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  We had been travelling for seven hours. We were very sore; riding in cotton slacks when one has not ridden for many months is arduous; when, at a sudden turn of a mounting road, we saw, many feet below us, the Atlantic beating on the windward coast; half-way down the slope the red roof of a bungalow, the green flatness of a lawn, the stately dignity of the royal palm.

  We were tired and we were sore and more than a little nervous as we rode up to the timbered bungalow. On the lawn there were peacocks, white and blue, spreading their vast tails. From a flagstaff the Union Jack was flying. On the verandah, in a deck chair, our host was waiting. His appearance had been described to us many times. And as he rose to welcome us he looked very much as I had expected him to look. He was tall, broad shouldered, and immensely fat. He wore a shirt that was slightly soiled and open at the neck. The belt that held his trousers had slipped, so that his shirt protruded, revealing an inch or two of skin. He wore slippers; his ankles, as he shuffled towards us, gave the impression of being swollen. He looked as I had expected him to look. A typical colonial planter. But what I had not expected was the voice with which he welcomed us. It was the courtly voice of the old-world English gentleman, with generations of breeding at the back of it.

  “You have had a long journey,” he said. “It is very good of you to come all this way to see an old man. He appreciates it. You must be very tired. We will have a glass of our vin du pays before your bath.”

  The dining-room was almost entirely filled with a long table. At the head of it were laid four places. “Captain Armstrong sits upon my right. Will the elder of you sit upon my left?”

  I took the place beside him. In front of each of us he set a decanter. We filled our glasses. He bowed towards each of us in turn. Then in one long sip finished the admirably mellowed rum. “And now,” he said, “I will show you to your rooms.”

  It was a large rambling house; a bachelor’s house. Its walls were lined with bookshelves and the odd assortment of pictures that bachelors at various periods of taste annex. There were hunting prints and college groups, and nudities from La Vie Parisienne, war-time caricatures of “Big and Little Willie.” Over the washstand of each room was a printed text: “Work is the ruin of the drinking classes”; “If water rots the soles of your boots, think what it must do to your inside.” A library is an autobiography. I looked carefully along his shelves. There were a certain number of novels, bought casually, a complete set of Wisden’s Cricketer’s Almanac since 1884, some legal books, the publications of the Rationalist Press, Darwin and the mid-Victorian agnostics, a few classics, a Horace and a Catullus, Thackeray and Dickens.

  Dinner was ready by the time that we were. A planter’s dinner. A Creole soup, a roast chicken served with Creole vegetables, boiled yam, fried plantains, sweet potatoes. But I could not believe that we were sitting at a bare deal table in cotton and tieless suits, eating Creole food from earthenware, served by a shambling-footed negress. I felt, so completely did our host’s personality dominate the atmosphere, that we were in some old English house; that the table was a polished walnut, reflecting the gleam of candles and old silver; that saddle of mutton was being served us by a silent and venerable butler; that it was Burgundy, not rum, that we were drinking.

  The conversation was of the kind for which you would look in such an atmosphere. The judge did most of the talking. He was an admirable raconteur. His anecdotes were scattered with reflections. He was a staunch Tory, with little use for the philosophy and the sociology of the day. What did they want to start educating the working classes for? Education meant discontent. The working classes thought so much of themselves nowadays that they couldn’t make good servants.

  “And what else are they any good for?” he asked. “They’re no happier now. They’re less happy.”

  We discussed religion. He was the practical Late Victorian rationalist. A Huxley, but the grandfather of Aldous, was his god.

  “All this talk about heaven, as though life were a Sunday School, with prizes for the best boy. When you’re dead you are dead.”

  The National Review was the only magazine he read. The old Imperial flame burnt bright in him. Let the Americans build Dreadnoughts if they wanted to, it could only mean the more for us to sink. It was thus that they talked, the English of his class thirty years back, before the war had broken finally the power and prestige of the feudal system. He typified an England that has passed.

  We did not leave the table after dinner. The plates were cleared away and we sat there over our rum. The judge was a heavy drinker; every quarter of an hour or so he filled his glass, looked round the table, gave a little whistle, lifted his glass and drained it. He was a heavy drinker, but he was too well bred to put any pressure on us to drink with him. We had each our decanter at our side: we could take as much or as little as we chose. They say that wine mellows man. But I have hardly ever met a man of over forty whom wine in large quantities improves. Young people it does quite often. It removes their self-consciousness, releasing their natural gaiety and high spirits. But with older people it is more often grievances that are released. By the time one has come to seventy one has accumulated a good many unsettled scores. Now and again a peeved look came into the judge’s face.

  “One has to suffer for being patriotic,” he said, and began to tell us some story whose details I could not clearly catch, of a naturalised German whom he had insulted in the Roseau Club. “Once a German always a German. I told him so. If I had been a younger man I should have flung him into the street. But I was fifty. They’ve never forgiven me down there. They all took the fellow’s side.”

