A Writer's Notebook (35 page)

Amiens. There are nearly as many English people here as in Boulogne, and great ladies drive about in huge motor-cars and visit the sick and conduct hospitals. I was told an agreeable story of one of them. A train-load of wounded had just come from the front and the wounded were placed temporarily in the hospital at the station. A lady went round giving them hot soup. Presently she came to a man who had been shot through the gullet and the lungs; she was just about to give him soup when the doctor in charge told her that if she did she would
drown
him. “What do you mean?” she said. “Of course he must have soup. It can't possibly do him any harm.” “I've been in practice a great many years and through three campaigns,” answered the doctor, “and my professional opinion is that if you give that man soup he'll die.” The lady grew very impatient. “What nonsense,” she said. “You give him soup on your own responsibility,” said the doctor. She held a cup to the man's mouth, who tried to swallow, and promptly died. The lady was furious with the doctor: “You've killed that man,” she said. “Pardon me,” he answered, “you killed him. I told you what would happen.”

The landlord of the hotel at Steenvoorde. He is quite a character, a Fleming, cautious, slow, heavy and stout, with round eyes, a round nose, and a round face, a man of forty-five perhaps; he does not welcome the arriving guest, but puts obstacles in the way of his taking a room or having dinner and has to be persuaded to provide him with what he wants; when he has overcome his instinctive mistrust of the stranger, he is friendly. He has a childlike sense of humour, heavy and slow as himself, with a feeling for the practical joke; and he has a fat, tardy laugh. Now that he has come to know me, though still a little suspicious, he is pleasant and affable. When I said to him:
“Votre café est bien bon, patron,”
he answered elliptically:
“C'est lui qui le boit qui l'est.”
He speaks in a broad accent, mixing up chaotically the second person singular and
the second person plural. He reminds one of those donors of altar pieces that you see in old Flemish pictures; and his wife might be the donor's wife; she is a large woman, with a stern, unsmiling, lined face, a rather alarming creature; but now and then you feel that there is the Flemish humour behind her severity, and sometimes I have heard her laugh heartily at the discomfiture of some offending person. The first day I arrived here, when I was persuading the patron to give me dinner, he went to ask his wife if it was possible.
“Il faut bien que je la demande,”
he said,
“puisque je couche avec.”

I enjoyed myself at Steenvoorde. It was cold and uncomfortable. It was impossible to get a bath. The food was poor. The work was hard and tedious. But what a delight it was to have no responsibility! I had no decisions to make. I did what I was told, and having done it my time was my own. I could waste it with a clear conscience. Till then I had always thought it so precious that I could not afford uselessly to waste a minute. I was obsessed by the ideas that seethed in my head and the desire to express them. There was so much I wanted to learn, so many places I wanted to see, so many experiences I felt I couldn't afford to miss; but the years were passing and time was short. I was never without a sense of responsibility. To what? Well, I suppose to myself and to such gifts as I had, desiring to make the most both of them and of myself. And now I was free. I enjoyed my liberty. There was a sensual, almost a voluptuous, quality in the pleasure of it. I could well understand it when I was told of certain men that they were having the time of their lives in the war. I don't know if there's such a word as hebetude in English, but if there is that's the state I so thoroughly enjoyed.

We were sitting in a wine shop in Capri when Norman came in and told us that T. was about to shoot himself. We were startled. Norman said that when T. told him what he was going to do he could think of no reason to dissuade him. “Are you going to do anything about it?” I asked. “No.” He ordered a bottle of wine and sat down to await the sound of the shot.

Liverpool to New York. Mrs. Langtry was on board. We neither of us knew anybody so we spent much of our time together. I had never known her well before. She still had a fine figure and a noble carriage, and if you were walking behind her you might have taken her for a young woman. She told me she was sixty-six. Her eyes, which they say were so beautiful, were much smaller than one would have expected, and their blue, once intense, I believe, was pale. The only remains of her beauty were her short upper lip and her engaging smile. She used very little make-up. Her manner was easy, unaffected and well-bred; it was that of a woman of the world who has always lived in good society.

She made one remark which I think is the proudest thing I ever heard a woman say. The name of Freddy Gebhardt recurred frequently in her conversation one day, and I, to whom it was new, at last asked who he was. “You mean to say you've never heard of Freddy Gebhardt?” she cried with real astonishment. “Why, he was the most celebrated man in two hemispheres.” “Why?” I inquired. “Because I loved him,” she answered.

She told me that during her first season in London she had
only two evening dresses, and one of these was a day dress which by the pulling out of a string could be arranged for wearing at night. She told me that in those days no woman made up, and her advantage was the brilliant colouring that she had by nature. The excitement she caused was so intense that when she went to the livery stable to mount her hired horse to ride in the park they had to shut the gates to keep out the crowd.

She told me that she had been very much in love with the Crown Prince Rudolf, and he had given her a magnificent emerald ring. One evening they had a quarrel, and in the course of it she snatched his ring off her finger and threw it in the fire. With a cry he flung himself down on his knees and scrabbled out (this was the word she used) the burning coals to save the valuable stone. Her short upper lip curled scornfully as she related the incident. “I couldn't love him after that,” she said.

I saw her two or three times after we arrived in New York. She was mad about dancing and went nearly every night to a dance hall. She said the men danced beautifully and you only had to pay them fifty cents. It gave me a nasty turn to hear her say this so blandly. The notion of this woman who had had the world at her feet paying a man half a dollar to dance with her filled me with shame.

Honolulu. The Union Saloon. You get to it by a narrow passage from King Street, and in the passage are offices so that thirsty souls may be supposed bound for one of these just as well as for the bar. It is a large square room with three entrances, and opposite the bar two corners have been partitioned off into little cubicles. Legend states that they were built so that King Kalakaua might go and drink without being seen by his subjects. In one of these he may have sat over his bottle, a bronze potentate, with R.L.S., discussing the misdeeds of missionaries and the inhibitions of Americans. The saloon is wainscoted with dark brown wood to about five feet from the
floor, and above, the wall is papered with a varied assortment of pictures. They are an odd collection. Prints of Queen Victoria, a portrait in oils, in a rich gold frame, of King Kalakaua, old line engravings of the eighteenth century (there is one after a theatrical picture by Dewilde, heaven knows how it got there), oleographs from the Christmas supplements of the
Graphic
and
Illustrated London News
of twenty years ago, advertisements of whisky, gin, champagne and beer, photographs of baseball teams and of native orchestras. Behind the bar serve two large half-castes, in white, fat, clean-shaven, dark-skinned, with thick curly hair and large, bright eyes.

Here gather American men of business, sailors, not able seamen, but captains, engineers and first mates, storekeepers and kanakas. Business of all sorts is done here. The place has a vaguely mysterious air and you can imagine that it would be a fit scene for shady transactions. In the daytime the light is dim and at night the electric light is cold and sinister.

The Chinese quarter. Streets of frame houses, one, two, three storeys high, painted in various colours, but time and weather have made the colours dingy. They have a dilapidated look as though the leases were running out and it was worth no tenant's while to make repairs. In the stores is every imaginable article of Western and Eastern commerce. The Chinese clerks sit impassive within the shops and stare idly at the passers-by. Sometimes, at night, you see a pair, yellow, lined, with slanting eyes, intent on a mysterious game which might be the Chinese equivalent of chess. They are surrounded by onlookers as intense as they, and they take an immense time between each move, calculating deeply.