made in the Far East, the West Indies and among the South Sea Islands between 1926 and 1929 when I was myself in my later twenties.

  Travel in those years was pleasant, easy and cheap. Railways and steamship lines had recently made accessible a number of out-of-the-way places that a few years earlier could only have been reached with great difficulty and considerable financial cost, while the aeroplane had not yet brought them within range of the nine-day vacationist. There were no currency regulations then. There was no trouble over visas. Ships were not crowded. You could always get a cabin to yourself. The contemporary reader of this book may well imagine me to have been a wealthy person. Far from it. I had no private income and was earning with my pen under twelve hundred pounds a year. But in June 1926 I was able to buy from the Messageries Maritimes a round-the-world ticket that included four months of first-class accommodation for £163. During a five months’ trip in the West Indies I spent under £400. To a fiction-writer like myself who had no ties, who could carry his office with him, world travel offered not only glamour, romance, adventure, what you will, but a practical and economical solution of many of the problems of livelihood. I was lucky to have been born when I was. I had access to a great deal of fun during the years when I was most capable of enjoying it.

  To-day, of course, all that is over. The world is divided into zones. There are currency regulations, visa problems, and a lack of transport. Passages can only be booked with great difficulty, and journeys made in great discomfort. Every hotel in the world is overcrowded. It will be many years before free and light-hearted travel is possible again.

  Had a new edition of this book been issued, say, in 1938, I should have been tempted to qualify a number of the comments, to indicate which prophecies had been fulfilled and which had not, to tell what had happened subsequently to certain of the characters, to describe (for instance) the death of the old Judge at Dominica, but to-day in 1947 in a world so different that we might be existing upon another planet, I thought it better to offer Hot Countries to a new generation of readers frankly as a period piece, unaltered as I wrote it, a picture of a way of living that exists no longer.

  ALEC WAUGH

  Contents

  I. AT SEA

  II. TAHITI

  III. LA MARTINIQUE

  IV. “GONE NATIVE”

  V. SIAM

  VI. CEYLON

  VII. THE ENGLISHMAN IN THE TROPICS

  VIII. NEW HEBRIDES

  IX. THE BLACK REPUBLIC

  X. HOMEWARDS

  XI. LONDON

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I

  At Sea

  “THE first question to ask about a travel book,” I have heard it said, is, “Can the author go back to the places he has described?” Usually he can’t. Those books that are more than bread and butter letters addressed to the people from whom their author has received hospitality, have not brought the novelist into good repute. I have noticed at times a quizzical look in the eyes of the officials and planters to whom I have been introduced.

  “What, another of you fellows coming here to write us up?”

  Well, that is not a thing that I have ever done. I have never gone to a place to write it up. I have travelled for the sake of travel. Novel writing has this advantage over most other jobs, that your office premises are portable. One way and another I have covered a good many miles, calling in at the places where I have friends or that I have felt curious about, carrying on with my job of story-telling in cabins and hotel bedrooms, mingling as I should in London with the life that I have found about me.

  And if you travel in that way you cannot write exhaustively of subjects. This book is a narrative of personal impressions. It is like casual fireside talk when the stream of anecdote and reminiscence carries you from sea to sea, from continent to continent. Penang reminds you of Tahiti, Dominica of the Siamese teak forests; Haiti recalls the mosquito-hung lagoons of the New Hebrides. I have written as I have travelled. My plan has been to have no plan.

  §

  It began, I suppose, in the spring of 1925, with the reading of The Trembling of a Leaf. I was staying at Diano Marina with G. B. Stern, and through an entire evening Geoffrey Holdsworth and I discussed “The Fall of Edward Barnard,” the story of a young Chicagoan who leaves America with the intention of making a fortune in the South Seas, only to surrender his ambition in an atmosphere of soft glances and soft airs. For three hours we discussed the problem of the “beachcomber.” Why, we asked ourselves, should man work himself in a cold inequitable climate towards an early grave when so little a while away livelihood lay ready to his hand? Why make life difficult when it might be easy? Why avoid a sunlit leisure? Did it really profit a man that he should make fortunes in Lombard Street when copra can be sold at a few francs a bag on the palm-fringed edge of a lagoon?

