Books: Letters from America
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Rupert Brooke >> Letters from America
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The office emptied for a while. Then drifted in a younger man, tall,
with that brown, dog-like expression of simplicity many Indians wear. He
was covered by a large grey-coloured blanket, over his other clothes. He
puffed at a pipe and stared out of the window. The agent and I continued
talking. You must never hurry an Indian. Presently he gave a little
grunt. The agent said, "Well, John?" John went on smoking. Five minutes
later, in the middle of our conversation, John said suddenly, "Salt." He
was staring inexpressively at the ceiling. "Why, John," said the agent,
"I gave you enough salts on Thursday to last you a week." John directed
his gaze on us, and smoked dumbly. "Still the stomach?" inquired the
agent, genially. John's expression became gradually grimmer, and he
moved one hand slowly across till it rested on his stomach. An
impassive, significant hand. After a courteous pause the agent rose,
poured some Epsom salts out of a large jar, wrapped them in paper, and
handed them over. John secreted them dispassionately in some pouch among
the skins and blankets that wrapped him in. We went back to our
conversation. Five minutes after he grunted, suddenly. Again five
minutes, and he departed. His wife--a plump, patient young woman--and
his solemn-eyed, fat, ridiculous son of four, were sitting stolidly on
the grass outside. It obviously made no difference if he took one hour
or seven over his business. They mounted their tiny ponies and trotted
briskly off.... I suppose one is apt to be sentimental about these
good people. They're really so picturesque; they trail clouds of
Fenimore Cooper; and they seem, for all their unfitness, reposefully
more in touch with permanent things than the America that has succeeded
them. And it is interesting to watch our pathetic efforts to prevent or
disarm the effects of ourselves. What will happen? Shall we preserve
these few bands of them, untouched, to succeed us, ultimately, when the
grasp of our 'civilisation' weakens, and our transient anarchy in these
wilder lands recedes once more before the older anarchy of Nature? Or
will they be entirely swallowed by that ugliness of shops and trousers
with which we enchain the earth, and become a memory and less than a
memory? They are that already. The Indians have passed. They left no
arts, no tradition, no buildings or roads or laws; only a story or two,
and a few names, strange and beautiful. The ghosts of the old chiefs
must surely chuckle when they note that the name by which Canada has
called her capital and the centre of her political life, Ottawa, is an
Indian name which signifies 'buying and selling.' And the wanderer in
this land will always be remarking an unexplained fragrance about the
place-names, as from some flower which has withered, and which he does
not know.
XIII
THE ROCKIES
At Calgary, if you can spare a minute from more important matters,
slip beyond the hurrying white city, climb the golf links, and
gaze west. A low bank of dark clouds disturbs you by the fixity of its
outline. It is the Rockies, seventy miles away. On a good day, it is
said, they are visible twice as far, so clear and serene is this air.
Five hundred miles west is the coast of British Columbia, a region with
a different climate, different country, and different problems. It is
cut off from the prairies by vast tracts of wild country and
uninhabitable ranges. For nearly two hundred miles the train pants
through the homeless grandeur of the Rockies and the Selkirks. Four or
five hotels, a few huts or tents, and a rare mining-camp--that is all
the habitation in many thousands of square miles. Little even of that is
visible from the train. That is one of the chief differences between the
effect of the Rockies and that of the Alps. There, you are always in
sight of a civilisation which has nestled for ages at the feet of those
high places. They stand, enrobed with worship, and grander by contrast
with the lives of men. These un-memoried heights are inhuman--or rather,
irrelevant to humanity. No recorded Hannibal has struggled across them;
their shadow lies on no remembered literature. They acknowledge claims
neither of the soul nor of the body of man. He is a stranger, neither
Nature's enemy nor her child. She is there alone, scarcely a unity in
the heaped confusion of these crags, almost without grandeur among the
chaos of earth.