  For a moment a hard, harsh look came into his face. In an instant it had gone, replaced by the suave, courteous look of hospitality. But I could understand how that reputation for violence had grown up in Roseau. I could picture the evenings when boredom and indigestion and the tiresome company of people who would argue and contradict him would goad him, who had never borne fools lightly, into one of those outbursts that would make even his most true admirer a little frightened of him. They were few who had not felt at some time the sting of that pointed rapier.

  It was after eleven when we left the table. It had been one of the best evenings that we had had since our farewell dinner to Europe in Bordeaux at the Chapeau Rouge. But it was, nevertheless, in a puzzled, almost embarrassed way that we turned to each other the moment we were alone.

  “Do you realise,” said Eldred, “that he’s no idea we’re going away to-morrow?”

  I nodded my head. Our invitation had been arranged over the telephone. Telephones in Dominica are notoriously inadequate. And during the evening several such remarks as “Captain Armstrong will take you and show you over there in a day or two,” had made it very clear that we were expected to stay at least a week.

  “I wish to heaven we could,” I said.

  Wished it both for our sake and his. There was no doubt that we should have had a delightful time there, and it was clear that he would enjoy our visit. He loved company and saw little company. It had been many months since he had seen travellers from England.

  “I suppose we can’t, though,” said Eldred.

  For a while we debated the problem. The boat on which we were booked to sail left within three days. There would not be another for a fortnight. We had arrangements to make in Martinique.

  We had written to friends in Barbados announcing the date of our arrival. We did not see how those plans were to be cancelled.

  “It’s not going to be easy telling him,” I said.

  It wasn’t. I have enjoyed few things less than I did next morning the making of that first enquiry to the judge about the time at which we ought to start.

  “Start,” he said; “but where?”

  “To Rosalie. I was wondering how long it would take to get there.”

  “But Rosalie? I do not understand.”

  We had exchanged half a dozen sentences before he understood.

  “What!” he cried. “You
are going to leave me?”

  It was said on such a note of pathetic, almost childlike disappointment that I almost then and there cancelled all our Barbados plans.

  “I had not realised,” he said. “I thought …”

  I began to explain. Our ship was sailing in three days. There were connections waiting. He scarcely listened. “You are going to leave me?” he repeated.

  For a moment he was completely overcome by disappointment, but only for a moment. He was too good a host not to realise that a guest must not be embarrassed by a host’s personal feelings.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I am very sorry. But since your boat is sailing it cannot be helped. We must see about preparing you a lunch.”

  Immediately he had begun to make preparations for our journey. A bottle of rum was to be packed, with cheese and a loaf of bread, cold meat and fruit and pickles. He abused roundly in patois the servant who made up the packet; but the servant laughed; his master might abuse him; but his master liked him. A negro will do anything for you provided that he knows that.

  “I’ll write you a letter to the overseer at my sister’s property,” he said. “He’ll put you up for the night. He’ll make you comfortable.”

  And he talked cheerfully as we packed of the island and the island’s history, its personalities and peculiarities. But there was a wistful look on his face as he said good-bye to us.

  “Come back one day,” he said, “and make it soon. I won’t be here much longer.”

  We promised that we would. We believed we would.

  “Within eighteen months we’ll be back,” we said.

  When we turned at the corner of the road we saw him standing on his parapet waving his arms to us.

  For quite a while we rode on in silence, picturing that long bungalow and the old man returning to his chair, his hands hanging limply over the sides, his mind abrood; thinking of what during those long hours, when the sun was too hot and he too tired to leave the cool shade of the verandah? Did his mind turn backwards to the past, to the thatched cottages of the Wiltshire where he was born, to the grey stone and green lawns of Oxford, to the mullioned windows of Lincoln’s Inn? Did he relive the ardours and optimisms of youth, the tumult and the feuds of middle life, the successes and disappointments, the friendships and the enmities, the loves that went awry? Or did he, who had no faith in any immaterial heaven, look forward, adoze there in his chair, to a day imperfectly discerned when the verandah on which he sat would be a bank of rubble, when the grass would run raggedly between the palms, when one more plantation had been reclaimed by the jungle from which it sprang, with he himself mingled with the roots of the tall mangoes under which by moonlight the brown people that he loved would dance?

  VIII

  New Hebrides

  Right through the West Indies you are depressed by the sense of departed glory, and it was this feeling perhaps that made Froude, forty years ago, paint so lugubrious a picture of West Indian prospects, or it may in truth have been that at that time England was indifferent to the future of what seemed a very insignificant portion of the Empire. In so large an Empire there must always be one section whose interests are overlooked. At the moment it is the New Hebrides.

  One rarely hears of them. How many averagely well-informed people in a hundred could tell you where Port Vila is? How many traffic agents in a tourist bureau would look blank if you were to ask them how to get to it? It is far away. Ten weeks from London, however you try to get there, whether you sail to Sydney and catch the Dupleix on one of its two-monthly journeys past Noumea; or whether you take at Marseilles one of the Messageries’ cargo boats that every ten weeks or so cross the Atlantic and Pacific. Nor when you get there is it much to look at. A single row of houses, affairs of wood and tin, along one flank of a little bay. They are stores for the most part; but there is a post office, and a hotel, and a club—a bar, that is to say, where you sign for drinks instead of paying for them. There are two good houses: the British and French residencies. In half an hour you have seen all that there is to see of it. And, “If this,” you say, “is the commercial centre of the New Hebrides, that’s as much as I care to know about them.”

