African and European Addresses | Page 3

So they sit tight, and pretend they
are not listening, and feast their ears on the wonderful
syllables--Ankobar, Kabul, Peshawur, Annam, Nyassaland, Kerman,
Serengetti, Tanganika, and many others. On these beautiful syllables
must their imaginations feed, for that which is told is as nothing at all.
Adventure there is none, romance there is none, mention of high
emprise there is none. Adventure, romance, high emprise have to these
men somehow lost their importance. Perhaps such things have been to
them too common--as well mention the morning egg. Perhaps they
have found that there is no genuine adventure, no real romance except
over the edge of the world where the rainbow stoops.
The bus rattles in and rattles out again. It takes the fresh-faced young
men down past the inner harbour to where lie the tall ships waiting.

They and their cargo of exuberance, of hope, of energy, of thirst for the
bubble adventure, the rainbow romance, sail away to where these wares
have a market. And the quiet men glide away to the North. Their wares
have been marketed. The sleepy, fierce, passionate, sunny lands have
taken all they had to bring. And have given in exchange? Indifference,
ill-health, a profound realization that the length of days are as nothing
at all; a supreme agnosticism as to the ultimate value of anything that a
single man can do, a sublime faith that it must be done, the power to
concentrate, patience illimitable; contempt for danger, disregard of
death, the intention to live; a final, weary estimate of the fact that mere
things are as unimportant here as there, no matter how quaintly or
fantastically they are dressed or named, and a corresponding emptiness
of anticipation for the future--these items are only a random few of the
price given by the ancient lands for that which the northern races bring
to them. What other alchemical changes have been wrought only these
lean and weary men could know--if they dared look so far within
themselves. And even if they dared, they would not tell.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In old days before the "improvements."

II.
THE FAREWELL.
We boarded ship, filled with a great, and what seemed to us, an
unappeasable curiosity as to what we were going to see. It was not a
very big ship, in spite of the grandiloquent descriptions in the
advertisements, or the lithograph wherein she cut grandly and evenly
through huge waves to the manifest discomfiture of infinitesimal
sailing craft bobbing alongside. She was manned entirely by Germans.
The room stewards waited at table, cleaned the public saloons, kept the
library, rustled the baggage, and played in the band. That is why we
took our music between meals. Our staterooms were very tiny indeed.
Each was provided with an electric fan; a totally inadequate and rather

aggravating electric fan once we had entered the Red Sea. Just at this
moment we paid it little attention, for we were still in full enjoyment of
sunny France, where, in our own experience, it had rained two months
steadily. Indeed, at this moment it was raining, raining a steady, cold,
sodden drizzle that had not even the grace to pick out the surface of the
harbour in the jolly dancing staccato that goes far to lend attraction to a
genuinely earnest rainstorm.
Down the long quay splashed cabs and omnibuses, their drivers
glistening in wet capes, to discharge under the open shed at the end
various hasty individuals who marshalled long lines of porters with
astonishing impedimenta and drove them up the gang-plank. A
half-dozen roughs lounged aimlessly. A little bent old woman with a
shawl over her head searched here and there. Occasionally she would
find a twisted splinter of wood torn from the piles by a hawser or
gouged from the planking by heavy freight, or kicked from the floor by
the hoofs of horses. This she deposited carefully in a small covered
market basket. She was entirely intent on this minute and rather
pathetic task, quite unattending the greatness of the ship, or the many
people the great hulk swallowed or spat forth.
Near us against the rail leaned a dark-haired young Englishman whom
later every man on that many-nationed ship came to recognize and to
avoid as an insufferable bore. Now, however, the angel of good
inspiration stooped to him. He tossed a copper two-sou piece down to
the bent old woman. She heard the clink of the fall, and looked up
bewildered. One of the waterside roughs slouched forward. The
Englishman shouted a warning and a threat, indicating in pantomime
for whom the coin was intended. To our surprise that evil-looking
wharf rat smiled and waved his hand reassuringly, then took the old
woman by the arm to show her where the coin had fallen. She hobbled