Yet this horrid and solitary wildness is but one aspect. There is beauty
here, at length, for the first time in Canada, the real beauty that is
always too sudden for mortal eyes, and brings pain with its comfort. The
Rockies have a remoter, yet a kindlier, beauty than the Alps. Their rock
is of a browner colour, and such rugged peaks and crowns as do not
attain snow continually suggest gigantic castellations, or the ramparts
of Titans. Eastward, the foothills are few and low, and the mountains
stand superbly. The heart lifts to see them. They guard the sunset. Into
this rocky wilderness you plunge, and toil through it hour by hour,
viewing it from the rear of the Observation-Car. The Observation-Car is
a great invention of the new world. At the end of the train is a
compartment with large windows, and a little platform behind it, roofed
over, but exposed otherwise to the air, On this platform are sixteen
little perches, for which you fight with Americans. Victorious, you
crouch on one, and watch the ever-receding panorama behind the train. It
is an admirable way of viewing scenery. But a day of being perpetually
drawn backwards at a great pace through some of the grandest mountains
in the world has a queer effect. Like life, it leaves you with a dizzy
irritation. For, as in life, you never see the glories till they are
past, and then they vanish with incredible rapidity. And if you crane to
see the dwindling further peaks, you miss the new splendours.
The day I went through most of the Rockies was, by some standards, a bad
one for the view. Rain scudded by in forlorn, grey showers, and the
upper parts of the mountains were wrapped in cloud, which was but rarely
blown aside to reveal the heights. Sublimity, therefore, was left to the
imagination; but desolation was most vividly present. In no weather
could the impression of loneliness be stronger. The pines drooped and
sobbed. Cascades, born somewhere in the dun firmament above, dropped
down the mountain sides in ever-growing white threads. The rivers roared
and plunged with aimless passion down the ravines. Stray little clouds,
left behind when the wrack lifted a little, ran bleating up and down the
forlorn hill-sides. More often, the clouds trailed along the valleys, a
long procession of shrouded, melancholy figures, seeming to pause, as
with an indeterminate, tragic, vain gesture, before passing out of sight
up some ravine.
Yet desolation is not the final impression that will remain of the
Rockies and the Selkirks. I was advised by various people to 'stop off'
at Banff and at Lake Louise, in the Rockies. I did so. They are supposed
to be equally the beauty-spots of the mountains. How perplexing it is
that advisers are always so kindly and willing to help, and always so
undiscriminating. It is equally disastrous to be a sceptic and to be
credulous. Banff is an ordinary little tourist-resort in mountainous
country, with hills and a stream and snow-peaks beyond. Beautiful
enough, and invigorating. But Lake Louise--Lake Louise is of another
world. Imagine a little round lake 6000 feet up, a mile across, closed
in by great cliffs of brown rock, round the shoulders of which are
thrown mantles of close dark pine. At one end the lake is fed by a vast
glacier, and its milky tumbling stream; and the glacier climbs to
snowfields of one of the highest and loveliest peaks in the Rockies,
which keeps perpetual guard over the scene. To this place you go up
three or four miles from the railway. There is the hotel at one end of
the lake, facing the glacier; else no sign of humanity. From the windows
you may watch the water and the peaks all day, and never see the same
view twice. In the lake, ever-changing, is Beauty herself, as nearly
visible to mortal eyes as she may ever be. The water, beyond the
flowers, is green, always a different green. Sometimes it is tranquil,
glassy, shot with blue, of a peacock tint. Then a little wind awakes in
the distance, and ruffles the surface, yard by yard, covering it with a
myriad tiny wrinkles, till half the lake is milky emerald, while the
rest still sleeps. And, at length, the whole is astir, and the sun
catches it, and Lake Louise is a web of laughter, the opal distillation
of all the buds of all the spring. On either side go up the dark
processional pines, mounting to the sacred peaks, devout, kneeling,
motionless, in an ecstasy of homely adoration, like the donors and their
families in a Flemish picture. Among these you may wander for hours by
little rambling paths, over white and red and golden flowers, and,
continually, you spy little lakes, hidden away, each a shy, soft jewel
of a new strange tint of green or blue, mutable and lovely.... And
beyond all is the glacier and the vast fields and peaks of eternal snow.
If you watch the great white cliff, from the foot of which the glacier
flows--seven miles away, but it seems two--you will sometimes see a
little puff of silvery smoke go up, thin, and vanish. A few seconds
later comes the roar of terrific, distant thunder. The mountains tower
and smile unregarding in the sun. It was an avalanche. And if you climb
any of the ridges or peaks around, there are discovered other valleys
and heights and ranges, wild and desert, stretching endlessly away. As
day draws to an end the shadows on the snow turn bluer, the crying of
innumerable waters hushes, and the immense, bare ramparts of westward-
facing rock that guard the great valley win a rich, golden-brown
radiance. Long after the sun has set they seem to give forth the
splendour of the day, and the tranquillity of their centuries, in
undiminished fulness. They have that other-worldly serenity which a
perfect old age possesses. And as with a perfect old age, so here, the
colour and the light ebb so gradually out of things that you could swear
nothing of the radiance and glory gone up to the very moment before the
dark.
