I WAS UNDER contract to be back in England by Nov. 1st, but I had hoped to stay long enough in Japan at least to be able to say that I had been there.
This hope was not fulfilled. I went down with fever in Shanghai, and the few days that I had set aside for Japan became at last so few that they might just as well have been none. I have vague memories of the Inland Sea, where even the wildest cliffs, the woodiest headlands, seemed pretty, unintimidating parts of a formal pattern. I remember still more vaguely (for now the obscurantist fever had returned) a drab, progressive Kobe and a Kyoto where the numerous temples were so well-kempt, the personally conducted pilgrims so seemly and appreciative, that it was as if the gods were holding a garden party. It felt a very long time since I had seen a Chinese soldier paring his toenails with an executioner’s sword in the courts of the Temple of Heaven. Then there was a long train journey through a neat and somehow suburban country, where everything seemed admirable and nothing more or less than admirable. And so at last to Tokyo.
But men have written of Tokyo who stayed in that city for longer than I did, and had lower temperatures while they stayed. So I shall say nothing of it, except that I was treated with great kindness there, and that in the Zoo they have a fascinating seal. For once, a two days’ stay does not seem to me sufficient basis for a page of superficialities.
From Tokyo I went to Yokohama, there to board once more the liner I had left at Kobe. As she drew away slowly from the dock, a fusilade of paper streamers broke out between ship and shore, uniting the departing to the seers-off by a gay, doomed, palpitating bridge. It is a charming Japanese custom. In England, and perhaps in all Western countries, coloured paper comes into our national life only on the heels of champagne, at an hour when that overrated wine has become either flat or forbidden It is revelry’s last fling. Sated or thwarted as the case may be, the guests at a gala night are maddened into a prolongation of their orgy by the lavish distribution of coloured paper. Paper hats are well enough; as masks once lent glamour to the least alluring face, so paper hats endow the staidest with a touch of the bacchanalian. But it is paper streamers that make the pace. Those small, compact, and – in a skilful hand – extremely deadly missiles tempt as irresistibly as snowballs: indeed, more so, for they are both licit and ready-made.
Those who would never dream of enlisting in the rank and file of revelry leap at the chance of being snipers in the cause; for the real secret of the streamer’s power is that it seems, at first glance, to offer an outlet for the anti-social instincts. The bored and the jealous, the dyspeptic and the disapproving – all, finding a streamer or two beside their plate, are trapped without knowing it. ‘See that fat chap with the pretty girl?’ they hiss, setting their teeth, drawing back their arm, scowling: and – phss-s-s-s-s-s-s-t – a pink parabola darts out across the turmoil to become, willy nilly, yet another ray in the artificial sunlight of mass hilarity.
The Manchurian bandit believes that bits of coloured paper can protect him against death. The Englishman has come to accept them as a guarantee against boredom. Coloured paper is a kind of drug, a supplementary drug, brought into play, not to create, but to sustain the effect of other drugs. It will not administer the coup de grâce to the repressions, but it will numb them for a little longer. ‘Wine, Women, and Song’ may have been all very well once; to-day the recipe would be incomplete without coloured paper.
If I knew a little more of Japan, I dare say that I should point to the contrast between the English and the Japanese attitude to paper streamers as typifying the difference between our national characters. We use them to stimulate the trivial emotions on occasions of no consequence. The Japanese use them when they are seeing people off.
They are an island race, and have an affectionate nature; partings are liable to mean a lot. Yet every ship leaves under a barrage of bright streamers, gallant decorations to the proud façade of stoicism. It may be that one who knew what he was talking about could draw profound psychological deductions from this custom. I cannot say. Perhaps its significance is not to be sought in the recesses of the national character. Perhaps it is simply that an extremely practical race has discovered that it is easier to conceal emotion if you give yourself something to do – that he or she who stands and waves a foolish and forlorn handkerchief is more likely to break down than the person whose valedictory gestures are those of a competitor at a coco-nut shy. But I doubt if the truth is as banal as all that.
The band played. The sun shone. The liner slid ponderously away. One by one the long thin ribbons of paper broke unobtrusively, till at last there were only three, then two, then one – a frail, protracted, primrose-coloured link with the land. Then that too parted in the middle. The two ends fluttered downwards and away from each other into the sea, the band stopped playing, and the voyage began.
I will not bore you with a description of the voyage; indeed, there was nothing to describe. After three or four days I recovered from my fever and came on deck to find that the ship was almost empty. Not so empty, however, as an equally gigantic American liner which pursued us across the Pacific and could sometimes be seen squatting portentously on the horizon, almost abreast. In this floating caravanserai there was only one first class passenger. I met him later in America. He was an American naval officer coming home on leave after three years on the Yangtse station. He told me that he had looked forward for months to the voyage home – the new faces, the pretty girls, bridge, dancing, deck tennis. …
At last, incredibly, after nine days, it was the last night of the voyage. As I was packing I came across a letter. It was one of those long letters from an old friend no longer resident in England which one carries about for months on end, hoping one day to find the time and the mood to answer it as fully and wittily as it deserves; it was, in fact, one of those letters that are never answered.
