I ALWAYS READ (I know I have said this before) the Agony Column of the Times.
I was reading it now. It was June 2nd, 1933: a lovely day. English fields, bright, friendly, and chequered, streamed past the window of the Harwich boat-train. Above each cottage smoke rose in a slim pillar which wriggled slightly before vanishing into a hot blue sky. Cattle were converging on the shade of trees, swinging their tails against the early summer flies with a dreamy and elegant motion. Beside a stream an elderly man was putting up his rod in an atmosphere of consecration. Open cars ran cheerfully along the roads, full of golf-clubs and tennis-rackets and picnic-hampers. Gipsies were camped in a chalk-pit. A green woodpecker, its laughter inaudible to me, flew diagonally across a field. Two children played with puppies on a tiny lawn. Downs rose hazily in the distance. England was looking her best.
I, on the threshold of exile, found it expedient to ignore her. I turned to the Agony Column.
The Agony Column was apropos but not very encouraging, like the sermon on the last Sunday of term.
‘Because it is so uncertain as well as expensive, I must wait and trust.’ The advertiser was anonymous.
I put the paper down. Normally I would have speculated at some length on the circumstances which evoked this cri du cœur; to-day I was content to accept it merely as oracular guidance. We were in the same boat, the advertiser and I; as he (or possibly she) pointed out, we must wait and trust.
From my typewriter, on the rack opposite, a label dangled, swinging gently to and fro in a deprecating way. ‘‘PASSENGER TO MANCHULI’ said the label. I wished it would keep still. There was something pointed in such suave and regular oscillation; the legend acquired an ironical lilt. ‘Well, well!’ said the label, sceptical and patronizing. ‘Boys will be boys. …’
‘PASSENGER TO MANCHULI.’ Had there been anyone else in the carriage, and had he been able to decipher my block-capitals, and had he in addition been fairly good at geography and at international politics in the Far East, that label alone would have been enough (for he is clearly an exceptional chap) to assure him that my immediate future looked like being uncertain as well as expensive. For Manchuli is the junction, on the frontier between Russia and Manchuria, on the Trans-Siberian and the Chinese Eastern Railways; and the latter line had recently been announced as closed to traffic, its ownership being in dispute between Moscow and the Japanese-controlled government of Manchukuo. In short, on the evidence to hand my hypothetical fellow-passenger would have been warranted in assuming that I was either up to, or would come to, no good; or both.
With the possible exception of the Equator, everything begins somewhere. Too many of those too many who write about their travels plunge straight in medias res; their opening sentence informs us bluntly and dramatically that the prow (or bow) of the dhow grated on the sand, and they stepped lightly ashore.
No doubt they did. But why? With what excuse? What other and anterior steps had they taken? Was it boredom, business, or a broken heart that drove them so far afield? We have a right to know.
But they seldom tell us. They may vouchsafe a few complacent references to what they call their Wanderlust. But chiefly they trade on an air of predestination; they are lordly, inscrutable, mysterious. Without so much as a Hey Presto! or a Houp La! they whisk us from their native land to their exotic destination; so that for the first few chapters the reader’s mind is full of extraneous and distracting surmises, as a proctor’s must be when he sees a chamber-pot crowning some ancient monument of the university. He overlooks the situation’s intrinsic interest, because he is passionately wondering how the situation was arrived at at all.
In this respect, if in no other, I intend to give the reader a square deal. As my label suggested, I had in my pocket a ticket to Manchuli. The reader will wonder why I had bought it.
Not, I can assure him, from any love of the place. Manchuli is a small, wind-swept village, lying in a vast, but naturally not less wind-swept plain. The population is Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian (Red and White). In the autumn of 1931 I was held up there for a day, and during that day I saw all that I wanted to see of Manchuli and of the network of shallow ditches which surrounds it, whether for the purpose of irrigation, sanitation, or defence I neither know nor care. In Manchuli, too, I read the greater part of The Pickwick Papers; but that, after all, one can do almost anywhere. Besides – as I say – I had done it. No; it would be idle and dishonest to pretend that Manchuli aroused in me any of the emotions that (for instance) Kentucky arouses in the saxophonist or Bognor Regis in the poster-artist. The ‘Come to Manchuli’ movement could count me out.
What was it, then, if not nostalgia? Simply this: that since the railway east of Manchuli was thought to be closed, to buy a ticket to, say, Harbin might well prove to be waste of money. With the minimum of luck – and I had the maximum1 – one could get to Manchuli; and there, after all, one would find oneself on a frontier separating two nations whose citizens are neither universally efficient nor universally incorruptible. So it would be surprising indeed, however serious the railway situation, if one did not manage to penetrate further east.
But why penetrate further east? We come at last to the point.
I had in my pocket – or, to be strictly accurate, I thought I had in my pocket – a document addressed ‘To All Whom It May Concern’. (Luckily, for I had left it behind, it concerned nobody.) This document went on to say that I had been authorized to act as Special Correspondent to the Times in the Far East. I had acquired it in the following manner:
Two months before, I had gone to the Editor of the Times and informed him that the situation in China during the coming summer would be fraught with every conceivable kind of interest. (This was a howling lie; the situation in China during the summer of 1933 was as dull as ditchwater.) I was the man, I shamelessly implied, to tell the world about it; had I not been there before, and for nearly three months?
The Editor of the Times is a humane man. His first thought was for his colleagues. ‘If I turn him down,’ he said to himself, ‘he’ll go round pestering them. Then, when he finds that no reputable newspaper will give him an excuse for going to China, he’ll come back to me with some cock and bull theory about Ecuador being the Country of the Future. Much better get him out of the country at once.’
He did. I was duly commissioned to write a series of articles on China, each one more portentous and comprehensive than the last; they would be paid for at a generous rate. The Spectator advanced me £50. My publisher, a curiously gullible man, made good the necessary rest. To all these people who made it possible for me to pay my way I am very grateful.
That, then, is how I came to be on the Harwich boat-train, en route for Manchuli. I have presented my credentials. If the reader wants any further motivation, he can invent it for himself.
1See the photograph facing page 66.