Hot Countries (30 page)

And yet, perhaps, it is in that way, anonymously, that one should return to a city so vast that one can be free in it. You can do what you like in London because no one in London has the time to wonder what you are doing. It may be that that is so also in Berlin and Paris and Vienna. Probably it is. I do not know them well enough to tell. Only in London and New York have I ever been without the uncomfortable sensation of living in a glass house. One has no private life. One is under constant observation. Even in Tahiti, where
one can do what one likes, everybody knows what one is doing. London is big enough to mind its own affairs. And as the train rattled through Hampshire I felt that this was the way in which one should come back: in a breakfast car surrounded by the clatter of many courses, among people who seemed to have spent the last fortnight in precisely the same way, though as likely as not the experiences of each person in that car were as diverse and varied as my own. That is, I suppose, one of the paradoxes of the English, that about the most personal and individual race in the world should give the impression of having been turned out to pattern.

I drove straight from Waterloo along the Embankment, up Regent Street, towards my club. The porter received me as though I had never been away. His “Good morning, sir,” had its invariable intonation of respectful and indifferent welcome. The boy who took my trunks and suit-cases from the cab cast no inquisitive eye upon the labels. I walked into the club. It was a little after nine. Breakfasts were still being served. There was only one man in the reading-room. I knew him fairly well. We would exchange the conventionalities of small talk two or three times a week. And once a month or so we would sit next each other at lunch or dinner. He must have known I had been away. But he had taken as little count of it as he had of such other things as we may have heard of one another, but to which it would never have occurred to us to refer. In a London club you leave your private life with your hat and overcoat in the hall. He turned his head as I came up to him.

“Ah, Waugh,” he said, “there's something I wanted to ask you. I was thinking of getting a first edition of
Avowals.
How much ought I to give for it?”

“Three guineas,” I suggested, and I sat beside him, and for half an hour or so we talked of limited and first editions.

And later, after he had gone, and I had settled myself in a corner chair with a pile of newspapers beside me, it was with the same feeling of having always been there that I turned the pages of the
Tatler.
The same people were being photographed in the same company. The gossip column was filled
with familiar names. The same parties, the same guests. In the literary page I saw that the same authors were producing the same books with the same measure of success. Nothing had changed. I might never have been away.

§

“Does London seem very strange,” I was once asked. “when you've been so long away? Does it seem smaller, when you've been so many miles from it?”

“You see it differently,” I said.

Or rather, you see it against a different background. In the same way that by reading history you have a standard for the political columns of the daily newspaper, and by reading the literatures of France and Rome and Greece you have a standard for that of your own country, by travel you come to see from a different angle the stir and conflict of London. Which is not to say that London seems any the less important.

There are people who will say that London does not matter, that London is not England, that Manchester is England, that Sussex is England, but that London is not England. Though what else it is, considering the number of Englishmen who inhabit it, I have been unable to discover. The provincialism of such a contention is surely as narrow as that of those few Londoners whose world is bounded by a few streets, a few houses, a few names, to whom no one unestablished within that circle matters, whose scale of values does not recognise the existence of those huge spheres of commerce and administration which develop and safeguard the interests of the country.

Travel does not make London seem either small or strange. On the contrary, there are sides of London life whose stature is infinitely increased by travel. You cannot travel through the Antilles and Australia and Malaya without feeling how immensely important is the headpiece that directs this vast and varied Empire. For that is what London is. To London come the best brains of England, and from London come the ideas that are to control those immense tracts of land, those haphazard minglings of warring nations, those young peoples
of the new world that are rising to significance. London is the administrative centre. It is hard to exaggerate the value of what that section of London that is representative of England's larger interest thinks and feels and says.

§

It is oneself chiefly that travel alters. It gives one an “other-worldliness,” the kind of “other-worldliness” that at Oxford comes to one through “Greats.” For it is not possible to linger among those green islands whither no newspapers ever come, where life follows its tranquil course, indifferent to what is happening in Europe and America, without wondering whether anything really matters beyond the setting of oneself in harmony with those eternal forces of birth and growth and ultimate decay that weave their gracious pattern by the palm-fringed beaches. Of this I am very sure, that whatever may lie ahead of me of success and failure, of happiness and disappointment, I shall have to counsel me against too ready a surrender to the moment's mood, the memory of that little island to which no echo of our western turmoil can ever reach.