  That started it. For on my return to London, a fortnight later, I was met by Petre Mais’ exuberant curiosity.

  “Now what’s all this I hear from Geoffrey Holdsworth about you and the South Sea Islands?”

  I stared blankly. What, indeed?

  “I hear,” he went on, “that you and he sit up all night discussing them, and that you’ve made up your mind to settle there.”

  “Hardly that.”

  “You’ld like to, though.”

  “If there’s a place,” I said, “where one can live on thirty thousand words a year, it’s well worth while having a look at it.”

  Next morning the readers of the Daily Graphic were informed that on the previous day Mr. Londoner had lunched with Mr. Alec Waugh, who could talk about nothing except the South Sea Islands, which he was planning to tour shortly. That settled it. The snippet is the only part of a newspaper that is really read. You can have your novel noticed in reviews of a column’s length, in paper after paper, and only such of your friends as have received a presentation copy of it will be aware that it is out. On the other hand, the inclusion of your name in the list of guests at a raided night club is certain to be seen by everyone. There is no limit to the power of the paragraph. It is the one part of a morning’s paper that is not dead by lunch-time. As the Buddhists conceive immortality it is immortal. It dies but it is re-born. It is the candle from which lamps are lit. During the next few weeks every mention of me in the press referred to a Mr. Waugh, who was shortly to desert London for the South Sea Islands. I found myself included in leaderettes on “The Lure of the Pacific.” Men came up to me in my club with a “Look here, about this trip of yours. …” I heard so much talk about the Islands that I had to buy an atlas to find out where Tahiti was.

  To begin with, it was amusing. Later on it became embarrassing. I felt as Tartarin did when his brave talk of lions was taken literally. And as the weeks passed and nothing happened, I found as Tartarin found, that I was being regarded with suspicion. People seemed surprised and a little indignant at meeting me still in London. “What, not gone yet?” they said. I felt that I had no right to be in Piccadilly, that I was a gate crasher who had better go before he was turned out. Precipitately, I flung myself upon the cares of the Western Shipping Agency.

  “I want,” I said, “to go round the world.”

  By the time I had got back I had developed the travel habit.

  And it is not easy to break oneself of habits. Once, after two years of almost continuous wandering, I vowed that never again would I set foot upon a liner. I was weary of packing and unpacking, of state-rooms and cabin trunks. I longed for the amenities of a compactum wardrobe, of bookshelves and arm-chairs. For twenty-four months I seemed t
o have done nothing but fill and empty drawers. “Never again,” I told myself as I signed a seven years’ lease for a flat in Chelsea. I meant it too. At thirty, I thought, one should begin to think of settling down. But within three months that flat was in the hands of the house agents and I was suggesting to Eldred Curwen that he should desert Europe and a Ballot for Martinique and a canoe. Once again my trunk was covered with the French Line’s red and yellow labels.

  §

  When I was a prisoner of war in Germany, supporting life upon a daily ration of three slices of bread, five bowls of watery soup, and six potatoes, I could not believe that the day would ever come when I should rise from a table on which food remained. In much the same spirit, as the Pellerin de Latouche steamed up the Garonne towards a Biscay that was to justify its reputation, I could not believe that on this actual boat within a week’s time we should be panting beneath electric fans in unbuttoned shirts, clamorous for open windows.

  It was clearly, for the first days, anyhow, to be an unpleasant voyage. The ship was crowded. The sea was rough. And I am not one of those happy travellers who love the ocean in all its moods. A storm at sea is, I am sure, a noble spectacle. The beating of the wind upon one’s face, the dashing of the waves across the deck, the spray turned into a rainbow by the sun, the quivering of the ship as trough after trough of waves is breasted; it is all, I am very certain, very fine. But it is rather differently that I have seen it.

