Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey Page 21

  My passport expired and I applied to the British Consulate General for a new one, giving my particulars. After a week or two they informed me that I appeared to be a citizen of India and should apply for an Indian passport. I replied that I had been thrown out of India, together with several thousand others, on the reasonable grounds that we were not Indians, but British. In my own case I had been employed with Gurkha troops, where there was a specific agreement between the King of Nepal and the King of England that only British officers should be so employed. The Consul General relented. If I could prove that my father was born in England, he said, they'd agree that I was a citizen of the United Kingdom and give me a passport accordingly. Breathing deeply, I replied that my father had been born in Midnapore, Bengal, India, the son of the Superintendent of Police of the Presidence (then an exclusively British job); who had been born in Kishnagur, Bengal, India, the son of the headmaster of La Martinière School there (then an exclusively British job); who was the son of a man born in Wiltshire, England, in 1773. In manhood this last had gone out to serve his sovereign in oriental climes with the 8th Hussars. The Consul General played his original note again: I appeared to be an Indian, and should apply to the consulate of that country for my passport. I did so, got my Indian passport, and formally abandoned the idea, so long dear to me, that I was an Englishman.

  Judge Rosenman's firm sent me a bill for $100. We paid our first income taxes and celebrated with a bottle of champagne. The tax seemed ludicrously small compared with what the country had given us. I wrote to President Truman, sending him a copy of Nightrunners of Bengal, praising him for his courage in firing General MacArthur, and asking him to turn some of his attention to the graft obviously visible in American public life. MacArthur certainly had the right idea on how to deal with the Korean situation but it was his duty to obey his civilian chiefs, right or wrong, and he didn't.

  On April 12, the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, the Immigration Bureau permanently suspended their order for my deportation. 'I'm in!' I shouted, and hugged my wife.

  'Read on,' she said soberly.

  A few lines lower down the letter advised me that the action taken had to be approved by Congress. 'Christ,' I said miserably. That was how I felt — because I did not know and the Immigration bureaucrats did not think it proper to tell me, that unless Congress acted within six months, the suspension order would stand. In other words, what I needed from the Congress was not action but inaction: this, as anyone knows, is a very different kettle of fish. But I didn't know, and began worrying how I would prod Congress into a favourable vote.

  I was not English then. So what was I?

  I dug myself deeper into The Lotus and the Wind. The Riddle of the Sands is not only a great spy story, it is a wonderful evocation of the mystique of small-boat sailing. Here was a possible second level for my book: but I did not want to make my hero a mountaineer, for I meant to reserve mountaineering for another book, where spying would not muddy the images and problems. I found the second level in my passionate feeling about Central Asia as such. The very names of Samarkand and Bokhara, Yarkand and Pamir have sent electric shivers up my spine since I was ten. I had long since read everything available about the area. Before the war I had corresponded briefly with the great archaeologist and explorer, Sir Aurel Stein, about making an expedition there. In Nightrunners and Deceivers I had written historical novels — that is, I had tried to give a sense of the history of those times, and what it was like to live in them. In The Lotus the historical feel was not so important to me, it was the land that concerned me. I wanted to make Central Asia so strong and real that the reader would recognize it as a part of the story's architecture, not a mere decoration. This would be fitting too, and therefore ought to come out well, because the geography of Central Asia was integral to the plot, as the North German coast is to The Riddle of the Sands. I was going to write not a historical but a geographical novel.

  The appearance of a third level, unbidden, began to alarm me. This was, the nature of mysticism. Davies, the hero of The Riddle of the Sands spends his life alone in small boats. But why? What does he hope to say to himself on his deathbed, that he has achieved? What goes he out for to seek? Some vision? An understanding of God? An understanding of himself? Erskine Childers, his creator, doesn't say.

