CHAPTER III.FLIGHT.
I was really running away now. It was not retreat, but flight; useless to pretend that I was even looking civilisation in the face.
Some instinct led me to Geneva. There would be safety, I thought, in its balanced poetry and prose, the mountains held in check by the tourists, the lake by the hotels.
But I had reckoned without the gentleman whose crown I had saved in the latemêlée. He turned up one day on Rousseau’s Island, and hailed me as a brother. I assured him I was but a second cousin, at the outside. It was in vain. He led me to a remote garret in the old town, and introduced me to a circle of blood relations in democracy, by whom, after examination, I was received into the family.
I did not mind; only it was hard to find this sort of thing going on everywhere.
I was evidently found to improve on acquaintance, for, one day, I was solemnly invited to a polyglot tea party, in another garret, with a Russian lady making the tea.
It was green tea, fortunately; else it would have been altogether too absurdly innocent a compound for this entertainment. Everybody but myself had done something, and I felt quite ashamed to say that I had only stood on the steps of the Royal Exchange. My sponsor came out in a new light; he had been first smearer of petroleum at the Ministry of Finance, during the Commune. He assured us that no other building burnt half so well. He laid it all on therez-de-chaussée; his colleagues wasted their stuff on the upper walls. A friend from Spain had shot three priests in the Carthagena riots, with one discharge of a blunderbuss. There was an offer to introduce me as one of the gentlemen who tried to sky London Bridge, so that I might not look strange, but I hate a false pretence. The lady at the samovar was a student emissary, who crossed the frontier with despatches, and she had just come back with news. She had seen the latest execution at St. Petersburg—twoof the brethren and one sister hanging up in the falling snow, as stiff as frozen ox-tongues. There were other cheerful reports from Rome, and from Belgrade; and one companion, who was strong in geography, gave us a bird’s-eye of the whole woeful earth. It was to much the same effect, only that, further afield, the dull pain of living was oftener met by endurance than by revolt. We had five minutes in the native quarter at Amoy, and saw an ingenious device of the needy to qualify as mendicant cripples, by making their feet rot off. It is something of a trade secret; but the right way is to tie a cord tightly round the ankle, till the member mortifies. It is a living—where it is not certain death. Next, we were with the stark naked casuals, squatting in the streets of Pekin in winter time, while, gorged with humanitarian learning, the lordly scholars pass. We came home by way of Central Asia, and dropped in on the squalid poor of Smarkand lousing among their quilted rags. The coaling coolies at Aden detained us but a moment; and, but a moment more, the sponge divers of the Ægean, with their lungs choked with blood, for the great lawof the margin of subsistence reaches even to the ocean bed.
Next day, I made straight for Genoa. I seemed to labour for breath on the dry land, and to want the sweet clean sea.
There was an Italian merchantman in port, fitting out for a voyage round the world. They had macaroni on board; and, if they had boiled the huge cargo, they might have girdled the globe as they sailed. They were going to take it to Ceylon and the Philippines, by way of the Suez Canal, and then, come back by the Horn to pick up something for the home market. I wanted a ship; they were not averse to a passenger. Short of ballooning, it seemed the readiest way of giving Civilisation the slip.
We sailed; and, as I just had the honour to inform you, here I am, on a peak in the Pacific, and thirteen thousand miles away from the dome of St. Paul’s—which, as everybody knows, is but a stone’s throw from the Royal Exchange. For distance, I think this will do.