In the same way that the shepherds recall by the site of Uricon “the Roman and his trouble,” I shall remember the long curve of that little harbour with the nestling schooners and the painted bungalows, and across the lagoon the many pinnacles of its sister isle. I shall remember the gentle manners of its people, the dark-skinned Polynesians, the French officials, the Chinese traders. I shall remember their soft singing and the glimmer on the water at nightfall of the torches by which they fish. I shall remember their cool verandahs, the red and white of the hibiscus, the yellow amanda flower and the purple of the bougainvillea. I shall remember how the sun shines and the earth is fertile and nobody is sad.

And I shall know that were I to return there, I should find the same merrily laughing group drawn up along the wharf. They would know nothing of how life had fared for me in Europe. The things that make for one's reception here, the
opinion of one's fellows, the sales of one's books, one's prices from the magazines, one's quarter or half column notices in the Sunday Press would count for nothing to one returning to that green island.

There would be the hailing of a remembered face. “
Ia ora na,”
they would shout to me. They would wave their hands. There would be a drifting towards the café, a laughing together over ice-cream sodas. And after the sun had set, a miracle of golden lilac behind Moorea, there would be a wandering to the Chinese restaurant for a chop suey, with afterwards a riding out along the beach with the moon shining upon the palm trees, and the warm air scented with the white bloom of the tiare. There would be the singing, the laughter and the dancing, a sense of unity with primæval forces.

And ultimately that is, I suppose, what death will prove to be: a stepping away from what is transient into the waveless calm of an eternal rhythm.

In a travel book such as this, I feel that footnotes could only be an inconvenience to the reader. So I have let the section about Haiti stand without any quoting of authorities.

The bibliography of Haiti is not long. Anyone who cares to spend a few hours in the British Museum reading-room will be in a position to dispute my interpretation of those facts one can be sure of. They are not many. Vaissiére's
Saint Domingue
is a scholarly study of the island's life up till 1789. But from then onwards the historian has to rely very largely upon guesswork. The documents on which accurate conclusions might be based do not exist. Lothrop Stoddard has written a careful and dramatic account of the years 1789-1803. But he has had necessarily to base his opinions on French official documents. He had no means of seeing the other side of the picture. With the surrender of Rochambeau and the massacre of the white, planters, darkness descends. There is no impartial witness. The various histories of Haiti have been written by men with an axe to grind: by French colonials trying to explain their failure; by mulattoes concerned with an attempt to attribute the island's misfortunes to black mismanagement; by negroes blaming those misfortunes upon mulatto weakness; by mulatto and negro apologists who denied that there were any misfortunes to be blamed on anyone; by Englishmen who were terrified lest the Jamaicans should follow the example of their neighbours; by casual tourists who accepted the testimony of the first history they picked up; by Americans who approved and Americans who opposed Washington's interference. The most balanced history is H. P. Davis'
Black Democracy.

In the outline of Haitian history that I have sketched I have relied upon that evidence that seemed to me least partial: in particular upon the Nugent papers in the Jamaican Institute.

They have not, as far as I know, been quoted from before, and my gratitude is very great to Mr. Frank Cundall and his assistants, who helped me to find a path through them. The official English in Jamaica were relatively independent and well informed. Colbert's despatches to Nugent and Nugent's to Hobart are the honest expressions of opinion of men who stood above the battle. But they are quite likely to have been mistaken. One has to accept out of one's general knowledge of the period, of the country, of negro and mulatto characteristics what appears most probable. There is, for instance, no proof that Christophe was concerned in the murder of Dessalines. I do not believe, however, that Christophe, had he been innocent, would have protested his innocence so indignantly and so self-righteously.

Throughout I have used the word ‘coloured' in the West Indian sense of half-caste, and the word ‘Creole' in its original sense of ‘born in and native to the colonies.' The word has nothing to do with colour. There were black, white and mulatto Creoles.

¹
The actual
chica
is a slightly different dance, somewhat similar to the Hula-hula. The couples do not touch each other as they dance.

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © Alec Waugh
First published 1930 by Chapman & Hall Ltd.
The moral right of author has been asserted
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication
(or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital,
optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written
permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
ISBN: 9781448200092
eISBN: 9781448201419
Visit
www.bloomsburyreader.com
to find out more about our authors and their books
You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can
sign up for
newsletters
to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers