“He had nothing to say. When I got there I found my pocket had been picked. It’s the more awkward because I can’t help wondering if someone in the recruiting office didn’t nab it when I was taking my physical examination. I hardly like to accuse any one there, especially at such a time as this. But I don’t know how I shall tell my wife. I was so late getting home that she went on to the dinner without me. She’ll be frightfully upset. And you know what the police are. I’m afraid we shall never see it again. Heavens! Look at that clock!”

STUDIO SMOKE

Voi non mi amate ed io non vi amo. Pure

qualche dolcezza è ne la nostra vita

da ieri....

—Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poema Paradisiaco.

That business of yours, Gimlet, of a thing falling so exactly on the tick, was rather curious. I have an idea, though, that it happens oftener than people might think. I’ve seen some queer examples of it myself. I remember one in particular. Not that it’s anything of a story. It’s merely a whiff of a story: you make it up to suit yourself. And the coincidence, now that I stop and think, was perhaps the least of it! But—

I was up in Alaska at the time. I’ve poked about a bit in my day, you know, and I took into my head once to poke up there. I’d been reading Bret Harte, that sort of thing, and I had an idea I’d do it over again for my generation! Maybe you don’t know that I used to have a scribbling bee in my bonnet. I imagine that’s really what spoiled my work. I thought if the Renaissance people practised ten or a dozen arts equally well, I might make a stab at two. We get these ideas when we are young, sometimes. Moreover I didn’t know that it took more than miners and mountains, plus a pinch of sentiment, to make a Bret Harte. And if I did him over again you didn’t happen to hear about it, did you? However, I had a good time, all the same!

That country took me tremendously. Norway used to be one of my favourite stamping grounds. I was particularly fond of going up there after Italy—only I used to wish there were a subway under Germany when I did it! The contrast was so extraordinary—in colour, line, atmosphere, people, everything. Then simply to breathe in Italy, for me, was such a volupté that it bordered on debauch! So after it Norway would come like a cool repentance. And there was a simplicity up there, a silence, a loneliness, that rather upset me after the South. It called out all the things with which the South has nothing to do. There’s no use trying to describe it. It’s the obverse, don’t you know, of kennst Du das Land.

Well, Alaska was like a bigger Norway—a Norway with longer fiords, with taller cliffs rising out of greener water, with bluer glaciers, with whiter and louder waterfalls. And it had, proportionately, a greater loneliness and a greater impression of contrast with the rest of the world. If Norway has its Sagas, if nightfall in some wild fiord-end seems literally a dusk of the gods, the silence of Alaska—the sense of its having been there for centuries by itself with no one to hear the grind of the ice and thunder of the waterfalls—takes you back farther yet. And then Norway, after all, is too accessible to be quite what it should be. Tourists may be as bête as you please; but they do have a way, after all, of pouncing on the very places you would like yourself if they didn’t exist. The philosophy of the beaten track has yet to be written. Alaska, however, hasn’t reached that stage yet. She will come to it in time. She can’t help it. More and more people go every year. But they live on the country even less than they do in Norway. They sit on decks and say Oh and Ah as things sail by. They really don’t meddle very much.