But the address at the top was Tacoma, and Tacoma, surely, was near Seattle, where to-morrow I must catch a train for New York? A map confirmed my memory. I wirelessed to my friend at Tacoma: ‘Meet me largest hotel Seattle six o’clock to-morrow.’
He did. The meeting is a delightful memory, if rather confused. There were four hours before my train left, and we had not seen each other for four years. Brewster and his wife produced a bottle of whisky and a bottle of brandy, and we embarked on one of those conversations which are so rich in material that they defeat their own purpose and no one succeeds in imparting or assimilating any information at all. The histories of our lives were interrupted at every turn by reminiscence, and reminiscence by the history of our lives. All three talked simultaneously and without drawing breath. The delights of reunion made the hours pass swiftly.
Too swiftly.
The North Coast Limited thundered through the night. At least, I suppose she did. I was not there. I had missed her by five minutes.
We lost no time. We galloped down the platform, bounded into a taxi, and made for the next station. It was twenty-five miles away: ‘over the hills’, as a porter said, with a fine melodramatic wave of his arm. If I missed this transcontinental express I would miss my boat and my luggage in Montreal, and all my plans for the immediate future would fall to the ground. It was an extremely exciting drive.
Brewster taunted, I flattered, the driver; the mixture worked well. The streets of Seattle streamed past. Traffic lights found us colour blind. The speedometer registered seventy. ‘And you call this a car!’ growled Brewster. The speedometer registered seventy-four. …
On the outskirts of the town we ran into fog. The driver maintained his speed. The taxi corkscrewed murderously from one side to the other of a wide and seemingly endless road. A man can stand only a certain amount of praise, only a certain amount of abuse. Except at the traffic-lights, our driver was seeing red.
We intercepted the train with thirty seconds to spare at a level crossing. A bell clanged, steam potently hissed, I cried farewells into the night. The North Coast Limited thundered East. This time I can vouch for it.
Much as I had enjoyed the Drury Lane flavour of this interlude, it left me in an unfortunate predicament. I found that I was travelling for three days and four nights across the North American continent with nothing to read except Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: a work difficult to read in America, impossible to read on a train. Intercourse with my fellow-passengers was, I discovered, virtually out of the question; for when I confessed that I intended to pass through Chicago without visiting the World’s Fair it was clear that they felt for me – and indeed I soon began to feel for myself – so profound a contempt that conversation must have been patronage on the one side and a penance on the other. I was driven back on the magazines in the observation car; for you cannot look out of the window all day, and at night you cannot look out of it at all. At least, it is not much good if you do.
Everyone knows – though it is doubtful if any understand – the principles on which American magazines are assembled or put together. You open them. You are instantly attracted, by the illustrations, to a story. Probably it is called Love Comes Late, by Evangeline Grossfoot Putz, and an editorial note assures you that, while it will appeal particularly to the middle-aged, the young will like it just as well; or else it is called Dawning-Time, by Delia Olssen Dufflebury, and a similar note points out that, although Miss Dufflebury is here concerned primarily with a boy-and-girl romance, her art reaches out to touch the heart-strings of more mature readers. Either way, it sounds as if you are pretty safe.
You begin to read. The world around you becomes suffused with a pinkish light. The spitting of the business men, evoking vivid and unwelcome memories of a Chinese troop-train, no longer incommodes you. You read with absorption, picking your way carefully in and out of the far-flung illustrations. After some 2000 words in Miss Putz’s or Miss Dufflebury’s inimitable (at least, I wouldn’t care to have to imitate them) style, you reach the bottom of the page. Eagerly you turn over, only to find yourself faced with an article called ‘Dope Kings I Have Known’.
This gives you a nasty jar. The world resumes its normal colour. Your heart-strings cease to throb. You turn back, and discover that the story you were immersed in is continued on page 128. You turn to page 128.
But now you are in the region, the lurid and terrifying region, of the advertisements. From every page a face stares out at you, haggard, tragic, haunted. Beautiful girls with tortured eyes wonder Why He Never Asked Her For A Second Dance. Neat young wives ask themselves What Makes Bob So Cold, These Days. The furrowed brows of spruce young business men who have been smoking the wrong cigarette, drinking the wrong kind of coffee, betray the imminence of a nervous breakdown. Elderly men are shown in the process of losing their grip or their hair. Babies, excoriated by the wrong kind of underwear, sickened by the wrong patent food, howl their anguish at the camera. Panic, irritation, and decay stalk through the advertisements.
You cannot ignore them. The pictures are too large and too dramatic. In vain I tried not to notice their doomed protagonists; in vain I averted my eyes from the diagrams which showed in loathsome detail what was happening to their feet, their teeth, their livers and their scalps. I could not help but see them.
