I WAS restless during that summer. My father announced at once that in the fall of the year I was to go to Paris. He was still talking of international law and of a diplomatic career for me. I was indifferent.
     Again I sailed a good deal; and ultimately I sailed around Jutland to Hamburg, taking with me a sailor who held a second-mate's ticket.
     I had written, of course; I had written to Mrs. Broegler under a name she had assumed for our correspondence, and addressed my letters Poste Restante. I had received answers, too; but I had felt that in everything she said

there were vast reservations; there were things I was not being told about; and at last my disquietude had reached a climax.
     From Hamburg I went at once to Blankenese. The villa was locked up; neighbours told me that Dr. Broegler had gone away for his holidays; nobody knew whether his wife was with him.
     Again I wrote and waited a week for an answer which did not come. My companion had to get back to Malmoe by a given date; his leave was up; he was to sail for England. We went home.
     An answer to the letter written from Hamburg was waiting for me at Thurow. I had been seen at Blankenese where Mrs. Broegler was staying with friends. She thought it best that, at least for the time being, we should not meet again. Her letter was full of love; but full, also, of worldly wisdom. I must not try to find her just yet; it would ruin my career. In fact, she advised me to go abroad as soon as possible; for her husband, whom she had told, had left her and was bringing a suit for a divorce, naming me as co-respondent. I was to go abroad and to ignore it.
     Which was anything but reassuring to me; yet, what could I do? I could not go back to Blankenese to make a house-to-house canvass. I wrote stormily, begging her to let me come or to meet me somewhere. I received no answer. I wrote again; and this time my letter came back unopened and unread.
     For weeks I was in a terrible state of emotional upheaval. Even my father noticed it; but he did not enquire into the reasons. Perhaps he guessed that there was some affair of the heart, especially since, in contrast to a year ago I refused to call on our neighbours and to play

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tennis with their girls. Instead, I rode wildly; and I trained for a boat-race in single skulls. I blamed "her" entirely; and it was years before I could think of her with gratitude and forgiveness. But outwardly I had quieted down long before the end of the summer.
     Perhaps one reason was that, during a horseback ride I fell in with a girl of my own age, perhaps even a year or so younger - a girl whom, in what follows, I will call Kirsten. She was the daughter of one of our neighbours - tall, very finely built, proud, and attractive - far too proud, so far, to let me see that I had made an impression on her, though, after our first meeting, we met, throughout the late summer, almost daily, by what amounted to appointment. Strangely, we were both disillusioned and told each other so; it was not the least factor in my attraction for her, and in hers for me, that we had both been disappointed in love.
     Then the time came for me to leave.
     The next phase of my life opened up with the arrival of a letter from my great-uncle Rutherford. He mentioned that he was on the point of going to Russia. The Russian government had engaged him to lead an overland expedition into the north country of Siberia, to get certain records, of temperatures, magnetic deviations, and similar things which I have forgotten, all of them connected with the "Asiatic Focus of the North Magnetic Pole". He did mention that he was going north of the Arctic Circle. His first stop, however, would be at St. Petersburg to get his equipment ready - horses, sleighs, Arctic clothing, and scientific instruments. He added the date on which he would leave London and his regret at lacking the time to run up to Thurow; otherwise he would have been glad to renew his acquaintance with his

