# Solo/Chapter 6

From ship to ship, from ocean to ocean, from land to land, waiting for ballast, tides, charters, and crews, wandering through jungles, loafing in water-side bars, rubbing shoulders with beach-combers, drinking tea with muslin-frocked ladies, inspecting temples and volcanoes, museums and graveyards, ambling through bazaars, riding donkeys and elephants, tossing pennies to naked beggar-boys from fragile jinrickshas, patronizingly interested in the monuments of bygone dynasties, abnormally condescending to lemon-squashes and mangoes, exploring, sampling, summing up—the cheek of it all!
For five years Paul had watched the world expand. New civilizations revealed themselves; swarms of aliens paraded for him, while he stored his mind with impressions. Then, days or weeks later, as his ship headed for the sea, the civilization last under inspection would dwindle into a grey shore-line, and only his own mind be left to bear witness that it even existed. The more he saw of the globe, the more he felt its unreality and his own incontrovertible existence in time and space. The one stable phenomenon in the universe was his ego, and that had merely the stability of a moon-drawn, wind-agitated ocean.
In the long periods of isolation he had read hundreds of books and spent hours in meditation. Year by year, he saw himself changing from a boy whom he intimately ​knew into a stalwart man whom he was at a loss to understand. When the daily routine was accomplished, when he sat apart or walked in unexplored directions, he was conscious of crossing a threshold that no one but himself ever crossed, and entering into the chambers of his own identity. Having done this he would sigh, but not merely in relief at having eluded the world; the sigh breathed a hint of despair, for, as the shelves of his mind grew heavy with impressions he was aghast at the chaos.
Each book, each acquaintance, each glimpse of the world added its quota to the store-house; hence each introspective interval had to be devoted to the task of overhauling and re-sorting. He could find no comprehensive system in accordance with which to group his opinions, tastes, and bundles of information, for, no matter how carefully he tucked and patted and squeezed, there were stray ends and overlappings and bulges; the interior was colourful beyond description, but far from shipshape. It was a library without a catalogue.
Blindly he attributed the confusion to lack of schooling, and in weak moments rued lost opportunities. Then, in some casual encounter ashore, he would find himself able to correct school or even university-taught men who had little but skeletonic theories with which to match his full-blooded facts. In the hope of reducing the facts to tabulation he would plunge again into text-books. These had their uses, but gave him no clue to the mental and emotional transformation going on within him.
Unhappily there was no one of his own age with whom he could talk upon any but the most elementary topics. When books failed, he could only resort to physical diversions, and at sea these were limited in kind. There had been a few friends, notably an apprentice from an English barque whom he had met in Hong Kong, and a young officer on a French steamer he had joined at Saigon. Their companionship had been precious; but he ​seemed fated to outgrow his friends, and in retrospect saw that what he had taken for common ground was in reality no more than his friends' willingness to humour his excesses of imagination and idealism. In a sense this enhanced their worth, but it also added a drop of sadness to his cup, for he longed, at this period, to be interpreted rather than tolerated.
He was under no delusion that his mind was too great a thing to be understood; simply, it was too multifarious, too specialized. Most men presented a traceable pattern whereas he saw himself as a patchwork that defied analysis. Yet he felt there must be some principle of homogeneity running through it, some stevedoring technique at work in the loading of his inner chambers. In books he was continually reading of youths who found it difficult to weather the period of "storm and stress" but who came through all right. He supposed, he earnestly hoped, he was in their case.
In Sydney Paul had shipped on a Blue Funnel boat bound for Chinese and Japanese ports. At Nagasaki he had been left in the hospital with an attack of fever. During convalescence a pretty Englishwoman, the wife of an exporter, had brought him books and fruit, and, when he was well, invited him to her house, where he spent blissful days playing on a grand piano. Then the lady's husband rather determinedly found him a berth on a trans-Pacific passenger ship. Tickled at having aroused the jealousy of a middle-aged man, Paul eluded his benefactor and shipped on a dirty tramp trading with the Malay States, whence he wrote a most sentimental twenty-page letter to the pretty Englishwoman.