  Ignobly prostrate in my cabin, I have watched through half-seeing eyes my possessions heap themselves into chaos on the floor. As a Victorian moralist watched during the War the overthrow of beliefs that he had looked on as immutably fixed lodestars, so have I watched objects that in harbour had seemed part of a permanently ordered scheme of living, sway, shiver and disappear. As the curtains over porthole and door swung inwards I have watched my wardrobe, garment by garment, detach itself from hook and hanger. I have watched my combs and brushes, my links and studs and shoe-horn slither over the polished surface of the dressing-table. I have watched gramophone records skate majestically towards the floor, to mingle with shoes and suit-cases in a measured sliding from one side of the cabin to the other, in time with the lurching ship. I have heard the crash of cabin trunks; have listened hour by hour to the rattle of a tooth-glass against a mug; have listened and have not cared.

  Nor can I honestly confess to any sense of shame. On my second morning I made a gallant, rather than a judicious, appearance in the dining-room. And a careful scrutiny of the depleted tables left me unconvinced that it is to the highest of His creatures that the Lord has granted immunity from sickness.

  It was not a particularly pleasant trip. I am doubtful whether any really long sea voyage is.

  At the start it is fun enough. There is a real kick to that first walk round the ship that for three weeks or a month is to be your home; that is to contain all you are to know of friendship, boredom, interest, romance. You scan surreptitiously, with an eager curiosity, the faces of your fellow passengers. Soon enough they will reveal themselves as the familiar types. Before lunch-time on the third day you will know who it is that is going to make speeches and propose healths in the dining saloon, whose voice it is that will harry you with shouts of “Red lies two. Good shot, partner, oh, good shot!” You will recognise those with whom you are likely to become friends and those between yourself and whom you will be at pains that there shall always be the length of half a deck. In forty-eight hours you will know them all. But for the moment they are mysterious and unknown. They are like an unopened mail. There is a spring in your stride as you stroll along the deck. You have been at trouble that the impression you are yourself to make shall be as good as possible. Your tie has been carefully chosen. You are wearing your happiest suit.

  But the sense of novelty is soon lost, and when it is once lost the passing of each day seems very long. Life develops into an attempt to find an antidote to boredom. Each nationality has its own medicine. The French employ a policy of passive non-resistance. Everyone does nothing resolutely. You rise late in pyjamas, to loll about the deck till the hour before lunch when you go below to shave and change. After lunch you siesta. After tea you read. As soon as possible after dinner you go to bed. The English are aggressive. Every instant of the day must be employed. There are sports committees and concert committees and fancy-dress committees, and at every odd moment of the day harassed secretaries are chasing you round the deck to tell you that you must be ready to play your heat in the deck quoits in five minutes’ time. The Americans settle down to bridge in the smoking-room directly after breakfast, and do not leave it except for meals till the bar is closed at midnight. I do not know which method is the best. For a six days’ trip I prefer the American. But after a week one’s liver resents the strain. For ten days deck games may be amusing, but ten days are the limit. After that, one is exhausted and involved in a dozen feuds. Whereas the French method, though it prohibits all social intercourse and is devastating for a short voyage—I recall in particular a voyage between Colombo and Singapore when literally I spoke to only one man and only to him at meals—is the only attitude that I can imagine possible on a long voyage, since it does not force people into such close contact with each other that they get immediately upon each other’s nerves. But even so, however one takes it, the experience of a long voyage is an exacting one.

  The trip on the Pellerin was no exception. I was counting seconds, not hours, by the tenth day out of Plymouth. And yet when the last night came, on this, as on every other trip that I have ever taken, I found myself limply surrendering to the conventional sentimental wistfulness.