great-nephew whom he remembered and to whom be sent his kindest regards.
     Now this great-uncle of mine was a well-to-do man, as well-to-do as his cousin, my grandfather, had been; and my father was anxious to see me make any sort of influential connection. So he promptly got into touch with him, over the wire, and arranged for a meeting between us at Brussels, a city through which I had to pass on my way to Paris. He little thought that, thereby, he was to postpone the beginning of my university career by a full twelve months.
     This is what happened. When my great-uncle and I met, he, renewing his liking for me, asked me, instead of proceeding to Paris, to come along with him and see Northern Asia. I believe he spoke half in jest; he mostly did, no matter what he said; and I liked his way tremendously; as a rule his lips curled in a smile; but on occasion he could be sharp and even grim when he gave orders -he had been a military man, in England as well as in India, and had seen fighting; but as a rule he was as charming as a woman, especially to those he liked. He was a very superior person who had lived under all sorts of conditions and had taken them all as if they were in the day's work. He had had the most amazing adventures - one of them being that, when a P. and 0. steamer had been cut in two, in a beam-end collision in the Channel, at night, he had been the only survivor from among the passengers; for the ramming steamer had, as by a miracle, struck in such a manner as to open his cabin door, whereas all other doors had been jammed in their frames, the liner sinking within a few minutes. Even that he had saved nothing but the pyjamas which he was wearing added a touch to be admired.

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     I believe he was just a trifle taken aback by the readiness, yes, eagerness with which I accepted. The proposal was made over the dessert and a bottle of champagne, after a dinner such as few places in Europe afforded.
     Two or three days later we were in St. Petersburg which I knew; but for the first time I was turned loose by myself; for my uncle was henceforth fully occupied with negotiations and examinations; every item of equipment and supplies had to be tested and approved or rejected; to be finally assembled and shipped. It must be remembered that the Trans-Siberian railway had not yet been built or at least completed. Since, most of the time, we were to be north of the line, whether completed or only projected, it would have helped us little in any case. The plan was roughly to strike as nearly as possible straight north from Omsk, along the river Ob; to survey a line along the Arctic Circle to the Yenissei and beyond, to the one hundredth meridian east of Greenwich, and thence to strike south for Irkutsk; to cross Lake Baikal; and to make as quickly as possible for the Amur River which we were to follow to its mouth near the city of Nicolayevsk. It was a most exciting plan.
     By the middle of October we were at Omsk, on the Irtish, the chief tributary of the Ob. It is all over fifty years ago; and I kept no records of any kind. Even if it were within the scope of this book to give detailed descriptions of what I saw, I could not do so; like the face of Europe my memory is a palimpsest on which writing has overlaid writing. But a few things I recall even across this gulf of time, and one or two were of importance for my later development. Thus I recall my amazement at the impression received in every one of these Siberian cities as if they were mere detached pieces

of a western civilization in plain contradiction to the environment: fragments broken off, as it were, from the margin of that civilization and scattered piecemeal over an untamed continent of enormous dimensions. Nowhere on earth, perhaps, not even in the early days of Western-Canadian cities, did the possession of an evening suit of clothes confer such an air of distinction on man; nowhere was, among women, décolletage so essential to social standing. I can imagine an English aristocrat taking his dinner in tweeds; I cannot imagine a Russian government official of the time taking it in anything but full evening dress. It was these things which made life possible to them in their isolation; they all "kept their form" as Galsworthy would have called it; and not only kept it but watched over it jealously, punishing every infringement of social convention, on the part of others, by social ostracism. "He came in a sack suit; one really cannot invite a brute like that." In the foreground of any mixed gathering people made the impression as if they were figures taken out of a toy box or a band-box, who moved as if an invisible player - romantic convention - were pulling the strings. Behind this foreground there seemed to be no sort of background, except when the men got drunk, which they did pretty regularly; but even then their moods of despair or boastfulness seemed to lack spontaneity; convention over-ruled every genuine impulse: the dress-suit ruled supreme, just as it does in certain small circles in almost every Canadian university. My uncle and I laughed about it. We, of course, being foreigners, distinguished foreigners, travelling under the auspices of St. Petersburg - which, at least nominally, meant the Czar of all the Russias by whom my uncle, by the way, had been received in au-

