The Passionate Friends
ungracious, old-fashioned nonsense, that has done so much to intensify
the deepening class antagonisms that strain us now at home almost to the
breaking point!
How amazingly, it seemed, those people didn't understand and wouldn't
understand any class but their own, any race but their own, any usage
other than their use! Covertly I surveyed the colonel's profile. It
expressed nothing but entire satisfaction with these disastrous
interpretations. What a weather-worn thought-free face that grizzled
veteran showed the world!
I was seized with a sudden curiosity to see how the private soldiers
behind me were taking old Eccles. I turned round to discover cropped
heads and faces as expressionless as masks, and behind them dusky faces
watching very alertly, and then other dusky faces, Eurasians, inferiors,
servants, natives.
Then at a sharp edge the glare of our lighting ceased and the canvas
walls of our narrow world of illusion opened into a vast blue twilight.
At the opening stood two white-clad Sikhs, very, very still and
attentive, watching the performance, and beyond them was a great space
of sky over a dim profile of trees and roofs and a minaret, a sky
darkling down to the flushed red memory--such a short memory it is in
India--of a day that had gone for ever.
I remained staring at that for some time.
"Isn't old Eccles _good_?" whispered the colonel's wife beside me, and
recalled me to the play....
Somehow that picture of a narrow canvas tent in the midst of immensities
has become my symbol for the whole life of the governing English, the
English of India and Switzerland and the Riviera and the West End and
the public services....
But they are not England, they are not the English reality, which is a
thing at once bright and illuminating and fitful, a thing humorous and
wise and adventurous--Shakespeare, Dickens, Newton, Darwin, Nelson,
Bacon, Shelley--English names every one--like the piercing light of
lanterns swinging and swaying among the branches of dark trees at night.
§ 5
I went again to Ceylon to look into the conditions of Coolie
importation, and then I was going back into Assam once more, still in
the wake of indentured labor, when I chanced upon a misadventure. I had
my first and only experience of big game shooting in the Garo Hills, I
was clawed out of a tree by a wounded panther, he missed his hold and I
got back to my branch, but my shoulder was put out, my thigh was badly
torn, and my blood was poisoned by the wound. I had an evil
uncomfortable time. My injury hampered me greatly, and for a while it
seemed likely I should be permanently lamed. I had to keep to vehicles
and reasonably good roads. I wound up my convalescence with a voyage to
Singapore, and from thence I went on rather disconnectedly to a number
of exploratory journeys--excursions rather than journeys--into China. I
got to Pekin and then suddenly faced back to Europe, returning overland
through Russia.
I wanted now to study the conditions of modern industrialism at its
sources, and my disablement did but a little accelerate a return already
decided upon. I had got my conception of the East as a whole and of the
shape of the historical process. I no longer felt adrift in a formless
chaos of forces. I perceived now very clearly that human life is
essentially a creative struggle out of the usage of immemorial years,
that the synthesis of our contemporary civilization is this creative
impulse rising again in its latest and greatest effort, the creative
impulse rising again, as a wave rises from the trough of its
predecessors, out of the ruins of our parent system, imperial Rome. But
this time, and for the first time, the effort is world-wide, and China
and Iceland, Patagonia and Central Africa all swing together with us to
make--or into another catastrophic failure to make--the Great State of
mankind. All this I had now distinctly in my mind. The new process I
perceive had gone further in the west; was most developed in the west.
The lighter end lifts first. So back I came away from the great body of
mankind, which is Asia, to its head. And since I was still held by my
promise from returning to England I betook myself first to the Pas de
Calais and then to Belgium and thence into industrial Germany, to study
the socialistic movement at its sources.
And I was beginning to see too very clearly by the time of my return
that what is confusedly called the labor problem is really not one
problem at all, but two. There is the old problem, the problem as old as
Zimbabwe and the pyramids, the declining problem, the problem of
organizing masses of unskilled labor to the constructive ends of a Great
State, and there is the new modification due to machinery, which has
rendered unskilled labor and labor of a low grade of skill almost
unnecessary to mankind, added coal, oil, wind and water, the elementary
school and the printing-press to our sources of power, and superseded
the ancient shepherding and driving of men by the possibility of their
intelligent and willing co-operation. The two are still mixed in every
discussion, even as they are mixed in the practice of life, but
inevitably they will be disentangled. We break free from slavery, open
or disguised, just as we illuminate and develop this disentanglement....
I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of human
society. Ours are not economic but psychological difficulties. There is
enough for everyone, and only a fool can be found to deny it. But our
methods of getting and making are still ruled by legal and social
traditions from the time before we had tapped these new sources of
power, before there was more than enough for everyone, and when a bare
supply was only secured by jealous possession and unremitting toil. We
have no longer to secure enough by a stern insistence. We have come to a
plenty. The problem now is to make that plenty go round, and _keep it
enough_ while we do.