It was on such a height, and at some such hour as this, that I sat and
considered the nature of the country in this continent. There was
perceptible, even here, though less urgent than elsewhere, the
strangeness I had noticed in woods by the St Lawrence, and on the banks
of the Delaware (where are red-haired girls who sing at dawn), and in
British Columbia, and afterwards among the brown hills and colossal
trees of California, but especially by that lonely golden beach in
Manitoba, where the high-stepping little brown deer run down to drink,
and the wild geese through the evening go flying and crying. It is an
empty land. To love the country here--mountains are worshipped, not
loved--is like embracing a wraith. A European can find nothing to
satisfy the hunger of his heart. The air is too thin to breathe. He
requires haunted woods, and the friendly presence of ghosts. The
immaterial soil of England is heavy and fertile with the decaying stuff
of past seasons and generations. Here is the floor of a new wood, yet
uncumbered by one year's autumn fall. We Europeans find the Orient stale
and too luxuriantly fetid by reason of the multitude of bygone lives and
thoughts, oppressive with the crowded presence of the dead, both men and
gods. So, I imagine, a Canadian would feel our woods and fields heavy
with the past and the invisible, and suffer claustrophobia in an English
countryside beneath the dreadful pressure of immortals. For his own
forests and wild places are windswept and empty. That is their charm,
and their terror. You may lie awake all night and never feel the passing
of evil presences, nor hear printless feet; neither do you lapse into
slumber with the comfortable consciousness of those friendly watchers
who sit invisibly by a lonely sleeper under an English sky. Even an
Irishman would not see a row of little men with green caps lepping along
beneath the fire-weed and the golden daisies; nor have the subtler
fairies of England found these wilds. It has never paid a steamship or
railway company to arrange for their emigration.
In the bush of certain islands of the South Seas you may hear a crashing
on windless noons, and, looking up, see a corpse swinging along head
downwards at a great speed from tree to tree, holding by its toes,
grimacing, dripping with decay. Americans, so active in this life, rest
quiet afterwards. And though every stone of Wall Street have its
separate Lar, their kind have not gone out beyond city-lots. The maple
and the birch conceal no dryads, and Pan has never been heard amongst
these reedbeds. Look as long as you like upon a cataract of the New
World, you shall not see a white arm in the foam. A godless place. And
the dead do not return. That is why there is nothing lurking in the
heart of the shadows, and no human mystery in the colours, and neither
the same joy nor the kind of peace in dawn and sunset that older lands
know. It is, indeed, a new world. How far away seem those grassy,
moonlit places in England that have been Roman camps or roads, where
there is always serenity, and the spirit of a purpose at rest, and the
sunlight flashes upon more than flint! Here one is perpetually a first-
comer. The land is virginal, the wind cleaner than elsewhere, and every
lake new-born, and each day is the first day. The flowers are less
conscious than English flowers, the breezes have nothing to remember,
and everything to promise. There walk, as yet, no ghosts of lovers in
Canadian lanes. This is the essence of the grey freshness and brisk
melancholy of this land. And for all the charm of those qualities, it is
also the secret of a European's discontent. For it is possible, at a
pinch, to do without gods. But one misses the dead.
XIV
SOME NIGGERS
"_Look at those niggers! Whose are they?" (An American Suffragist
lady on board S.S. 'Ventura,' entering Pago-Pago Harbour, Samoa,
October 1913. Apropos of the Samoans.)_
I suppose that if news came that the National Gallery was burnt down,
one might feel, while hearing of the general damage, the rooms gutted or
untouched, the Rembrandts and Titians saved, harmed, or lost, a sudden
disproportionately keen little stab of wonder: "The Pisanello _St
Hubert_," or "The Patinir _Flight into Egypt_--What's happened
to _that_?" So now there must be a handful of wanderers here and
there who, among all the major conflagration and disasters of nations
and continents, have felt the tug of the question, "What of Samoa?"
