TO THE WILDS AGAIN
ALL THE SUMMER OF 1921, IN KENT AND IN IRELAND, I WENT ON WITH
The Chornicles of Rodriguez, finishing it on 4th August. At the end of May my play IF was put on at the Ambassadors’ Theatre, with a very fine cast of which the most brilliant were Miss Gladys Cooper, Miss Marda Vanne, Miss Ethel Coleridge, Henry Ainley, Leslie Banks, Michael Sherbrook, Henry Caine and G. Hayes. There did not seem to me to be at that time, when IF was being rehearsed, a full appreciation of Miss Gladys Cooper’s great ability, and I was given the idea that she had been chosen principally for her beauty, which, though a great asset to a play, is not an essential part of it; but both as a girl out of a job in London, and as a sort of queen in the East, her acting was an immense delight. So also was Ainley’s, and there was one long scene between him and Michael Sherbrook which I never wearied of seeing; it seemed to go like a duel with rapiers. Even when Harry Ainley forgot his part, he forgot it with a superb dignity. Michael Sherbrook waiting for his cue had evidently said: “But you forget...,” though no sound of such words was audible, but Ainley drew himself up with all the dignity of the oriental despot that he was supposed to be, and saying, “Very well, I do forget,” walked grandly away.
Early in the rehearsals I had said to Leslie Banks that, as he was quite perfect, it could not be necessary for him to rehearse any more. But I horrified those who were directing rehearsals, and was told that I should give him altogether a wrong idea of himself; yet time has I think showed without any doubt that it was the right idea. Miss Marda Vanne, then almost unknown, was so good as an inhabitant of a little house in the suburbs of London that a critic, while praising her as she deserved, tried to explain her achievement by suggesting that she may have lived all her life in just those surroundings. But he missed her by the length of a long continent, for she came from the far end of Africa, where I recently met her again, too famous now to mind having that mistake recalled to her. The play was about a dictator, who went the way of Mussolini, though it was written before the march on Rome. It ran on into October, its principal rival at that time being Miss Clemence Dane’s Bill of Divorcement, with Malcolm Keen in the principal part, in the St. Martin’s Theatre only just across the road.
That autumn we went to Arden in Yorkshire to stay with Lord and Lady Mexborough and shoot grouse, as we had done the year before, and many other years. There are three stone men on the steep top of Arden Bank, that are made of bits of nummulitic limestone: they were quite squat the year before, and were now recovering their stature. I suppose that now they have lost their height again, and the matter may seem unimportant; and yet it is not wholly unconnected with the fate of the world, for when no-one goes up there to replenish them with a stone or two every few weeks, it is because all the men are away, helping to reduce a kaiser or a fuehrer to his proper proportions.
Later that year we were at a shooting party at Petworth, where so much of Turner’s work is housed and where the woodwork is carved by Grinling Gibbons. On a Sunday morning there, when the rest had gone to church I had a very interesting talk with the first Lord Cowdray, who was another of Lord Leconfield’s guests, that is to say I sat and listened. He told me how as a young man, with some reputation already made, he was digging the Blackwall tunnel, and senior engineers were coming to him to tell him to stop, because it could not be done and he would lose everything if he went on. And he went to an older man and asked his advice, and this man said to him: “Have you done everything that you yourself know to be right?” And he said Yes. And the older man said: “Then go on.” Then they went to his wife and tried to get her to stop him, to save him from ruin. And she said: “I back Dick (or whatever she called him).” He told me a great deal of the steel shields with which they went through the gravel under the Thames, but he, interested me most when he spoke of the older hands that tried to push. the young man into their grooves and furrows, for it is by escaping from them that the great names are made.
And then I went back to the wilds again, starting from Biskra. There I found bright sunlight in the middle of January, and there I collected a few Arabs and started off with my tent into the desert to look for Dorcas gazelles, which I had shot before, as well as the rare edni gazelle, and hoping for that fine trophy, the head of a Barbary sheep, which I had never seen as yet and of which I had only heard tales from the Arabs. Part of a letter that I wrote to my wife on 24th January, 1922, gives a clearer idea of the country than my unaided memory could give. I wrote: “Really Africa does know the job of making a morning. Last night I went up to the tower just late for the sunset, but the air was still full of light. Looking North one looked into a semicircle of mountains running from one’s right to behind one’s left, a little more than a semicircle. To the West the mountains seemed to gather nearer and to sit down all dark and frowning, but to the East they melted away into a mass of pink. Over where the sun had gone down behind the mountains a small red cloud floated which turned, while I was walking round the tower, to an astonishingly vivid scarlet, redder than a hunting-coat, redder than the robe that Ainley wore, redder than anything, till all lustre left it and it hung there a listless gray. Over the pink rocks in the East the sky was mostly a Cambridge blue, and away to the South outside the curve of the mountains, a rather narrow strip, the Desert showed so deep a blue that it was almost black.
