A Writer's Notebook (64 page)

The cool of the evening. The air is soft and limpid. You have an extreme sense of well-being. Your imagination is pleasantly but not exhaustingly occupied with image after image. You have the sense of freedom of a disembodied spirit.

Macassar Harbour. The sun sets magnificently, yellow, then red and purple; and in the distance grown over with coconut trees floats in radiance. You try to think how to describe the dazzling spectacle. Its splendour a little unnerves you and you feel a bit wabbly about the knees, but at the same time it fills your heart with its own glory and if you could sing you would burst into song. The Quintet in the
Meistersinger?
No, a Gregorian chant. It is a death in which there is no sorrow, but only fulfilment. Eastern cities can best offer you, their harbours with shipping, tramps, passenger-boats, schooners with an exotic air (something in them still of the galleons which first entered those distant waters) and fishing-smacks; that, the sunrise and the sunset.

T. He is a dug-out who after the war came out to Ceylon to be the secretary of a club on the strength of having run a regimental mess. He is a short stumpy man with legs very much too short for a long body. He looks absurd in very wide trousers and a long loose homespun coat, both much the worse for wear. He gives you the impression that he was a cavalryman, but in point of fact he was in the K.O.Y.L.I. His hair is dark and thin and plastered down on his skull, but he has an enormous flowing and luxuriant moustache. He prides himself on playing bridge very well, and criticises everyone with whom he plays. He is fond of talking of the titled persons he has known and of the generals and field-marshals with whom he was hail-fellow-well-met.

The Snatcher. He is a man of little more than fifty, but he looks very old and frail. He is bald and his hair and moustache are white. He has a very red thick nose. When he is seated you have the impression of a little hunched-up man, and when he stands up you are surprised to see that he is more than commonly tall. He is a great fisherman and talks incessantly of his pursuit. He generally has flies in his pockets. He is much interested in butterflies and is bringing out a book on the butterflies of Ceylon. He drinks a great deal and talks willingly of the drinking-bouts in which he has taken part. I don't know why he is called the Snatcher.

The Jungle. There is a moment just before sundown when the trees in the jungle seem to detach themselves from the great mass of forest and become individuals; then you cannot
see the wood for the trees. In the magic of the hour they appear to gain life of a new kind so that you can almost imagine that they enclose spirits and with the sunset will be capable of changing their places. You feel that at some uncertain moment a strange thing will happen to them and they will be fantastically transformed. Then the night comes, the moment has passed, and once more the jungle takes them back; the trees again become part of the wood and they are still and silent.

A planter's house. The two-storey bungalow is placed on the crest of a little hill and it is surrounded by a garden in which are lawns of some sort of coarse herbage, bright yellow cannas, hibiscus and flowering shrubs. Behind the bungalow is a huge tree with red flowers. From the veranda there is a long narrow view of hill planted with rubber. There is a small formal drawing-room at the back, but the living-room is a large open veranda, furnished with estate furniture, large chairs, with extensions for the legs, cane chairs, a table or two, and some shelves in which are cheap and ragged editions of vapid novels. The bedrooms are upstairs; they are very poorly furnished with iron beds, painted deal chests-of-drawers and a washstand with broken crockery which does not match. At meals the glass is coarse, the plate is shabby, and the crockery is of the cheapest kind. The dinner is elaborate, with soup, fish, roast and sweet, but everything is badly cooked and served in a slovenly and unappetising fashion.

Rangoon. They were father and son, both skippers of tramps belonging to a Chinese firm. The father idolised his trim, smart, handsome boy and was horrified when he fell in love with a Burmese girl, but not just in love, head over ears in love. He was infatuated. He went native, began to smoke opium and eventually lost his job. The older man got the idea
that the girl had cast a spell over the boy and determined to save him. One day she was found drowned. No one knew how she had come by her death, but everyone believed that the father was responsible. The boy was broken-hearted. He went all to pieces, and the passionate affection that he had had for his father turned to a deadly hatred.

Mandalay by moonlight. The white gateways are flooded with silver and the erections above them are shot with silhouetted glimpses of the sky. The effect is ravishing. The moat in Mandalay is one of the minor beauties of the world. It has not the sublimity of Kilauea nor the spectacular picturesque of the Lake of Como, it has not the swooning loveliness of the coastline of a South Pacific island, nor the austere grandeur of parts of the Peloponnesus, but it has a beauty which you can take hold of and enjoy and make your own. It is a beauty which does not carry you off your feet, but which can give you constant delight. Those other beauties need the frame of mind to be enjoyed and appreciated, but this is a beauty suited to all seasons and all moods. It is like Herrick's poems, which you can take up with pleasure when you are out of humour for the
Inferno
or
Paradise Lost
.

F. He is a big fat man, with scanty grey hair, but his red face is unlined and round, so that he looks sometimes almost boyish. He has a small grey toothbrush moustache. His teeth are very bad, and the only one you see, a long yellow one in the middle of his mouth, hangs loosely and looks as if it would come out with a sharp pull. His face is shiny with sweat. In mufti he wears a khaki suit, a tennis shirt with a loose open collar and no tie. He has a game leg caused by a bad wound during the war and walks with a pronounced limp. His only interest in life is horses. He speaks of them as skins and talks
of nothing else all day long. He races a great deal, keeping his own ponies, and is a byword, for he never wins a race. He is jovial and hearty, but gives you the impression that he is up to all the tricks of the race-track and would hesitate at little to bring off a coup.