The South Sea Islands have an invincible glamour. Any bar in 'Frisco or
Sydney will give you tales of seamen who slipped ashore in Samoa or
Tahiti or the Marquesas for a month's holiday, five, ten, or twenty
years ago. Their wives and families await them yet. They are compound,
these islands, of all legendary heavens. They are Calypso's and
Prospero's isle, and the Hesperides, and Paradise, and every timeless
and untroubled spot. Such tales have been made of them by men who have
been there, and gone away, and have been haunted by the smell of the
bush and the lagoons, and faint thunder on the distant reef, and the
colours of sky and sea and coral, and the beauty and grace of the
islanders. And the queer thing is that it's all, almost tiresomely,
true. In the South Seas the Creator seems to have laid Himself out to
show what He _can_ do. Imagine an island with the most perfect
climate in the world, tropical, yet almost always cooled by a breeze
from the sea. No malaria or other fevers. No dangerous beasts, snakes,
or insects. Fish for the catching, and fruits for the plucking. And an
earth and sky and sea of immortal loveliness. What more could
civilisation give? Umbrellas? Rope? Gladstone bags?.... Any one of the
vast leaves of the banana is more waterproof than the most expensive
woven stuff. And from the first tree you can tear off a long strip of
fibre that holds better than any rope. And thirty seconds' work on a
great palm-leaf produces a basket-bag which will carry incredible
weights all day, and can be thrown away in the evening. A world of
conveniences. And the things which civilisation has left behind or
missed by the way are there, too, among the Polynesians: beauty and
courtesy and mirth. I think there is no gift of mind or body that the
wise value which these people lack. A man I met in some other islands,
who had travelled much all over the world, said to me, "I have found no
man, in or out of Europe, with the good manners and dignity of the
Samoan, with the possible exception of the Irish peasant." A people
among whom an Italian would be uncouth, and a high-caste Hindu vulgar,
and Karsavina would seem clumsy, and Helen of Troy a frump.
The white population of Heaven, as one would expect, is very small; but,
as one wouldn't expect, it is composed of Americans, English, and
Germans. About half Germans, for it has been a German colony for some
fourteen years. But it is one of the few white 'possessions,' I suppose,
where a decent white needn't feel ashamed of himself. For, though it's
proper to deny that Germans can colonise, they have certainly ruled
Samoa very well. In some part, no doubt, the luck has been with them--
with the world--in this success. Samoa was one of their later and wiser
attempts in colonising. The first governor was Herr Solf, the present
Secretary for the Colonies, who is reputed to have started the
administration of Samoa after a careful examination of our method of
ruling Fiji, and with a due, but not complete, regard for the advice of
the chief English and American settlers in Samoa. Certainly he started
it very ably and wisely. By luck and good management those various
forces which might destroy the beauty of Samoa are almost ineffectual.
The fact that the missionaries are nearly all English puts a slight
sufficient chasm between the spiritual and civil powers, and avoids that
worst peril of these places--hierocracy. The trade of the islands is
largely a monopoly of the 'German firm,' a big affair which pays a few
people in Hamburg fabulous percentages. So smaller traders aren't
encouraged to flourish unduly; and the German firm itself is too well
fed to bother about extending. The Samoans, therefore, aren't exploited,
spiritually or commercially, as much as they might be. By such slight
chances beauty keeps a foothold in the world. The missionary's peace of
mind may require that the Samoan should wear trousers, or the trader's
pocket that he should drink gin and live under corrugated iron. But the
Government has discovered that these things are not good for the health
of the Polynesian, so the Samoan wears his _lava-lava_ and drinks
his _kava_, and lives in his cool and lovely thatched hut, and is
happy. And--final test of administration--the population is no longer
decreasing.
But I think there's more than luck or German wisdom at the bottom of the
happy condition of Samoa. Something in the very magic of the place seems
to subdue or soften the evil in men. Heaven forbid I should deny that
mean and treacherous and cruel acts of white men and brown are on
record. But as a rule the greedy or the boorish, once they settle there,
appear to mellow and grow quiet. Between this sea and sky even a trader
becomes almost a gentleman, even a Prussian almost lovable, and the very
missionaries are betrayed by beauty, and contentment takes them unaware.