  Davies falls in love with a girl, and through that stumbles upon the spying plot. Tension grows in him as he realizes that if he uncovers the plot he will ruin the girl. I had tried to follow this pattern but it didn't fit, and my characters had got themselves into a much more complicated situation. My girl, Catherine, said simply: 'I love this man, Robin Savage. I am a normal young woman, affectionate, passionate perhaps, in no way cut off from other women or humanity in general. Therefore I want to marry Robin, settle down, have children, and make a home. He has been hardly treated by the world. No one understands him, but I do (the universal cry of woman). I will so enfold him with love that he will he cured of whatever ails him. He will he happy.'

  But my young man, Robin Savage, said to himself: 'I have to keep searching. For what, I don't know. I have to be alone, stripped of all that encumbers thought. I must be free to move like the wind across the earth. I love this girl — but she terrifies me. The deeper she gets into my heart, with her need for love and a home, the more I fear her, because she will kill me. I am the wind. Hold the wind still, and what happens to it? It dies. She is the lotus, a flower. Tell the flower to follow the wind, throw it up in the wind, and what happens to it? It dies.'

  I wished to God Robin and Catherine would get back in the channels I had cut out for them, and behave themselves. These problems were too deep for me: on the one hand I believed it was my duty to find an answer to them, on the other they were clearly unanswerable. It was extremely difficult, on technical grounds alone, to weld the three levels of my book into a single whole. I had set up a target and was now finding it beyond the range of my weapons. A miss on one side would fall into mawkishness, or plain confusion, since mystics are as difficult to write about as to understand; a miss on the other side would produce a spy story whose clean lines were blurred by pointless philosophising.

  But who knew what the limit of my range was? I certainly did not. It might increase all the time, with trying. Besides, I had no choice. I had to write the story as it now revealed itself, or not at all.

  Summer drew on. We left the children with friends in Rockland County and took of for two weeks' camping and walking, starting in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After rain on the Dry River Trail, rain on Webster Cliff and Lake of the Clouds, and rain at Arethusa Falls, we moved north to the National Park of Mt Desert island, behind Bar Harbor, Maine.

  It was mid-week, early in the season, and the camp ground was deserted when we arrived. We put up the tent in a grove of pines beside the sea. A bell buoy clanged eerily a hundred yards out and seagulls floated past on long wings, black-tipped against the pale light. A jalopy arrived, bearing a man in late middle age and two teenage boys. The car had New York licence plates, and as we lit our fire we surreptitiously watched the efforts of the newcomers to set up their tent. The grove echoed with Brooklyn oaths, complaints and orders, but the tent did not rise. Barbara and I whispered to each other. Should we offer to help? Would we be intruding on their privacy, or would we be acting as 'good neighbours'? The man solved the problem by coming over and asking us where he could find water and firewood. I thought from his accent that he was a first generation immigrant, probably Greek. We soon had their tent up and a fire started. The younger boy began piling it high enough to set fire to the grove, but I stopped him and suggested we have a big one later. We showed them how to protect the tent against heavy rain in the night, while Barbara cooked a meal for all of us. After supper we sprawled hack, talking, and although nothing of note was said, we were deeply moved. The man he was indeed Greek-American — had been saving for years so that one day he could close his store and take his boys into the wilderness — their w
ilderness, for they were Americans born. The 'old lady' was staying at home, anxiously convinced that her men would be eaten by bears. The firelight shone in the man's grey eves and wrinkled face, on his thin shoes and faded town clothes — 'This is their country,' he said, 'This belongs to them, right? They gotta know about it, right? But did we have a night last night!'

  All talking at once, they told us: they'd been rained out, the tent had collapsed, no one had slept for mysterious howls, thumps, and moans... but it was all worth it, and now they'd met us, and we'd shown them how, and told them where to go, and everything was going to be fine.