Thereafter he wandered from ship to ship, loathing his squalid surroundings, waging campaigns against animalculæ—what quantities of Keating's powder!—and ward​ing off the coarse encroachments of his mates, thirsting for new experiences, ever erecting new air castles upon the ruins of the old. Ordinary seaman, able seaman, steward, bugle boy, quartermaster, assistant purser, boatswain: he had acted in these and other capacities, and at the end of each voyage converted his pay-day into English gold and added his savings to the fund with which he had set out from Fremantle. The secreting and safeguarding of this hoard had been a precarious business. More than once he had done battle for it. But association with ruffians had taught him arts of self-protection.
For three or four years he roved the Southern Seas in steamers of varying nationality, touching at ports in Africa, India, South America. In none of his ships did he find the freedom, comfort and kindliness that had prevailed on the Clytemnestra. None of his shipmates spoiled him as Captain Caxton and Otto and the Danish carpenter had done. Kicks replaced friendly pats, jibes were more common than endearments. The clean smell of tar and white sheen of canvas were exchanged for oily cotton-waste and showers of soot from smutty funnels. Everything was ugly, cramped and prosaic. Aboard the Clytemnestra one had made the world to suit oneself; wars might rage throughout Europe and Asia and nobody be the wiser. On wireless ships distracting rumours came to the ears. In retrospection his first voyage seemed like a story he might have read in Chums.
Often, when carrying out the orders of some weedy fourth officer, Paul had mutinous fits that got him into trouble. After conflicts of this kind he would stare into—the sea and curse the folly that had taken him from home. He pictured radiant careers he had forfeited, then reminded himself that nothing rooted in Hale's Turning could ever be radiant. True, in Hale's Turning, for all its provincialism, he might have had the solace of music; and the deprivation of music had done more than any​thing to feed his discontent. Month by month he kept promising himself a vacation which he would devote with all his heart and soul to reparation. In spare moments he exercised his hands—hands grown out of recognition—and whenever he went ashore he sought out the local "Bethel" in order to test his fingers and memory on the piano. But the piano was usually beyond hope, likewise his performance.
The moods of depression never endured, and he ended by resolving to see the whole squalid job through, complete his collection of discharge certificates, and then, when the right day came, go up for his Master's papers. With this objective in view he was planning to join a British tramp in Melbourne when a French skipper offered him a post as second mate on a four-masted barque bound for California. The lure of sails and the fun of talking French decided him, and he signed the articles of the Général Fronchard at the office of the French consul.
On this ship there was red wine to drink, and a good cook. The galley smelt of olive oil, and Paul idly wondered whether national characteristics had anything to do with diet. The crew were lazy, but competent and jolly. There were cats and dogs to make friends with, and the homeliness he had missed on steam-driven ships. The captain was an indifferent navigator and trusted his subordinates to keep the vessel afloat whilst he played the gramophone and waltzed with a lady he called his wife. Occasionally the lady danced with Paul, and one hot night, somewhere in the latitude of New Caledonia, she stole out on deck during the second watch. "On étouffe là-bas," she said, then, glancing over her shoulder in the direction of the quarters set apart for the captain, added, "Il est saoul ce soir."
She talked of the Southern Cross and admired Paul's knowledge of astronomy. How, par exemple, could he tell the difference between Venus and Jupiter? It wasn't ​as if there were some sign to indicate their sex. Now, if God had made one green and the other red, like starboard and port! She lurched slightly and Paul took her arm. She spoke of his strength, of his voice. He was, she affirmed, with a little emphasizing gesture of her head, "extraordinarily old for his age." Why didn't he let his moustache grow? It would be so mignonne. She liked to see him smile. She was going to give him a nickname: "le sourire."
A few minutes later she was in Paul's arms, where she had fully planned to be. In the darkness he was laughing cynically to himself, for she had imagined she was the first!
There followed indolent days during which Paul recaptured some of the romance that had tinged the long-outgrown moods of the Clytemnestra. Apart from books, there were few mental events to break the pleasant monotony. Madame's books were thin, and rather warm, fare; tales by Gyp, Pierre Weber, Willy and Colette. She came from Port Saïd, and the fact that she adored that pestilential haunt was sufficient commentary on her calibre.
Paul sat placidly among the objects in his mental stores, indifferent for once to the lack of order. It sufficed that a glint of colour here or a sinuous outline there beguiled his attention, while the external world slumbered on. Again the sails collapsed heavily against steel rigging, then swelled towards the blue like a small boy puffing out his cheeks. The sheets snapped taut or slackened with the clink of iron blocks, and Paul gave idle instructions in a newly perfected jargon to Italianate French sailors who made witty, if indecorous, conversation over their half-spliced manilla and their tubs of caustic soda.