Our real perplexities are altogether psychological. There are no valid
arguments against a great-spirited Socialism but this, that people will
not. Indolence, greed, meanness of spirit, the aggressiveness of
authority, and above all jealousy, jealousy for our pride and vanity,
jealousy for what we esteem our possessions, jealousy for those upon
whom we have set the heavy fetters of our love, a jealousy of criticism
and association, these are the real obstacles to those brave large
reconstructions, those profitable abnegations and brotherly feats of
generosity that will yet turn human life--of which our individual lives
are but the momentary parts--into a glad, beautiful and triumphant
co-operation all round this sunlit world.
If but humanity could have its imagination touched----
I was already beginning to see the great problem of mankind as indeed
nothing other than a magnification of the little problem of myself, as a
problem in escape from grooves, from preoccupations and suspicions,
precautions and ancient angers, a problem of escape from these spiritual
beasts that prowl and claw, to a new generosity and a new breadth of
view.
For all of us, little son, as for each of us, salvation is that. We have
to get away from ourselves to a greater thing, to a giant's desire and
an unending life, ours and yet not our own.
§ 6
It is a queer experience to be even for a moment in the grip of a great
beast. I had been put into the fork of a tree, so that I could shoot
with the big stem behind my back. The fork wasn't, I suppose, more than
a score of feet from the ground. It was a safe enough place from a
tiger, and that is what we expected. We had been misled by our tracker,
who had mistaken the pugs of a big leopard for a tiger's,--they were
over rocky ground for the most part and he had only the spoor of a
chance patch of half-dried mud to go upon. The beast had killed a goat
and was beaten out of a thicket near by me in which he had been lying
up. The probability had seemed that he would go away along a tempting
ravine to where Captain Crosby, who was my host, awaited him; I, as the
amateur, was intended to be little more than a spectator. But he broke
back towards the wing of the line of beaters and came across the sunlit
rocks within thirty yards of my post.
Seen going along in that way, flattened almost to the ground, he wasn't
a particularly impressive beast, and I shot at his shoulder as one might
blaze away at a rabbit,--perhaps just a little more carefully, feeling
as a Lord of Creation should who dispenses a merited death. I expected
him either to roll over or bolt.
Then instantly he was coming in huge bounds towards me....
He came so rapidly that he was covered by the big limb of the tree on
which I was standing until he was quite beneath me, and my second shot,
which I thought in the instant must have missed him, was taken rapidly
as he crouched to spring up the trunk.
Then you know came a sort of astonishment, and I think,--because
afterwards Crosby picked up a dropped cartridge at the foot of the
tree--that I tried to reload. I believe I was completely incredulous
that the beast was going to have me until he actually got me. The thing
was too completely out of my imaginative picture. I don't believe I
thought at all while he was coming up the tree. I merely noted how
astonishingly he resembled an angry cat. Then he'd got my leg, he was
hanging on to it first by two claws and then by one claw, and the whole
weight of him was pulling me down. It didn't seem to be my leg. I wasn't
frightened, I felt absolutely nothing, I was amazed. I slipped, tried to
get a hold on the tree trunk, felt myself being hauled down, and then
got my arm about the branch. I still clung to my unloaded gun as an
impoverished aristocrat might cling to his patent of nobility. That was,
I felt, my answer for him yet.
I suppose the situation lasted a fraction of a second, though it seemed
to me to last an interminable time. Then I could feel my leggings rip
and his claw go scoring deeply down my calf. That hurt in a kind of
painless, impersonal interesting way. Was my leg coming off? Boot? The
weight had gone, that enormous weight!
He'd missed his hold altogether! I heard his claws tear down the bark of
the tree and then his heavy, soft fall upon the ground.
I achieved a cat-like celerity. In another second I was back in my fork
reloading, my legs tucked up as tightly as possible.
I peered down through the branches ready for him. He wasn't there. Not
up the tree again?... Then I saw him making off, with a halting gait,
across the scorching rocks some thirty yards away, but I could not get
my gun into a comfortable position before he was out of sight behind a
ridge.... I wondered why the sunlight seemed to be flickering like an
electric light that fails, was somehow aware of blood streaming from my
leg down the tree-stem; it seemed a torrent of blood, and there was a
long, loose ribbon of flesh very sickening to see; and then I fainted
and fell out of the tree, bruising my arm and cheek badly and
dislocating my shoulder in the fall.... Some of the beaters saw me fall,
and brought Crosby in sufficient time to improvise a _torniquet_ and
save my life.
CHAPTER THE NINTH
THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW WORLD
§ 1
I met Rachel again in Germany through the devices of my cousin the
Fürstin Letzlingen. I had finished seeing what I wanted to see in
Westphalia and I was preparing to go to the United States. There I
thought I should be able to complete and round off that large view of
the human process I had been developing in my mind. But my departure was
delayed by an attack of influenza that I picked up at a Socialist
Congress in Munich, and the dear Durchlaucht, hearing of this and having