  I felt humble that so much had come to me so comparatively easily; but in a small way we could share our portion that night, and we sat up late talking over the fire in the grove, by the sea. I envied the boys that these were their first nights in the open. I was younger than either of them when I first slept out under the loom of the Wiltshire downs, with a dead pigeon for tomorrow's breakfast clutched in my hand and a loaf of bread crumbling somewhere in the blanket in which I had rolled myself. Since then two thousand nights I had lain down to sleep under the sky, in England, France, Iraq, Persia, Syria, India and Burma, on mountains, by rivers, in deserts, under all the Asian stars, in the thunders of the monsoon and the oven wind of the Euphrates night. They had all been wonderful — but they had not been the first.

  In the morning we parted as friends, and Barbara and I climbed Cadillac Mountain in a thick fog. The view from the top extended twenty feet in all directions. Far to the west we could not see Mt Washington. Two miles directly below us we could not see Bar Harbor. We could not see the Atlantic horizon a hundred and more miles away to the east and south. To the north, Mt Katahdin, where we were going, would have to await our inspection till we reached it... which we did the next day. The sun's rays touch the summit of Katahdin before any other place in the United States; but not the day we climbed it. A dense fog settled on the mountain five minutes after we left Chimney Pond camp for the walk up the Cathedral Trail. It saved me money, at that: the two photographs I took from the top of Cadillac also served as views from Katandin.

  On the way south to pick up the children we spent a couple of days on the Appalachian Trail above Berlin, New Hampshire. The Androscoggin was a wide and lovely river there, but its waters were brown-tinged and vile-smelling from the acids the paper companies dumped into them, and it took half an hour's climbing to leave the stink behind. Then we were in the pines. The bad weather had gone and when we went to bed in the Trident shelter the sky was clear, and a warm slow wind stirred the low bushes around the tent. I awoke at three in the morning to a dying moon and the sound of a small animal scratching somewhere close by. But that was not what had awakened me. I heard then a steady beat, a deep breathing to the south. It reminded me of the breathing of the ocean that I had heard so many years before in Cornwall, but this was faster and more regular. Then an owl called, faint and far, a long hollow, quavering call in a minor key, and I understood. It was not an owl, nor the ocean, but a steam engine. I awakened Barbara and we sat up in the shelter mouth smoking a cigarette while far down in the darkness the locomotive laboured a heavy Grand Trunk freight up the Androscoggin valley, Montreal-bound. The exhaust beat grew louder, stronger, though always hollowed and blurred by our remoteness on the mountain above. We watched the searchlight creep up the valley, and at the unseen crossings heard the long mournful owl call of the whistle. That call has always cried America! to me, ever since I first heard it at Kingman, Arizona, on a Santa Fe express grinding in out of a Mojave blizzard in a winter night of 1938. Now, on the New Hampshire ridge, we felt that the engine down there was calling to us, 'This is home... home hoooome.'

  On our way to New City we spent a night in Brattleboro, Vermont. In the evening we drove up the hill on the west side of the town and had a look at Naulakha, Kipling's house. We did not want to inconvenience the present owners, so did not make a call but parked in the narrow road and peered through the hedge at the house, some way up the hill. It was a big house, but the first thing that struck us was its exact resemblance to an Indian hill-station bungalow. Its very presence turned Brattleboro into Simla, the Green Mountains into the Himalayas, and a passing New Englander into a Bhotia shepherd, complete with dog. I stood a long time, staring, for Kipling did much of his best work here, and for a time seemed to be going to make America his home. Was I, too, to write about India on American soil, and then, called by heaven knew what primal need, return to my native land? Except that England wasn't my native land... nor Kipling's, come to that. He was born in Bombay.

  We returned to Mystic. I settled down in my working routine: at my desk at 9 a.m. every day; work till 12; lunch; nap; work and 'administration' until 4 (tea); play till 6; Martinis.

  The Lotus and the Wind grew and became stronger. The children turned brown in sun and wind. As I poured a first Martini Barbara told me that the Giants had won again. We settled back in our chairs and told ourselves, This is it! This is what it's going to be like the rest of our lives.