Then after weeks of doldrums there rose up out of a lapis lazuli sea a quaint little island five or six hundred ​miles from the nearest Fiji group—a coral affair that reminded the young second of a hat, with palm trees for feathers; an exotic dot on the ocean. Over it hovered birds, and he heard Madame from the break of the poop, shrilly wondering how they had ever got there. She passed down a telescope to him. Under stilted, coco-nut-thatched dwellings lounged a dozen natives. They tried to launch a boat, but the breeze was fresh and the surf too heavy—surf which burst and sent licking pools of translucent emerald over a mile of deep pink seaweed.
To test the chronometers, the captain sailed as close as he dared, and, without warning, Paul yearned, as he had never yearned in his life, to be set ashore, that he might for ever remain on this spot of land "in which it seemèd always afternoon."
Most weary of all seemed the effort to live, the effort to project oneself into a troublesome future, the effort to go on exploring, the effort of knowing, of making decisions, of growing up. Once again his world stood still, and for an eternity he gazed on this little gem of creation. There one might retire, as into some cosy tomb, and the remainder of one's allotted span would be a siesta.
But the captain ordered him to swerve off towards a thousand miles of blankness, and as the wheel spun to the command of "La barre dessous, toute!" he dutifully wore ship, in the grip of a fearful nostalgia. To an old sail-maker he confided his mood, only to be argued down by rampant tales of the "Barbary Coast" in San Francisco—tales which filled him with laughing disgust and threw him back more passionately than ever on his hopeless longings.
​He confided in Madame, who was lolling in a deckchair. On her lap was a guide-book, in which she had been gleaning facts about the island. Indulgently she listened, smiled archly when Paul—with belated, cynical gallantry—included her in his scheme of exile, then informed him that his island was infested with snakes.
In despair at the incomprehension of everybody, nerveless and dispirited, he went below. That poor little island, so low that an hour's smart sailing had sunk its highest tree-top below the horizon! And the sandpiper that had been blown off-shore to die of fright on a foreign, heaving deck!
That night he came to a decision. The life of the sea was not to be his life. His destiny lay ashore—on some quiet acre remote from the teeming life of the universe. The diminutive island had marked the beginning of a new variation of the endless theme.
After unloading at the mouth of the Sacramento River, Paul's ship was towed into San Francisco bay and thence up the coast to the port of Eureka, where she was to take on a cargo of redwood. Paul had decided to return in her to Toulon, whence he would make his way into Germany and recast his life in a more fitting mould. The prospect of this adventure reawakened a dozen enthusiasms, and stilled the unrest that had been growing for two or three years. His imagination leaped ahead and pictured him at some vast organ. Music might bring into his life the missing elements of direction and meaning.
His picture was clouded by an uneasy wonder: had the interval of silence and growth rendered him incapable of resuming musical studies where he had left off? It seemed half a lifetime since he had played Beethoven in ​the bare hall at Fremantle, and a century since he had played voluntaries in the Baptist church at Hale's Turning. Was it possible that he, weather-beaten young giant, could ever have been that rather girlish lad who had reached so cock-surely down to built-up-pedals, overweeningly satisfied with being able to play "Praise God" by heart? He laughed, with a trace of embarrassment and of wistfulness, at the thought, and sang out an order concerning a refractory filin. Just as he had once been an organist up to the hilt, he was now up to the hilt at being a sailor—a sailor, so to speak, in French.
In the thoroughness of his adaptation he had even seemed to take on the appearance, as well as the character, of his present rôle; for with his brown throat and arms he might have passed for a Marseillais. His accent, owing to daily contact with the Southerners, was reminiscent of the Midi. Only the fineness of his skin under its tan, the precious contours of cheek and lips, the elegance of waist and hip, and a literary turn of phrase, set him apart.
And having exhausted the possibilities of his present rôle, he characteristically projected himself into the next: the rôle of musical disciple—ces soirées de Munich et de Vienne. He rehearsed it in warm June afternoons as he kept his men employed on deck, whilst the enormous saws of the mill screamed and purred their way through twenty-foot logs. In the evening twilight he wandered alone through the woods skirting the village of Samoa, picking berries in the bushes, or mowing off the heads of yellow poppies with a switch. Often he crossed the low strip which separated the bay from the sea, and seated on a dune amid tufts of reed, let his thoughts roam down the track of the moon, as they had done a thousand times in a thousand corners of the world.
Eureka, the up-to-date little city across the harbour, had no attraction for him. He had explored its park, ​spent an hour in its library, bought some necessities in its shops, walked in First, Second and Third Streets, likewise in A, B and C, and in its leading theatre witnessed an appalling melodrama called The Algerian Princess. His mates had found their way by instinct to a street whose houses flaunted red lights at their portals.
On the Fourteenth of July, the captain declared a fête in honour of the taking of the Bastille. Paul obtained extra leave and boarded a jaunty little train which ran through forests of gigantic redwoods carpeted with fern, past gorges and gulches, to the village of Trinidad, perched on a precipice and serving as a centre of the logging industry. There he hired a buggy and drove along a superb coast, in the direction of Crescent City, over a narrow road which in places was merely a ledge on the cliffs. Above him stretched walls of rock; below, steep grassy slopes, riotous with bushes of mountain laurel, while far beneath lay the green sea, streaked blue in a manner that recalled the "blueing" he had once employed to "whiten" his duck jackets.
In the early afternoon he arrived at a cove about which clustered a few farms. Roses and geraniums spilt over unpainted fences. Before the prettiest cottage he stopped and called out to a girl who was feeding chickens. She shaded her eyes with one hand, held up her apron with the other, and advanced wonderingly. She was uncouth but comely, with silky yellow hair, strong teeth and sculpturesque limbs. Her figure was revealed by a tight blue cotton blouse; and stout, iron-toed boots could not entirely disguise the neatness of her feet.
"Is there any place near here where I might get something to eat?" Paul inquired.
There was not. "At least no regular place—like," the girl amended.
"What would you be wanting?" she asked, at a loss ​to understand the requirements, much less the motives, of outlandish venturers into these unfrequented regions.
Paul laughed. "Well, when you haven't had anything to eat for hours and hours, it doesn't much matter what, does it? I half hoped I'd find some sort of inn."
"Inn?" she echoed, as though she found the word "affected." Perhaps it struck her as biblical, Paul reflected, for she must have heard the famous sentence, "There was no room for them in the inn." He remembered now that the word was not current in North America; his own vocabulary comprised the currency of twenty countries.
In the end she invited him to take pot-luck with her. The men-folk were in the fields. "There ain't much," she concluded, "but you're right welcome."
Paul thanked her and got out of the carriage.
"Not much used to horses, are you?" she commented, as he looked doubtfully from the reins to the fence.
"No. My first impulse was to anchor the beast, but I suppose the thing to do is moor him with this bit of line."
Blushing and giggling, the girl came through the gate to take over the hitching operation, and Paul thoroughly enjoyed his sense of dependence.
"Come in," she commanded, in a tone which added, "Mere man that you are."
"If you want to wash, there's a pump round at the back, with a basin and soap."
On entering the kitchen a few minutes later he was greeted by the odour of frying meat. "Fee-fo-fi-fum!" he exclaimed.
"It's a bear steak," she informed him, "But you're not to tell anybody. Bear's out of season. Pa killed him for stealing our honey."
She ran into the garden and came back with a handful of roses, which she arranged, diffidently, in a heavy ​white pitcher. Paul crossed the room to smell them, and she returned to the stove.
Something in the form and colour of the flowers, something in the smooth yellow sheen of her hair, had awakened an old memory. The fragrance of the flowers identified it. He was a boy again, poaching on the Ashmill grounds, with the image of a little fair-haired girl in his mind. The darkness of the night, the air of excitement, mystery, danger and love-sickness came back to him. What odd trifles one remembered!
"These are tea-roses, aren't they?" he asked.
"No! Marshal Neys. I grew 'em from a slip a lady gave me in Arcata."
"Oh, really!" Noting that the girl wished not to be thought provincial, he conceded that Arcata was a charming town.
She turned over the sizzling steak. "I take butter down there every week. I dessay you think Arcata's little," she said half defiantly. "I dessay you've seen a mort of big cities."
"A good few," he admitted. She gave him a glance which was meant to be disapproving—to cover all contingencies—then smiled in spite of herself, and brought the frying-pan across the room, transferring its contents to his plate.
"It's all there is—except berries and cream, and bread and butter and cheese and milk and honey."
"It's nectar and ambrosia," he protested. "Though perhaps you don't know what they are."