  §

  I have read much and seen a little of the genuine pathos of last nights on board when the brief but deep friendships of a fortnight’s passage are sundered in all human probability for ever. But on the Pellerin, during those twelve days of discomfort and discontent, such contacts as had come to us had been superficial. Yet all the same, as the last day closed and the sudden tropic night with its train of unfamiliar stars swept statelily over the calming waters, Eldred and I found ourselves growing sad and silent.

  What was it? The surrender simply to a facile uprush of obvious emotions? “We never,” said De Quincey, “do anything consciously for the last time without regret.” Like trees we take root where we are planted. And I fancy that our instinctive sadness at these moments of uprooting is something more than a false idealising of the past simply because it is the past; that the psychologist would detect in it a recognition subconsciously of the symbol in our brief sojourning of the sojourning only relatively less brief of all mortality; that in this loss of things and faces that have grown familiar we are abandoning a series of amulets, of reassurances in a continuity that possibly does not exist; that this sudden last-hour friendliness for a number of persons with whom we have little if anything in common and whose acquaintance, were it made in the customary routine of life, we should never bother to follow up, is based upon genuine sentiment.

  It may be. But be it how it may, the phenomenon remains that whether the voyage has been long or short, grey or pleasant; whether its end is to mean the opening of a new and entrancing chapter of fresh experience, or a return made grudgingly to conditions from which we can only temporarily escape; always there rises on that last night a clouded mood of melancholia. People to whom you have scarcely spoken during the voyage come up to you after dinner. “What, going to-morrow?” they say, “that’s sad. We shall be a less cheerful party.”

  And you sit talking, not as you have talked on other evenings, casually, without enthusiasm because your eyes were too tired for the reading you would have preferred, but eagerly, intimately, expansively in quick, coloured sentences, in a desperate haste to get said in this short night all that must otherwise remain unsaid. And right through the conversation will run motif-wise the refrain “How tragic that this should be our last night.”

  It is ridiculous, but there it is.

  For days Eldred and I ha
d been counting the hours to our release. For days we had been telling ourselves that neither in this nor any other life did we wish to see again one inch of those sulky sea-splashed decks, or one foot of all the feet that had trodden them. Yet when the time had come for us to drift quietly through the still waters of the Caribbean we were almost regretting that on the next night it was to be under the grey shadow of Carbet that we should be sleeping.

  §

  It was wet and misty as the Pellerin de Latouche drew into Fort de France, and it was hard to distinguish the lettering on the large, broad-beamed cargo flying a French flag, that followed us into dock. There was, however, a familiar quality about that long, low ship with its single funnel, its black airholes, its squat, white superstructure; and yet I could scarcely believe that chance should have brought into that harbour at that moment a ship that only three times a year and for a few hours touched there. It would be the kind of coincidence that the novelist is counselled to avoid scrupulously. And yet it was very like the ship that twenty-four months before I had seen steam slowly into the Segond Channel.

  I turned to the Commissaire.

  “What’s that boat over on our right?” I asked.

  “That,” he answered, “Oh, that’s the Louqsor”

  He spoke rather contemptuously. And no doubt the Louqsor to the Commissaire of an ocean liner would seem a somewhat discreditable acquaintance. To describe her as a cargo boat is to say nothing. The word ‘cargo boat’ evokes a picture of Kipling’s “black bilboa tramp,” and a “drunken dago crew.”

  But nowadays there are not too many such. The smartest small ship I ever travelled on was the Handicap, a Norwegian cargo boat running between Europe and Seattle, that I boarded as she was passing through the Canal. She was an oil burner of 9,000 tons. There was never a speck of dirt upon her. The crew were housed in small, clean, airy cabins; two or three men in each. The twenty-three days’ journey to London was the most comfortable I have ever had. She carried no passengers—I had to sign on as an assistant purser. My cabin was large and cool, the food better and more varied than I should have had on any save a transatlantic liner. There was naturally no saloon. But the captain, a married man, travelling with his wife and two small children, had the kind of flat for which, furnished, you would pay four guineas a week in London. The word “cargo” boat nowadays means simply “not carrying passengers.”