Books: Letters from America
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Rupert Brooke >> Letters from America
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And now Samoa is ours. A New Zealand Expeditionary Force took it. Well,
I know a princess who will have had the day of her life. Did they see
Stevenson's tomb gleaming high up on the hill, as they made for that
passage in the reef? Did Vasa, with his heavy-lidded eyes, and that
infinitely adorable lady Fafaia, wander down to the beach to watch them
land? They must have landed from boats; and at noon, I see. How hot they
got! I know that Apia noon. Didn't they rush to the Tivoli bar--but I
forget, New Zealanders are teetotalers. So, perhaps, the Samoans gave
them the coolest of all drinks, _kava_; and they scored. And what
dances in their honour, that night!--but, again, I'm afraid the
_houla-houla_ would shock a New Zealander. I suppose they left a
garrison, and went away. I can very vividly see them steaming out in the
evening; and the crowd on shore would be singing them that sweetest and
best-known of South Sea songs, which begins 'Good-bye, my Flenni'
('Friend,' you'd pronounce it), and goes on in Samoan, a very beautiful
tongue. I hope they'll rule Samoa well.
AN UNUSUAL YOUNG MAN
Some say the Declaration of War threw us into a primitive abyss of
hatred and the lust for blood. Others declare that we behaved very well.
I do not know. I only know the thoughts that flowed through the mind of
a friend of mine when he heard the news. My friend--I shall make no
endeavour to excuse him--is a normal, even ordinary man, wholly English,
twenty-four years old, active and given to music. By a chance he was
ignorant of the events of the world during the last days of July. He was
camping with some friends in a remote part of Cornwall, and had gone on,
with a companion, for a four-days' sail. So it wasn't till they beached
her again that they heard. A youth ran down to them with a telegram:
"We're at war with Germany. We've joined France and Russia."
My friend ate and drank, and then climbed a hill of gorse, and sat
alone, looking at the sea. His mind was full of confused images, and the
sense of strain. In answer to the word 'Germany,' a train of vague
thoughts dragged across his brain. The pompous middle-class vulgarity
of the building of Berlin; the wide and restful beauty of Munich; the
taste of beer; innumerable quiet, glittering _cafes_; the
_Ring_; the swish of evening air in the face, as one _skis_
down past the pines; a certain angle of the eyes in the face; long
nights of drinking, and singing, and laughter; the admirable beauty of
German wives and mothers; certain friends; some tunes; the quiet length
of evening over the Starnberger-See. Between him and the Cornish sea he
saw quite clearly an April morning on a lake south of Berlin, the grey
water slipping past his little boat, and a peasant-woman, suddenly
revealed against apple-blossom, hanging up blue and scarlet garments to
dry in the sun. Children played about her; and she sang as she worked.
And he remembered a night in Munich spent with a students'
_Kneipe_. From eight to one they had continually emptied immense
jugs of beer, and smoked, and sung English and German songs in profound
chorus. And when the party broke up he found himself arm-in-arm with the
president, who was a vast Jew, and with an Apollonian youth called Leo
Diringer, who said he was a poet. There was also a fourth man, of whom
he could remember no detail. Together, walking with ferocious care down
the middle of the street, they had swayed through Schwabing seeking an
open _cafe_. Cafe Benz was closed, but further up there was a
little place still lighted, inhabited by one waiter, innumerable chairs
and tables piled on each other for the night, and a row of chess-boards,
in front of which sat a little bald, bearded man in dress-clothes,
waiting. The little man seemed to them infinitely pathetic. Four against
one, they played him at chess, and were beaten. They bowed, and passed
into the night. Leo Diringer recited a sonnet, and slept suddenly at the
foot of a lamp-post. The Jew's heavy-lidded eyes shone with a final
flicker of caution, and he turned homeward resolutely, to the last not
wholly drunk. My friend had wandered to his lodgings, in an infinite
peace. He could not remember what had happened to the fourth man....
A thousand little figures tumbled through his mind. But they no longer
brought with them that air of comfortable kindliness which Germany had
always signified for him. Something in him kept urging, "You must hate
these things, find evil in them." There was that half-conscious agony
of breaking a mental habit, painting out a mass of associations, which
he had felt in ceasing to believe in a religion, or, more acutely, after
quarrelling with a friend. He knew that was absurd. The picture came to
him of encountering the Jew, or Diringer, or old Wolf, or little
Streckmann, the pianist, in a raid on the East Coast, or on the
Continent, slashing at them in a stagey, dimly-imagined battle.