  We said the words, and tried to feel them, but it wouldn't come out right. Something was wrong. What?

  We tried to analyse our feeling, but spoke cautiously and with circumlocutions, for it was impossible to admit even to each other that there might be a flaw in the vision that had sent us to this gem of a house beside the sea. Yet some facts could not be concealed. Both our children were bright, and deserved the best possible education; but the local school system was considerably worse than the one in Rockland County. Then, the atmosphere of the little town was more formalized than we liked. People owned fine houses and accepted a gracious way of life as a worthwhile object in itself. There was a noticeable anti-Semitism and narrow-mindedness, both particularly oppressive to us after the far-ranging acceptance and scope of Rockland County. The general attitude was summed up for us in the Daughters of the American Revolution, who were strong in Mystic. This is a society of women claiming descent from someone who fought in the American Revolution (on the American side, it was sometimes necessary to add). In many ways the D.A.R. were entirely praiseworthy, but although they were American, they denied the same status to the recent immigrant; they certainly weren't revolutionary; which left 'Daughters' as the only word defining them. Of this they were proud; but I did not feel that they were proud of their forefathers because they were unkempt farmers and hunters, fighting for individual freedom against the strongest power in the world, but because their early arrival on the American shores was taken to confer a patent of aristocracy on their descendants. We had not come to the United States in search of the aristocratic ideal; we had seen that system working, and pretty well, in England.

  Then a neighbour advised us not to paint our shutters blue 'because that's the colour the Italians paint them'. A day later, some aura of dissatisfaction having apparently become visible to others before we ourselves could isolate it, we were asked, should we ever consider selling our house, not to sell it to a Jew or (a laugh at the unthinkable) a Negro. On that occasion I asked the speaker whether she would prefer us to sell to John Dillinger, but did not pursue the matter further. That night I said, 'I've a damned good mind to give the house to Jackie Robinson.'

  'Not him,' Barbara said tartly. 'It's far too good for any Dodger. Give it to Willie Mays.' (Jackie Robinson was the first Negro to be permitted to play major-league baseball. He was brilliant — but a Dodger. Willie was also black — but ours.)

  Racial prejudice is not the worst sin in the world. Some peoples, notably the Jews and the English, could not have survived without a heavy endowment of it. Our neighbours in Mystic were honest, generous, hard-working, and essentially worth-while to humanity and the United States. But each man's shoe rubs in a different spot, depending on the peculiarities of his feet. I had been driven out of a country where we still had much work to do, and where we would have been welcome to stay and finish it if it hadn't been for our attitude of racial superiority and the social snubbing based on it. I ow
ed my life and reputation to coloured people, and for hours on end had shared holes in the ground with them, fighting a common enemy, who was sometimes white, sometimes coloured. I was taught race prejudice under the guise of race pride. I had grown out of it. I did not want to have anything more to do with it.

  A little later I succeeded in isolating our original mistake, and saw that it was not ours, but mine. In the list of limitations which theoretically narrowed our total freedom I had not given enough weight to the most important: people. A house by the sea may be all very well, but people are a man's best friends. We had no wish to alter the way these people lived their lives in this corner of Connecticut, but nor had we any sense that we could usefully share in it. Barbara had felt this in our original discussion, and now she could have said, 'I told you so.' But she didn't. Instead, when I asked rhetorically, 'Where are our people then?' we both answered with one voice, 'Rockland County, New York.'

  Next day I telephoned Laura Auberjonois, who acted as a house agent on the side. She said, 'Boy, are you lucky! Helen Eustis has just put her house on the market, at a very reasonable price, with five and a half acres.' We had met Helen once (she had written Horizontal Man a few years earlier), but knew her house from the outside only. It was an old red farm house just off the east end of South Mountain Road, about two miles from Eleanor Hope's house, and in the same school district. This meant that we could simply drop back into the same circle of friends we had left in April. The house would be available in November.