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dience before leaving the west - were treated like dukes and lords for whom receptions were held and who were bowed to almost like royalty. The forms observed in the face of an unbelievable isolation often verged on the ludicrous. But I must not forget to mention that most of the men were physically magnificent specimens, all bearded; and many of the women reminded me of the gorgeous Creole of the boarding-house at Hamburg.
     But what impressed me most, and what remains with me today as one of the vital things in all the experience of my life, was not the city but the barren belts isolating
     it. Omsk lies in the northern margin of the vast Kirghiz steppe. The distance from Omsk to Semipalatinsk, the next city to the south, is around six hundred miles as the crow flies. That is as if there were nothing between Saskatoon, let me say, and the centre of North Dakota; or, in Ontario, between Ottawa and Port Arthur; or, in England, between London and Scapa Flow; nothing resembling a city, a town, or even a village. There were settlements of sorts; but in these settlements there was nothing which we should call a house; there were huts at best. To the west, the steppe stretched away to the Urals; to the east, for five hundred miles or more, to the great massif of the Altais. Think of the district between Medicine Hat in Alberta and the little town of Brooks, a district consisting of rolling hills of marl, covered by a sparse, short grass growing in tufts; and you have some sort of idea of the landscape; but in Alberta you cross that district in a two-hour drive by motor; in Siberia, at the time, you had to travel for weeks. The true Kirghiz steppes, of course, lie south-east, separated from the Omsk district by a belt, again six hundred miles wide, of high hills, partly wooded; and the moment you have

crossed these, you are in the inland basin of the Aral Sea where all is semi-desert. We have the exact counterpart of that, too, in the alkaline lakes of Saskatchewan; we have the exact counterpart of almost every Siberian landscape in the west of Canada; but it is invariably in miniature. Great as our distances are, compared with Siberia, Canada is crowded as, in a museum, show-landscapes are set close together.
     The effect of that landscape on me was enormous and enduring; that is why I am enlarging upon it. The two or three months which I spent on or within the Arctic Circle, under the conditions of a Polar expedition, have paled in my memory: they were no more than a trip to me, interesting in their way, calling, on occasion, for the exertion of every physical and mental power; but they were no more than an episode - a personally-conducted overland journey. But the steppe changed my whole view of life; the steppe got under my skin and into my blood. Life as a student in Paris, life in the various parts of the world through which I was to hurry during the years that followed, paled in my eyes whenever I thought of the steppes; and only when I struck my roots into the west of Canada did I feel at home again. In the steppes only, so it seemed, life was lived as life pure and simple, as life qua life. For here was the staggering fact: these steppes were inhabited; they were peopled by man. Perhaps, in this experience, I must look for the reason why, when stranded in America, I remained in Canada and clung to it with my soul till it had replaced Siberia as the central fact in my adult mentality. Like Siberia, Canada needed to be fought for by the soul: but very few Canadians know it. They think of it as of a Europe enlarged. I have said that this is not a travelogue;

but for once, in order to make things clear, I have to draw a picture.
     Let it not be forgotten that I had come from the crowded life of great cities where I had plunged into experiences of a totally different nature - experiences of which I was to receive a last vivid reminder right there at Omsk; for a paper reached me, with a document attached which I was expected to sign before witnesses, after having followed me from Sweden to Brussels, from Brussels to St. Petersburg, from St. Petersburg to Omsk. It was a subpoena, or something of the sort, which summoned me to appear before the court in a suit for divorce brought at Hamburg by Dr. Broegler against his wife. For a few days I lived in great excitement over it; and then, under the impact of the steppe, it all dropped from me. In any case, there was nothing that I could do; neither I nor Mrs. Broegler could defend the suit.
     Then came the day that has remained among the most vivid memories of over fifty years.
     We were making a trip through the steppe on horseback, accompanied by an armed escort of Cossacks. My uncle was chiefly interested in the geologic aspects of the district. I-had not the landscape slowly taken hold of me and conquered my innermost being- should probably have felt bored. For day after day it was the same thing. Treeless country, flat or rolling, covered with the short, sparse, wiry grass, vaulted over by a cloudless sky which seemed to hang low, except at night- lower than any I had ever seen. Here and there we saw camps or even more or less permanent settlements filled with women, children, and old men, all looking alike, both people and settlements, the latter, from a distance, resembling blisters thrown up by the very soil, for there