Ridiculous. He vaguely imagined a series of heroic feats, vast
enterprise, and the applause of crowds....
From that egotism he was awakened to a different one, by the thought
that this day meant war and the change of all things he knew. He
realised, with increasing resentment, that music would be neglected. And
he wouldn't be able, for example, to camp out. He might have to
volunteer for military training and service. Some of his friends would
be killed. The Russian ballet wouldn't return. His own relationship with
A---, a girl he intermittently adored, would be changed. Absurd, but
inevitable; because--he scarcely worded it to himself--he and she and
everyone else were going to be different. His mind fluttered irascibly
to escape from this thought, but still came back to it, like a tethered
bird. Then he became calmer, and wandered out for a time into fantasy.
A cloud over the sun woke him to consciousness of his own thoughts; and
he found, with perplexity, that they were continually recurring to two
periods of his life, the days after the death of his mother, and the
time of his first deep estrangement from one he loved. After a bit he
understood this. Now, as then, his mind had been completely divided into
two parts: the upper running about aimlessly from one half-relevant
thought to another, the lower unconscious half labouring with some
profound and unknowable change. This feeling of ignorant helplessness
linked him with those past crises. His consciousness was like the light
scurry of waves at full tide, when the deeper waters are pausing and
gathering and turning home. Something was growing in his heart, and he
couldn't tell what. But as he thought 'England and Germany,' the word
'England' seemed to flash like a line of foam. With a sudden tightening
of his heart, he realised that there might be a raid on the English
coast. He didn't imagine any possibility of it _succeeding_, but
only of enemies and warfare on English soil. The idea sickened him. He
was immensely surprised to perceive that the actual earth of England
held for him a quality which he found in A---, and in a friend's honour,
and scarcely anywhere else, a quality which, if he'd ever been
sentimental enough to use the word, he'd have called 'holiness.' His
astonishment grew as the full flood of 'England' swept him on from
thought to thought. He felt the triumphant helplessness of a lover.
Grey, uneven little fields, and small, ancient hedges rushed before him,
wild flowers, elms and beeches, gentleness, sedate houses of red brick,
proudly unassuming, a countryside of rambling hills and friendly copses.
He seemed to be raised high, looking down on a landscape compounded of
the western view from the Cotswolds, and the Weald, and the high land in
Wiltshire, and the Midlands seen from the hills above Prince's
Risborough. And all this to the accompaniment of tunes heard long ago,
an intolerable number of them being hymns. There was, in his mind, a
confused multitude of faces, to most of which he could not put a name.
At one moment he was on an Atlantic liner, sick for home, making
Plymouth at nightfall; and at another, diving into a little rocky pool
through which the Teign flows, north of Bovey; and again, waking, stiff
with dew, to see the dawn come up over the Royston plain. And
continually he seemed to see the set of a mouth which he knew for his
mother's, and A---'s face, and, inexplicably, the face of an old man he
had once passed in a Warwickshire village. To his great disgust, the
most commonplace sentiments found utterance in him. At the same time he
was extraordinarily happy....
My friend, who has always, though never very passionately, believed
himself a most unusual young man, rose to his feet. Feeling a little
frightened, and more than a little unwell--for he is a person of quiet
mental habits--he wandered down the hill. He kept slowly moving his
head, like a man who wishes to dodge a pain. I gather that he was
conscious of few definite thoughts till he reached the London train. He
kept remembering, unwillingly, a midnight in Carnival-time in Munich,
when he had seen a clown, a Pierrot, and a Columbine tip-toe delicately
round the deserted corner of Theresien-strasse, and vanish into the
darkness. Then he thought of the lights on the pavement in Trafalgar
Square. It seemed to him the most desirable thing in the world to mingle
and talk with a great many English people. Also, he kept saying to
himself--for he felt vaguely jealous of the young men in Germany and
France--"Well, if Armageddon's _on_, I suppose one should be
there." ... Of France, he tells me, he thought little. The French always
seemed to him people to be respected, but very remote; more
incomprehensible than the Japanese, more, even, than the Irish. Of
Russia, less. She meant nothing to him except a sense of hysteria and
vague evil which he had been given by some of her music and literature.
He thought often and heavily of Germany. Of England, all the time. He
didn't know whether he was glad or sad. It was a new feeling.
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