A Writer's Notebook (57 page)

I've known Mrs. A. for years. She's American and married to a diplomat who had been
en poste
in Petersburg before the war. I met her in Paris the other day. She told me she'd just had an odd experience. It had upset her. She had run across a Russian friend whom she had known rich before the revolution and whose parties she had frequently been to. She was shocked to see her poorly dressed and down at heel. She gave her ten thousand francs to buy herself new clothes which might help her to get a position as a
vendeuse
or something like that. A week later Mrs. A. met her again, but in
the same old frock, the same old hat and the same old shoes. She asked her why she hadn't bought herself a new outfit. The Russian rather shame-facedly told her that every one of her friends was poor and shabby, and she couldn't bear the idea of being the only one among them who was well dressed, so she had invited them all to a grand dinner at the Tour d'Argent and after that they'd gone to
boîte
after
boîte
till every penny was spent. They got home at eight in the morning, broke, tired, but happy. When Mrs. A. went back to the Ritz and told her husband, he was cross with her for wasting the money. “You can't do a thing for people like that,” he said. “They're hopeless.” “Of course he was right,” she said when she told me the story, “and I was mad too, but you know, somehow or other, I can't help having a sort of sneaking admiration for her.” My friend looked at me ruefully. “I feel it shows a spirit that I haven't got and never can have,” she sighed.

Charlie Chaplin. He is of an agreeable exterior. He has a neat figure, admirably proportioned; his hands and feet are well shaped and small. His features are good, the nose rather large, the mouth expressive and the eyes fine. His dark hair, touched with white, is waving and abundant. His movements are singularly graceful. He is shy. His speech has in it still a hint of the Cockney of his early youth. His spirits are ebullient. In a company in which he feels himself at ease he will play the fool with a delightful abandon. His invention is fertile, his vivacity unfailing, and he has a pleasant gift of mimicry: without knowing a word of French or Spanish he will imitate persons speaking in one or the other of those languages with a humorous accuracy which is wildly diverting. He will extemporise dialogues between a couple of women in the Lambeth slums which are at once grotesque and moving. Like all humour they depend on a close observation, and their realism, with all its implications, is tragic; for they suggest too near an
acquaintance with poverty and squalor. Then he will imitate the various performers in a music hall of twenty years ago or the amateurs at a cabman's benefit in a public house on the Walworth Road. But this is mere enumeration: it omits the unbelievable charm that graces all his actions. Charlie Chaplin will keep you laughing for hours on end without effort; he has a genius for the comic. His fun is simple and sweet and spontaneous. And yet all the time you have a feeling that at the back of it all is a profound melancholy. He is a creature of moods and it does not require his facetious assertion: “Gee, I had such a fit of the blues last night I didn't hardly know what to do with myself” to warn you that his humour is lined with sadness. He does not give you the impression of a happy man. I have a notion that he suffers from a nostalgia of the slums. The celebrity he enjoys, his wealth, imprison him in a way of life in which he finds only constraint. I think he looks back to the freedom of his struggling youth, with its poverty and bitter privation, with a longing which knows it can never be satisfied. To him the streets of southern London are the scene of frolic, gaiety and extravagant adventure. They have to him a reality which the well-kept avenues, bordered with trim houses, in which live the rich, can never possess. I can imagine him going into his own house and wondering what on earth he is doing in this strange man's dwelling. I suspect the only home he can ever look upon as such is a second-floor back in the Kennington Road. One night I walked with him in Los Angeles and presently our steps took us into the poorest quarter of the city. There were sordid tenement houses and the shabby, gaudy shops in which are sold the various goods that the poor buy from day to day. His face lit up and a buoyant tone came into his voice as he exclaimed: “Say, this is the real life, isn't it? All the rest is just sham.”

Sarawak. On the horizon was a row of little white clouds, the only clouds in the sky, and they had a curious gaiety. They
looked like a row of ballet girls dressed in white, waiting at the back of the stage, alert and merry, for the curtain to go up.

The sky was grey, and against the greyness hung black, fantastic clouds, and the high sun, breaking through the greyness, touched their summits with silver.

Sunset. Suddenly the rain stopped and the heavy clouds that straggled about the mountain seemed to set upon the sun with the fury of Titans fighting the divine Apollo, and the sun, vanquished but magnificent in its fall, transfigured the black clouds with glory. And they seemed to pause for a moment, as though aghast at the splendour with which the death throes of the god had covered them; and then on a sudden it was night.

The river is broad, yellow and turbid. At the back of the sandy shore grow the casuarinas, and when the breeze stirs their lace-like foliage they make a sound as of people talking. The natives call them talking trees and say that if you stand under them at midnight you will hear voices of unknown people telling you the secrets of the earth.

A green hill. The jungle reached to its crest, an intoxication of verdure, and the luxuriousness was such that it left you breathless and embarrassed. It was a symphony of green, as though a composer working in colour instead of with sound had sought to express something extraordinarily subtle in a barbaric medium. The greens ranged from the pallor of the aquamarine to the profundity of jade. There was an emerald that blared like a trumpet and a pale sage that trembled like a flute.

The yellow river under the breathless sun of midday had the white pallor of death. A native was paddling upstream in a frail dug-out so small that it hardly showed above the surface of the water. On the banks of the river, here and there, were Malay houses on their piles.