never was the slightest trace of colour. When we approached, the men were always away; only the women and children were there: shy, silent creatures who ran and hid when they saw us, as if we were skirmishers or reconnoitring parties of a raiding army. The few we cornered spoke no language which we knew; they chattered, shrilly, as if angry or mortally afraid. Certainly it was not Russian which they spoke; my uncle spoke Russian fluently. When, as he invariably did, he scattered a handful of coins in the streets or in what passed for streets, they did not throw themselves down to scramble for them; they acted as if they did not see; but hardly had we departed far enough for them to think we were out of eye- and ear-shot, than they started screaming fights for these tokens which resembled, to them, drafts on the wealth of a different world. The few women and children we actually saw from close by looked as if they had never washed; and they smelt like that, too. Somehow it all seemed natural; it seemed the appropriate thing; one did not object to either sight or smell. Cleanliness seemed an irrelevancy.
     And then, one evening, we saw the men. I do not remember whether it was near to, or far from, the flamboyant city where, no doubt, at that very hour men of a different race were changing into full-dress suits and women powdering their throats and bejewelled hands.
     My uncle and I had been leisurely riding along, on our tough ponies, in silence, anxious to reach a camp-site before dark, and followed, at some distance, by our escort. For league after league we, that day, had crossed treeless country of an impressive and ceaseless monotony; and from time to time the horizon of this grass land had been

dotted with the nomadic herds of some native patriarch, half Slav, half Mongol.
     And then, in the dusk of the evening, we overtook a travelling clan of these Kirghiz herdsmen who, mounted on lean, half-starved, and shaggy ponies, were driving their stunted, long-haired, and short-horned cattle and sheep from one used-up pasture to another. We overtook and passed them; and they returned our greeting in a peculiarly haughty, distant, almost hostile manner. All these men were bearded, of course, sparsely bearded; and as we passed through the cavalcade, they strung out in a long line, as if making room for us on a trail crowded only with shadows.
     But, when we had left them a quarter of a mile behind, suddenly, unexpectedly, almost startlingly, the whole column broke into a droning song, with the effect of a ghostly unreality. It was a vast, melancholy utterance, cadenced within a few octaves of the bass register, as if the landscape as such had assumed a voice: full of an almost inarticulate realization of man's forlorn position in the face of a hostile barrenness of nature; and yet full, also, of a stubborn, if perhaps only inchoate assertion of man's dignity below his gods.
     A revelation came to me. All these humans - for, incredibly, like myself, they were human - represented mere wavelets on the stream of a seminal, germinal life which flowed through them, which had propagated itself, for millennia, through them, almost without, perhaps even against, their will and desire. They had done what they must do; and from their doings life had sprung. No doubt each single one of them felt himself to be an individual; to me, lack of personal, distinguishing contact made them appear as mere representatives of their race.

     But their song was eternal because, out of the stream and succession of generations, somewhere, somewhen, a nameless individual had arisen to give them a voice. That voice was the important thing to me; for already I felt that one day I, too, was to be a voice; and I, too, was perfectly willing to remain nameless.
     That is the picture which remains; clear and sharp, etched into my memory like a copper-plate. All else is mere thought which does not matter. More and more, after the side-trip into the Arctic - for such it was to me - as we returned to the main cross-continent route, the Mongol element prevailed in the population, an amiable, Chinese element, feminine almost, and utterly alien in spite of its smiling faces. From them, there came no revelation, so that, among the constituents of my inner life, Siberia remains to this day the steppe.
     It was March or April when we reached Nikolayevsk. From Omsk I had written to my father; and here, at Nikolayevsk, which, at the time, was a half Arctic port, resembling settlements in Alaska or in the northernmost Norway of Europe, mail was waiting for me, among others a letter from my father. He was angry at my escapade; but he sent money; and that was what mattered. There was also a brief note from Uncle Jacobsen, with the enclosure of a letter of introduction to his cousin Van der Elst, a settler on the island of Java, not far from Batavia. The note merely stated that, having heard of my being in the far east, he, Uncle Jacobsen, advised me, on my way home, to stop over and to see something of the tropics.
      The funds my father sent me were in the form of drafts on various banks, at Vladivostok, Yokohama, and Hong-Kong. Thus my route was defined for me. My great-