  Which is the attitude that the British Government appears to have adopted.

  Little is known of the New Hebrides. They are off the map. No tourist boat has ever stopped there. Little has been written of them. There are a few pages in Titayna’s Mon Tour de Monde, and there is Isles of Illusion, an accurate if blinkered record which had, from the point of the general public, the disadvantage of being subtitled Letters from the South Seas. For the South Seas is so vague a term that the book was reviewed and read, not as a picture from an angle of one section of life in the South-west Pacific, but as a general exploding of the South Sea myth. Actually, nothing could be less typically “South Sea” than the New Hebrides. You will look in vain through Santo and Malicula and Erromango for the soft hues, soft scents, soft glances of Loti’s paradise. It is a harsh, hostile, fever-ridden archipelago that lies north-east of New Caledonia.

  Ships carry with them the atmosphere of the countries they are bound for. Americans prefer to travel to Europe on the French Line because on the Paris and the Ile de France they feel themselves upon their beloved boulevards while they are still in Hudson River; and ten days before I had reached the Segond Channel, while I was still in the smooth waters of Sydney Harbour, I was conscious of the atmosphere that I was bound for.

  Sydney is a city of contrasts. No place that I have ever been to provided me with more contradictory first impressions. It is extremely friendly, extremely hospitable. And yet you have the sensation of being an unwanted stranger. It is extremely modern, but you are conscious at every turn of history. It is extremely modern, and its hotels, by English, let alone by American standards, are mediaeval. It is the seventh largest city in the world. But its inhabitants lead an outdoor country life. Every week-end they are on the beaches—Manly, Coggee, Bondi—stretched out on the sand under the sun in the intervals of surf-riding. Very many of them bathe every day before going to their work. It is a city without pasty faces. No one who has been to Sydney could call Paris the city of lovely women. It is one of the chief ports of the world, Japan and China are contiguous. But there are no slums Yet, although there are no slums, there is no city where it is more necessary after dark to keep to the main streets. Sydney is the first site for a city in the world, yet except at night Sydney Harbour is not beautiful. The rows of small houses undignify the circle of hills. I am inclined to doubt whether any modern city built on an un-American plan can be anything but petty. In mediaeval days, when the peasant and artisan class were content to live in squalor, cities consisted of the few lovely buildings: the churches, theatres, the palazzas that were the concern of the few rich families. Nowadays, when the million demand decent living conditions, it is inevitable that the few buildings should be obscured by the many insignificant ones. It is in America alone that you find a style of architecture that is adaptable to modern needs. From the sea Sydney is not beautiful; and there are times when you walk down its streets that you wonder whether there is an uglier city upon earth. A moment later you are wondering if there is one lovelier. For you have turned a corner and there in front of you at the end of the avenue of houses is the harbour, in all the beauty of its blue distances.

  At the ends of your streets are spars,

  At the ends of your streets are stars.

  wrote George Sterling of San Francisco. The same words might be written of Sydney. It is a city of contrasts. Yet of the many contrasts that in my too short stay there it brought me, none was more marked than my sailing from it.

  I had lunched at the Australia. On all sides of me young life was stirring; young life which had the harsh, keen savour of new wine. I had driven through streets of which fifty years earlier scarcely a stone had stood. On Circular Quay ruffianly porters were arguing over my luggage in uncouth Australian. The Old World seemed very far away. And then I had walked acro
ss a foot of gangway, and suddenly I was in France: in Maupassant’s France, the France of the café and the bock; of red plush couches along a wall; of a maître d’hôtel venerable and pontifical and suave. That was my first impression of the Dupleix, a piece of France drifted into Sydney. My second, after the bell had sounded, with the gang-plank up, the last paper streamer torn, with the Heads, jagged and menacing behind us. was still one of France, but of France setting out on an adventure.

  No passenger boat—the Dupleix is about two thousand tons—that I had or have since travelled in possessed or has possessed so completely homogeneous an atmosphere. Every other boat has had its sprinkling of passengers travelling for pleasure, or for business unconnected with the immediate run, a sprinkling that as often as not has set the tone and pace of the ship’s life. On the Dupleix, with the exception of a Melbourne journalist, I was the only person on board whose life and interests were not intimately bound up with the Westerr Pacific. It was a masculine atmosphere, almost entirely. There were one or two commercial travellers, the representatives of a Sydney firm, but for the most part they were planters from Santo, from the Banks Islands, from Erromango. Before we were through the Heads, I had the feeling of being one of a family party. Everyone on the ship knew everything about each other. For a month I lived in the atmosphere of the New Hebrides. And I had the great good fortune to have as a fellow passenger the most notable personality in the West Pacific and the best raconteur that I have ever met, Tibby Hagen. Before we had left New Caledonia I had some idea of what I was to find awaiting me.