Samoa has been well governed. The people have been forbidden a few
perils of civilisation, and for the rest are left pretty well to
themselves. Go up from Apia across the mountains, or round the coast,
or take a boat over to the other big island, Savaii, and you find them
living their old life, fishing and bathing and singing, and never a sign
of a white man. They are guaranteed possession of their land. They'll
sometimes complain faintly of 'taxation'--a small head-tax the
Government exacts, which compels the individual to some four or five
days' work a year. The English inhabitants themselves have had no
grumble against the Germans except that they incline to be 'too kind to
the natives'--an admirable testimonial. And traders in the Pacific say
they always get far better treatment from the customs and harbour
authorities at Apia than at the British Suva, in Fiji.
And yet the Samoans do not like the Germans. When I was there, nearly a
year ago, I was often asked, "When will Peritania (Britain) fight
Germany, and send her away from Samoa?" They have no complaint against
the Germans. They have merely a sentimental and highly flattering
preference for the English. On a recent visit of an English gunboat to
Apia, the officers were entertained at a Samoan dinner party, with music
and dances, by an eminent and very charming young princess. The princess
is a famous beauty, with the keen intelligence Samoans have if they
care, a wonderful dancer, possessed of a glorious singing voice and a
perfect knowledge of English. The party was a great success. The
princess led her guests afterwards to the flag-staff. Before anyone
could stop her, she leapt on to the pole and raced up the sixty feet of
it. That also is among the accomplishments of a Samoan princess. She
seized the German flag, tore it to pieces, brought it down, and danced
on it. So the tale is; and it is probably true. In the villages where I
stayed it was amusing how swiftly and completely the children forgot the
few words of German the Government sometimes had them taught; while one
or two common phrases, '_Morgen_,' '_gut_,' etc., were
retained as extremely good jokes by the boys and girls, occasions of
inextinguishable laughter, through the absurdity of their sound and the
very ridiculous German-ness of them....
I wish I were there again. It is a country, and a life, that bind the
heart. There is a poem:
"I know an island,
Lovely and lost, and half the world away;
And there, 'twixt lowland and highland,
Lies a pool, rich with murmur and scent and glimmer,
And there my friends go, all the radiant day,
Each golden-limbed and flower-crowned laughing swimmer,"
--and so on. It tells how ugly and joyless by comparison the fellow's
own country sometimes seems, filled with money-making and fogs and such
grey things:
"Evil, and gloom, and cold o' nights in my land;
But,--I know an island
Where Beauty and Courtesy, as flowers, blow."
So it goes, with a jolly return on the rhyme. But the whole poem is a
bad one. Still, the man felt it, the magic. It is a magic of a different
way of life. In the South Seas, if you live the South Sea life, the
intellect soon lapses into quiescence. The body becomes more active, the
senses and perceptions more lordly and acute. It is a life of swimming
and climbing and resting after exertion. The skin seems to grow more
sensitive to light and air, and the feel of water and the earth and
leaves. Hour after hour one may float in the warm lagoons, conscious, in
the whole body, of every shred and current of the multitudinous water,
or diving under in a vain attempt to catch the radiant butterfly-
coloured fish that flit in and out of the thousand windows of their
gorgeous coral palaces. Or go up, one of a singing flower-garlanded
crowd, to a shaded pool of a river in the bush, cool from the mountains.
The blossom-hung darkness is streaked with the bodies that fling
themselves, head or feet first, from the cliffs around the water, and
the haunted forest-silence is broken by laughter. It is part of the
charm of these people that, while they are not so foolish as to 'think,'
their intelligence is incredibly lively and subtle, their sense of
humour and their intuitions of other people's feelings are very keen and
living. They have built up, in the long centuries of their civilisation,
a delicate and noble complexity of behaviour and of personal
relationships. A white man living with them soon feels his mind as
deplorably dull as his skin is pale and unhealthy among those glorious
golden-brown bodies. But even he soon learns to _be_ his body (and
so his true mind), instead of using it as a stupid convenience for his
personality, a moment's umbrella against this world. He is perpetually
and intensely aware of the subtleties of taste in food, of every tint
and line of the incomparable glories of those dawns and evenings, of
each shade of intercourse in fishing or swimming or dancing with the
best companions in the world. That alone is life; all else is death. And
after dark, the black palms against a tropic night, the smell of the
wind, the tangible moonlight like a white, dry, translucent mist, the
lights in the huts, the murmur and laughter of passing figures, the
passionate, queer thrill of the rhythm of some hidden dance--all this
will seem to him, inexplicably and almost unbearably, a scene his heart
has known long ago, and forgotten, and yet always looked for.
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