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uncle Rutherford was going to be with me till we reached Japan; but thence he was to cross over to America, to return to Europe via Canada and the Atlantic; he himself, however, advised me to take the route around Asia. He laughed a good deal over my father's indignation, adding that the Siberian trip would, no doubt, in the long run, prove of greater value to me, even in a diplomatic career, than a year at Paris could have done.
     There followed the long voyage home, via Java, the ports of the Malay Peninsula, two or three Indian cities, the Red Sea, and the familiar Mediterranean.
     The actual voyage, including the various stops, was of no fundamental importance to me, of vastly less importance than I had expected. What influence it had came out many decades later when the greater part of my life was lived. Today I should be glad to take it over again. For the moment, of course, I was absorbed by the many novel sights I saw; memory has since sifted them; criticism has eliminated most of what was irrelevant. Finally, quite recently, a new context was built up ex-post-facto which canalized conclusions not arrived at, not even dreamt of, on the spot. If I had another fifty years of mental vigour ahead of me, that context might prove of ultimate and permanent importance.
     What, throughout the half century which has elapsed since then, remained as a lasting memory was the lavishness of nature which, on occasion, became as destructive as its stinginess elsewhere. Here it was not barrenness which challenged life; on the contrary, life choked life; the very vitality of the scene implied its tragedies.
     This is the story of a writer; and a writer's concern is everlastingly with his soul. Circumstance concerns him only in two ways: inasmuch as it gives him a viaticum on

the way, such as is implied in his descent or in the heritage he has received; and inasmuch as it impedes or furthers the growth of what he has thus received. Experience is strangely selective: mostly it teaches only what we have already learned. In new scenes we seek only what we are looking for and for the reception of which we are prepared. Two people of opposite tendencies may draw opposite results from the same experience. But that applies only to experiences which, in one way or another, concern us vitally. In the case of the present writer far and away the greater part of his experience simply checked him by a process of distraction. There are three things which are essentially alien to him; the large city, the mountains, and the tropics. I might almost say they are racially alien to him; and of these three his attitudes to two of them are closely connected. The mountains and the tropics offer him at best a temporary, holiday hospitality; he can go there for recreation, not for development; only the sea and the plains are, in the deepest sense, his homes.
     Every human being born can, in a way, be regarded as a seed; the seed, too, has its viaticum; once released from the parent plant, it has to seek, or rather to find, its soil, there to grow or to perish. Considering myself as a seed, then, it strikes me now, as it struck me then, that Siberia had come very near to giving me the soil I needed. The wind picked me up and bore me aloft. It is significant that, not until I found a similar soil, did I strike root.
     Ultimately I got to Paris; it was midsummer; and I took great care not to go home. It was not because I feared to face my father; he had, by this time, forgotten his anger which had undergone a metamorphosis into pride of my enterprise. In a long letter he expressed something which