I felt myself seized by a growing terror. In the privacy (if you can call it that) of my Pullman berth I lay racked with anxiety. Quite quickly I lost all hope. If only they had warned me earlier … Now it was too late. My diet was disastrously wrong; that breakfast food which alone could prevent you from Letting Down the Corporation – why, I had never even heard of it. My collars were not in the least like those on which, it appeared, every successful business career had been founded. I preferred not to think about my teeth. I knew, now, that I was suffering from Business Strain, Athlete’s Foot, and Superfluous Hair. I was pretty sure I smelt awful.
It was accordingly in a chastened frame of mind that I reached New York. But my publishers did much to restore my confidence by giving me lunch, lending me money, taking my photograph, and asking me over and over again to tell them the story of my life. Gradually I forgot about Dandruff and Fallen Arches; I forgot that I was not Giving My Pores a Chance; I forgot that I had shirked the World’s Fair. My publishers assured me that at least fifty thousand, or perhaps it was million, people were going to read my book. I felt that there was probably a good deal to be said for me after all. I decided to revisit Wall Street.
Four years before I had worked there for several months. It cannot be said that I was a success. My arrival coincided with the last fortnight of Prosperity in 1929. I was placed in a bank, one of the largest banks, to undergo a course of intensive training in finance. It is a shameful thing to confess, but I cannot do Long Division; however, my mother, knowing this, had given me a slide-rule as a parting present, and I settled down to work with some show of confidence. But the worst of a slide-rule is that it has two ends; you jiggle the little thing in the middle about, and it leaves you – at least it always used to leave me – with two alternative answers. I am no good at all at mathematics, and too often I was reduced to choosing between these widely different solutions by the spin of a coin. I and my fellow-students were engaged, if I remember rightly, on a comparative statistical analysis of the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railways in respect of their Revenue Freight Mileage per Head of Livestock Carried over the Short Haul; and in delicate matters of this sort the gods of chance are dangerous allies. After a month I left the bank and was transferred to a firm of stockbrokers, where I sat all through the winter behind a door marked RESEARCH, fingering my slide-rule nervously.
By this time the slump was in full force, and the air was dark with investors jumping off sky-scrapers. A first-hand view of this vast financial cataclysm should have been an experience of the very greatest interest for a young man. Unhappily, however, I understood about as much of the Stockmarket as I did of the Zodiac. For me it remained an unaccountable and rather ridiculous institution, and when the bottom dropped out of it I never really understood what all the fuss was about, or why people should expect it to have a bottom at all.
My disorientation was increased by the fact that I was unfamiliar with the names of the various securities (as they were quaintly called); and when, for instance, a pale-faced man burst into the office and announced in tones of horror ‘Anaconda’s right down the drain!’ my only emotional reactions were produced by a fleeting picture of two sanitary inspectors angling for a boa constrictor with a lump of meat. In spite of the slump, those were the days in which Big Business was still held in a kind of superstitious awe, and when I confessed, with more honesty than discretion, that in my view Big Business was a bad joke and Wall Street a waste of my time, I created much the same unfavourable impression as an American would in England if he spoke lightly of the British Empire. No, I was not a success.
I therefore approached Wall Street, after an interval of four years, in the spirit of an old lag revisiting Pentonville incognito. I approached it by the subway. The traveller on the New York subway descends into the bowels of the earth and discovers that the earth is suffering from indigestion. Mechanically intent, wholly oblivious of each other, the natives of Manhattan scurry down convergent catacombs with the short, fussy steps of the townsman. In patient and abstracted ranks they wait upon the platforms. Then the train arrives and the passengers alight. But ‘alight’ is the wrong word; a verb which appropriately describes the Fairy Queen’s descent from her coach fails to do justice to a herd of peccary breaking cover. Say rather, the passengers are spewed forth.
Competition for the vacancies thus created is keen. No quarter is asked, none is given. In England the like could only be witnessed in moments of uncontrollable panic; the New Yorker undergoes it twice a day. Powerfully built officials thrust the overflow of the scrum on board, the doors close automatically, and the train moves off.
But to me the battle for a place is less remarkable than the demeanour of the victors. They are like people in a trance. Wedged into a seat, or suspended by handles from the roof, they endure the journey in a state of suspended animation. Their faces are lacklustre and expressionless. Some of them are reading newspapers skilfully folded into the minimum of space; most of them stare straight before them with unseeing eyes. They do not look at each other. As the train rattles deafeningly on its way the cheeks of the sitters quiver foolishly and incessantly; the bodies of the straphangers sway like strands of seaweed at slack water. You begin to wonder whether they are alive, and, if so, why.
As I travelled down to Wall Street on the subway, turning over in my mind the memories which were awakened by its once familiar sounds and smells, I had a vision of a causeway leading into a little walled city in China. Down this, in the evening, you would see the people coming back from the fields. There was only one form of transport. A man pushed his wheelbarrow; the girls and the old women and the children sat on the flat sides of it, three or four to each side, balancing each other. They dangled their feet luxuriously after a hard day. Their sleek black heads nodded as they talked. Their fitful laughter floated on the cool air.
They looked absurd and not very comfortable. They moved extremely slowly. All the same, as I looked round at that cylinder-full of jaded automata hurtling through a hole in the ground, I could not help reflecting that there was something to be said for belonging to a backward race.