OF THE VARIOUS excuses which may be advanced for writing about something of which one knows very little, none is valid when the subject has been adequately covered by competent authorities. I shall therefore pass rapidly over Canton and Hong Kong, each of which I was visiting for the second time, but in neither of which I spent more than two days.
Shanghai is not Chinese; Canton is, Canton’s aura of modernity has therefore more significance than Shanghai’s. Her Bund boasts no palisade of sky-scrapers; but through the ancient huddle of her houses broad new streets have been driven, aircraft are intermittently busy in the sky, and the troops are well equipped and know their drill. There is something a little crude and flashy about Canton; but she is truer to twentieth-century urban China than Shanghai, just as Chicago is truer to America than cosmopolitan New York.
Hong Kong is at once portentous and provincial. The Peak and the harbour are superb; but the chief charm of the place – especially for the traveller who comes to it from the interior – is its atmosphere of dependability. Justice, punctuality, sanitation – all those civic virtues which in China one misses consciously or subconsciously, according to one’s nature – here suddenly shine forth. One is somehow stirred by the reappearance of a sixpenny bit, and the sight of Morris Cowleys in large numbers is infinitely reassuring. Civis Romanus sum … Pax Britannica …
At the time of our visit a controversy, magnificently appropriate to the Outposts of Empire, was raging in the local papers over the film Cavalcade. The Governor and the élite of the Colony had been invited to a special première, and the rest of the audience had been charged exorbitant prices for the privilege of attending the film in such distinguished company. That pure, exhilarating breath of snobbery was as good as a sight of Dover cliffs; the Old Country seemed very near.
Like most of those who live by their wits, I have occupied in a brief career a large, I suppose a discreditably large variety of positions. In all of them I have seemed to myself somewhat incongruously cast, but in none more so than in that which I now found myself sharing with Gerald. We had become – or at any rate we had no difficulty in passing ourselves off as – the Greatest Living Authorities on a subject. Our information about the Communist areas, though far from comprehensive, was exclusive and, I honestly believe, the best obtainable by foreigners; the fact that no foreigners had bothered to obtain it before gave it an artificial importance. It was eagerly solicited by the authorities in Hong Kong and, later, in Shanghai, and we divulged it readily, suppressing – on my part – an uneasy feeling that we were in some indefinable way rank impostors.
From Hong Kong we took ship to Shanghai. We took it, as a matter of fact, rather prematurely, for the typhoon signals went up as soon as we were on board, and for two days we were storm-bound while walls of rain marched up the harbour against the Peak. But at last the typhoon drew away, and we steamed slowly up the China coast, reading with an assiduity worthy of a better cause the ship’s small library of detective novels.
Whenever people tell me how passionately they desire to Get Away From It All, I think I know what is in their mind’s eye. They see themselves riding off into the sunset, or paddling a canoe down the silver wake of the moon, or very slowly (but ecstatically) stretching their arms on the edge of a huge precipice; they see themselves, in fact, in terms of the silent film. They imagine some vast solitude with a healthy climate, where no telephones ring and no maids give notice, where there are no income-tax returns and incidentally no insects: where the Simple Life is possible.
Such an Arden, though it may exist, would not, I fear, be as they like it. But where they make their gravest error is in supposing, as dramatists and film-directors have licence to suppose, that the process of Getting Away From It All has a climax, that there comes a sharp, sweet moment when the escaper consciously relishes the full flavour of escape. In my experience no such moment exists. We do not, to-day, cut loose. We wriggle out of one complicated existence like a snake sloughing its skin, and by the time we have wriggled into the next it has become complicated too. The raptures, the first flush of flight, wither unfelt as we say our farewells, and catch our train and then our boat, and wire back some instructions that we forgot to leave behind, and find that we have lost our certificate of vaccination. The old life overlaps what should have been the most exhilarating moments of the new; the first stage on the golden road to Samarkand has no enchantment for the man who is doubtful whether they packed his evening shoes.
So Getting Away From It All is not such a vivid and delightful experience as it sounds on paper or looks on the screen. Getting Back To It All, on the other hand, can be. Particularly in its preliminary stages; one’s actual return is almost always anti-climax. But sometimes there comes a moment when the traveller, who has for weeks or months seen himself only as a puny and irrelevant alien crawling laboriously across a country in which he has no roots and no background, suddenly re-encounters his other self, a relatively solid and considerable figure, with a sure stake in another kind of life and a place in the minds of certain people. My last memory of China is of such a moment.
It was the evening after we landed at Shanghai, where my headquarters were with Tony, who fully deserved his reputation as the best host in China. Tony’s houseboat chugged softly up the river, against a gentle current. The ripples slapped her bows with a hasty, deprecating sound. On the deck above our heads chains rattled, and the dog-coolie spoke in a low voice to the setter and the two spaniels. From the galley came the smell of cooking. The cabin was full of a seasonable litter of cartridge bags and guns and old coats. Occasionally the lights of a junk going downstream passed swiftly from one small window to the next. Our legs were sore from the stubble which scratches your legs as you made after snipe in the thick black mud of the paddy fields. We were pleasantly tired.
I lay on my bunk and read my mail. Two months ago my first book, a facetious story of South American travel, had been published in London, and now I learnt for the first time that it was a success. A sheaf of reviews produced in me a feeling, not at all of elation, but rather of embarrassment. Nicolson, Lynd, Squire, Priestley – the giants of contemporary criticism, men whom I had hitherto held in considerable respect – praised this book to the skies. A cable summoned me to New York, where it had been chosen Book of the Month. ‘Which month?’ I wondered. But more I wondered ‘Why?’
Still, here was a copy of the book itself. Clamped between tasteful covers and approached with a fresh mind, perhaps it would justify the giants and reveal unsuspected virtues. I read it. It revealed nothing of the sort. But I have a theory that a young man should put himself as frequently as possible in situations where the maximum number of comic things are liable to happen to him, and it was apparent from the rest of my mail that the position of a successful author, however little he deserves his success, has its compensations. Of many charming letters from readers I remember most vividly one from a gentleman in Golders Green. He and I, he said, were in most respects kindred spirits (‘I can see myself peeping out from many of your whimsies’). That being so, he could not understand how I could bring myself to chronicle – nay, even to take part in – the slaughter of alligators, ‘many of them taken unawares, too’. Had I never put myself in an alligator’s place? he asked.
Next morning Tony and I sat on a bank, scraping the mud off our bare legs and waiting for a sampan to take us back to the houseboat for breakfast. Our pockets were full of snipe, and we were pleased with ourselves for having shot well. I was sailing for England in a few days.
A pale sunlight lay on the paddy fields. In some of them the rice had been cut and lay in swathes on the thin layer of water which covered the mud; in the others men and women were working with scythes. The country was dead flat. As far as you could see there was nothing but dykes and fields, fields and dykes, with here and there a clump of dark trees round a tomb, or the ribbed sails of a junk moving stiffly down some unseen waterway, or a magpie flying slowly. A single tall pagoda stood up in the distance.
On this huge, green, unlovable chess-board the workers were small blue automata. The mud hid their legs to the knee, and when they stooped they had the blind, shapeless look of parasites. You felt that if the world were overturned – if the landscape before you were suddenly tilted sideways – they would still be clinging to it: still working inch by inch in their appointed squares: still working while the pagoda fell, and the magpie flew off into space, and our houseboat with its Union Jack was swept away: still working until the earth, their sole, most grudging ally, flawed and disintegrated beneath them.
There would not be an end of China till the last of them was dislodged.