"We don't have much time for schooling out here," she retorted. She seated herself on a window sill, folded her arms, and turned her eyes from his face, to the golden-green fields.
The food, the shady room, the glimpse of sun-bathed flowers out of doors, the distant hum of bees, the girl's fresh colouring and clean apron, the sound of her voice, ​the shrewdness of her instinct and naïveté of her opinions, all conspired to charm Paul. He sat back in his chair and smoked, utterly free from care.
Through talking about school they reached the subject of music.
"Do you play?" asked Paul.
She nodded her head.
"Have you a piano?"
"Only an organ."
He rose. "Then come in the other room and play for me."
She required coaxing, but ended by sitting on a horsehair stool and pumping out a monotonous version of a waltz called "Myosotis." Every now and then she remembered to change the bass. Paul concentrated his attention on the line which undulated from the nape of her neck to her round elbow, then thanked her and asked permission to play.
She relinquished the stool, and in a few moments he had forgotten his surroundings, as he strayed from one composition to another, improvising where memory failed, adjusting his performance to the crying limitations of the instrument.
The smell of roses came in through an open window. In a corner of a mirror on which daisies had been painted and half washed off he could see a glint of golden hair. Before he realized it, he was in the midst of a Bach prelude—in church, playing with an exalted faith in the music, and Phœbe Meddar was his audience. Wistfully he recalled his old conception of music as a universal language that should enlighten and unify the world. What a disparate thing the world had become since those naïve days! Yet there was a unity; his present mood and setting were strangely reminiscent of others. Out of a long submerged set of associations came the memory of afternoons when he had posed as a grown-up virtuoso ​performing for the edification of Mademoiselle Meddar. He was now grown-up, but the virtuosity, alas, was missing, and for audience he had a farm-girl who fidgeted with impatience—all of which was about as near the mark as anything one could hope to realize.
When finally, with a deep sigh, he turned from the organ, it was to see an astonished pair of men staring at him through the window. The setting sun gave a halo to their silhouettes, which were set off by a gay garden hedged with sun-flowers. Far in the background was a luminous sea. The stupid rusticity of the men projected against the unparalleled splendour of nature made Paul burst out laughing. The girl, from the doorway, echoed his laugh, believing it to be merely his reaction to the wonderment manifested in the faces of her father and brother—a reaction she could share. She explained as they entered the house, and the elder man, somewhat distrustfully, pronounced a hospitable formula, whilst the brother gaped.
Paul spoke of returning, but was told that he could not reach Trinidad until a late hour, and it was more than foolhardy to drive over the ledges at night. In the end he accepted their offer to put him up, and went to superintend the stabling of his horse.
After supper he invited the girl to accompany him on a walk toward the cove, where a lagoon was separated from the sea by a narrow strip of sand formerly used by stage-coaches, but abandoned since a storm, many years since, when the surf had pounded away the road and engulfed a party of gold prospectors.
They sat on a high knoll whilst shadows crept along the coast and a faint breeze ushered in the night. Paul, strangely tranquil, yet with senses alert, was living in the past. In all his wandering he had come across nothing quite so familiarly homely as this little Pacific coast farm. It was exotic, yet it brought back long-​forgotten scenes in Nova Scotia. Another decision was taken: he must one day revisit Hale's Turning.
The girl seemed to be fascinated by his abstracted air, all the while resenting it. She repeatedly tried to draw his attention towards herself, and it repeatedly strayed. Mechanically, yet with a definitely tender instinct, he had placed his arm about her waist. She had at once pushed it away, but seemed complacently to expect his insistence, and when his arm was at last installed, a similar game of protest and acquiescence was gone through apropos of his kisses. In the end they returned silently, hand in hand, arms swinging. Just before reaching the gate, the girl stopped, peered up at him and waited. He took her in his arms, whilst she pretended to struggle. She broke away, ran a few steps, then stood facing him, her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling. In a flash she was back again, hugging him and kissing his neck—then like a frightened, mischievous child she fled up the garden path.
Paul was suddenly aflame. He found it impossible to make conversation with the old man, and soon all three retired. In his room Paul listened to the others. The old man slept downstairs, the boy in the attic, and the girl occupied a room on the same floor as himself. Long after the men had settled for the night he could hear discreet sounds. His door was ajar, and he stood, holding his breath, whilst a fury of erotic desires possessed him. So far no woman who had thrown herself into his arms had escaped unscathed, but so far only women who were not immaculate had overtly challenged him. He had only to take a few steps, tap on her door, turn the handle—she would not cry out, for she was subtle, for all her uncouthness—and the rest he would know how to manage—but!