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I should not have thought him capable of conceiving and which, much later, I found condensed into a single sentence written by Santayana. There are two ways of looking at life; one may view it as an adventure or as a discipline. Now my father lived under a very curious delusion, perhaps because he had never stirred into the remoter corners of this globe but had, instead, lived his life within the quadrangle defined by four points, Thurow, Berlin, Paris, London; namely, the delusion that his own life had necessarily to be defined as a discipline; and while I did not yet know with any degree of precision just how he stood with regard to many things, for instance in the mere matter of finance, I accepted that view for the moment. I knew of no basis of fact on which to refute it. Mine, he said, was perhaps to be an adventure; and if so, well and good. But this was his advice: whatever I might ultimately want to do with myself, I was to do it thoroughly and with gusto.
     I was eighteen years old but precocious to a degree seldom met with; and had I known that there were to be only two more years during which I might have been said to have some remnant of free will or decision left, I should hardly have done what I did - a thing I was shortly to summarize in the Goethean line: Ich bin nur durch die Welt gerant.* It must not be forgotten that, no matter how deeply mortgaged Thurow might be, I still looked upon myself as its future master. It never occurred to me that there might be the slightest reason to retrench, so that I could live on left-overs. When, today, I calculate my expenditure of the next two years, I see that, had I asked for

*I have merely rushed through the world.

that sum of money in a lump sum, it would have secured me against want for the rest of my days. I do not mean to say that that would necessarily have been a good thing; I merely state the fact. For the moment, funds were so plentiful that I felt I could do very much as I pleased.
     I went to the enormous expense of having my yacht run around to Cherbourg; and for the next few months I cruised in the French territorial waters of the Atlantic, occasionally extending my range into Spanish and Portuguese valleys as well.
     With the opening of the winter-term, however, I returned to Paris and promptly began to attend lectures, dividing my time between the law, medicine, and archeology; I was still exploring. Wisely, I abandoned medicine; I found that I was, as I am today, unable to look at other people's blood without fainting. In the law, I discovered a disability of another kind; I felt nothing but boredom and disgust; so I let it go by the board. Archeology, on the other hand, attracted me more than ever. I attended certain courses with great assiduity; and I conceived at least one personal admiration: for Solomon Reinach who already enjoyed a European reputation. But in the nature of things all courses were elementary; so far they gave only a survey; and shortly I decided that such a survey could be better arrived at by studying originals on the spot, at Rome or Athens, than by looking at plaster casts. I had, after all, been infected with Wanderlust.
     A new interest helped me to make the old ones wane. I had, of course, all sorts of cards of introduction; and I met a few people who had known my mother. Soon I was in the social whirl; and incidentally I made my

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first contacts with younger writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, architects.
     Towards Christmas I stopped to analyse my position. What, so I asked, had school given me; and what, therefore, was the university likely to give me? My very adventure with Greek and its literature stared me in the face. What help I had received counted after all for little; essentially, in Greek, I was self-taught; and I had acquired in one year what it took others six to acquire. Did not that fact prove that schools were at bottom useless, at least for such as I? I said to myself that school had at bottom given me no more or less than "standing", standing one has to have. In order to get it, I had read; and even today I feel that formal instruction can give little beyond the ability to read. It might have been different had my aim been the initiation into the arcana of formal philology. Nor did I consider, for one moment, the fact that, if my classical studies were to yield me a means of making my livelihood, I needed first of all to make myself familiar with the methods of minute research; I never expected to have to make my living.
     Here is the central fact. More than anything else I lacked, at Paris as elsewhere, the definitely directed will to do the practical thing. I can, today, see the wisdom out of which my mother had kept reiterating that word "practical". At all times, the very last thing I had in mind was to carve a career for myself. I wanted to know all, to grasp all that man had ever found out, about his past as well as about his present. In that, I could further myself only by scattering my endeavour over many fields; I was the born "dilettante"; I toyed with everything and mastered nothing - in the practical field. That in the long-run, and considering all that was to

happen to me, this was beneficial, I should be the last to deny. It is the aim of most of our curricula, in colleges and universities. The student is given a "smattering" of everything and perhaps a little solid knowledge in one field. Later, I was to devote the leisure hours of a decade to the study of chemistry; and I do not consider it time thrown away. But what I did at Paris could not prepare me for what lay ahead.
     Meanwhile, socially, I approached certain circles from the outside.