“A light or two came out among palms and houses, the bell of the Christian church began to boom, and then from some ravine among low mud-houses those notes came up that Arabs play on their reed flutes, it was Pan challenging very softly, but with all his ancient cunning, the lure of the New Creed.”
I met a friend in Biskra who I thought would have come with me, but I said in my letter to my wife: “After all why cling to relics of civilization when one has left it for the desert. To bring another white face with me would be like taking a tall hat, and I think the desert would be huffed at either and would hide his mysteries beyond yet one further ridge.”
And next day I wrote: “This afternoon while sitting in the garden one of the mountains that yesterday I called pinkish turned the colour of rose, and glowed through the tops of the trees at the edge of the garden. Then I went back to the tower. The sunset did not seem quite so splendid as yesterday’s, but I stayed and watched its changes. While the mountains in the West turned to a deep black the ones to the East were melting away into blue, like rose-leaves slowly dyed in an azure vat. At 5 o’clock two men came out upon separate towers and sang that there is one God. All the while the desert remained the same dark slate-colour. And then an Arab lighting a cigarette in the street showed by the brilliance of the flame that down below me the night had far progressed.”
And next day I wrote again: “I stayed up on the tower to-night until one star appeared in the same Eton-blue that was melting the rose mountains. There was a chilly wind blowing over a warm town. When the priests came out on to towers and sang that God was One, the lights had already become very clear and golden, where any appeared at all, and some other people that were up there went down, but I stayed where I was to see the last of the mountains.” And later in the evening I added: “The Arabs are giving a dance. A little bunch of them have just come round to the hotel door with a drum, which amounts to an invitation. A rather handsome fellow dressed in fox-skins and bones came up to me outside the door with his tongue hanging out and beating furiously on his drum. I smiled at him, which seemed rather to disappoint him, for he went away with his drum.”
And I also recorded the following conversation with the valet de chambre of the hotel.
“I: ‘Vous avez de moustiques ici.’
“He: ‘Ah, oui.’
“I: ‘Beaucoup?’
“He: ‘Neuf’”
Luckily I did not tell him that I had killed one, for he thought I had said “Vous avez domestiques ici?”
I never lost interest in those sunsets, and wrote to my wife next day: “I thought I would try and tell you what each sunset was like here, but by the third evening I began to fear they would be all alike, rose mountains to the East, black to West and plain pale-brown to the North, and the Desert always dark blue. But to-night, though everyone seemed to think it scarcely worth going to look at so dull an evening, there was an amazing change. The rose mountains were deep grey, the usually dull mountains to the North were dark red, and to the West the hills stood out so clear that you could almost see separate rocks on them, and could make out straggling paths on the sand below them, and encampments of which one had not known before. Huge, dark-grey shapes of storm were striding by on this side of the eastern mountains, going towards the Desert. In the South-West, a good deal shut in by clouds and mountains, an ordinary golden sunset was going on.
“And then there began to appear quite close with extraordinary suddenness the most amazing mountains and coloured rocks. They appeared out of the evening as things appear on the stage, quite suddenly, lit with crude unnatural, violent light. This sunset was beating Chu Chin Cairo even at its own game. A little range of hills that one had not noticed before, lying under the grey and erst-while rose-pink mountains leaped into the colour of peonies, which soon grew deeper and deeper, the whole of the far bank of the river wider than the Nile, which runs down to the Desert and is dry, caught the same glow: the end of a rainbow, mainly pink, stood up like a low tower on the horizon beyond the end of the mountains in the East: just to the right of it a tiny white house or tomb, which we had never seen before, stood vivid on the horizon: the grey shapes that were going past the mountain turned to a purply rose when they came to the rainbow: the little peony hills grew deeper in colour and dimmer, till they seemed to be drifting away by sheer magic to fairyland: then the storm broke over Biskra. I waited to see what the muezzins would do, and soon above the sound of the wind and the rain and the palm-trees swaying their voices came floating.
‘‘When I left, the heads of all the palm-trees in the forest of them were black, and between every two was a grey sheet of rain.
“The Desert was troubled and mostly veiled in orange.
“9-30 p-m.”I’ve just been out to sniff the wind in the street. It is not as cold as it might be and smells pleasant. It will be a change from hotels.”
Next morning I added: “The night always begins here with a parliament of dogs: it ended this morning with drums and that queer reed instrument that wails. There is still much wind. I start for the desert to-morrow morning.”