He closed the door swiftly and went to sit on the edge of his bed. He hated to be faced by a choice between ​strong desire and a sense of fair play. But above all things he hated vacillation. The girl was his for the taking—why hesitate? The risk for her? There were ways of obviating that.
He put the odious consideration out of his mind and began to undress.
But in a moment he found himself at the door again, listening. Flinging the last scruple to the winds, he left the room, tiptoed along the passage, listened at her door, then gently opened it.
The moon had risen and its beams made a pool of light on the carpet. He saw walls decked with magazine-cover girls, and a heap of garments strewn on a chair. Her face, turned slightly away from him, looked plump, like a baby's, and one hand was thrown out. She was fast asleep, and the room smelt—rather too much like a bedroom.
Silently as he had come, he regained his room, and sat on the window-sill to laugh. As if by magic his ardour had vanished, leaving him comfortable, yet out of sorts. Gradually the spell of the night wrapped itself round him. For a long while he sat gazing towards the silvered sea, drinking in the fragrance of unseen flowers and dew-sprinkled earth, a fragrance that made him home-sick for a home that didn't exist. Early in the morning he would set out for the ship. To his shipmates he would say nothing of the adventure. How should any sailor understand his anomalous blend of depravity and squeamishness? To think that virtue could be suspended on such tenuous filaments!
A distant clock struck the hour, and an alien odour crept into his nostrils—the odour of eucalyptus. He scarcely noticed this phenomenon, and like a true sailor fell asleep as soon as his head was pillowed. In his dreams, however, he heard the old chimes which had gained such an uncanny hold on him. Their message ​this time, put into words, might have been, "So you see, you're not as chaotic as you thought. You have a method, and it's no less wise for being instinctive. Fastidiousness is next to morality—it often serves you better."
Before putting to sea Paul laid in a supply of books. For some time past his reading had been haphazard, if voluminous, At Eureka he provided himself with the pick of what the leading bookshop had to offer, and at the last moment had the salesman include a little green paper-bound play by a certain G. B. Shaw, whose name he had often seen quoted, as though this writer were a "character" in the world of letters.
Not until he was nearing Toulon, after a fatiguing, storm-ridden voyage did he dip into Man and Superman. Then occurred a mental event of the first importance—an event more memorable than the mutinous day when he had longed to be set ashore on his coral island. After the first few répliques he felt the stirring of a mighty revival of heterodoxies. Issues he had in his first youthful rebelliousness dismissed wholesale trooped back retail for a rehearing. A sun of intellectual emancipation made a rift in the adolescent haze obscuring his vision.
He recalled his boyish struggle to keep his soul intact from the designs of the officiously pious, the fury and exasperation with which he had talked down zealots who had decoyed him to "Bethel" meetings in remote seaports, Since those days he had been a constant foe towards all forms of blind orthodoxy, but it had been difficult to find words for his iconoclasm. Well, here they were! Paul drank them in; felt them settling into him, stiffening his resolutions, giving him that rare gratification: the discovery, after the event, that there exist sound, assertable reasons for acts committed on ​impulse. Shaw cut capers for him, and Paul laughed with the hysterical abandon of a child who has had to be violently diverted out of a long fit of moping. Shaw gleefully rattled the skeletons Paul had refused to reverence but had not known how to dispose of. Shaw cried his healthy, heathenish cause from the rooftops; championed him, and put him forward as a champion. And at the end seemed to say, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" And Paul cordially agreed, in blissful forgetfulness of his own mortality.
"Your friends," said Don Juan to the Devil, "are the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only shaved and starched . . . not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all—liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls!"
At one stroke the adolescent cobwebs were swept away. In the store-house of his mind Paul had been trying to range parcels that had been delivered there labelled "virtue," "vice"—or whatever—but containing suspiciously incompatible lumps. Off with the wrappers! That was Shaw's way. And the process of classification went on apace, almost automatically.
From the dry deck to which Shaw had caught him up, Paul surveyed with an ineffable sense of safety a seaful of floundering limbs and debris where he had been desperately keeping his own ego afloat. At a bookshop in Marseilles he found little green copies of other plays, and put them into his handbag to read in the train which was to bear him towards Germany.