"SHIPS THAT PASS-"

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21478, 29 April 1933, Page 6 (Supplement)

"SHIPS THAT PASS-"

SCME REMEMBERED FACES MEMORY PICTURES BT EVELTN BEERB It's rather strange, how certain faces, Been once or seldom, will obstinately stay in the hack of one's mind. "Without names or voice, with only imagined histories, they keep their fixed, mysterious life while the years are fading and changing those "real" faces that you saw at first. Not many, unless you haro been rarely fortunate, are noble or lovely enough to bring with them high thoughts or delicate dreams. !A few may be positively evil —turn them out at once! And among the rest will be every-day types that you have Been, perhaps, in some of those queer moments of heightened consciousness- - * the times, half-mystic, half-comic, when a grocer's window or a clothesline alive •with wind-blown pyjamas may seem to hare a secret meaning for yourself alone. These should not bo encouraged, for they fill the memory-cells that might bear finer images. But sometimes, when there is no one to talk with, and the new book is discovered to be twaddle, then even the least of the faces is a sort of /company. You can wonder what life had made it look like that, and how |t seemed to other people. There was that pale fair girl of 14 15 who stood all day in the doorway t>f a show in the Strand, and wound up mechanical toys—little gaily-coloured men and beasts that flapped and rattled across a rickety table. To a younger child it might have seemed a happy life, a perpetual playtime. But the whole of sadness was in her eyes, and all disillusionment in the corners of her pretty mouth. She seemed never to lift her gaze from those maddening toys,' never to make the least response to, that streaming, unending marvel of London's traffic. . . . East and West In Paris, wandering as a sightseer through the Luxembourg Gallery, I saw an art student from Indo-China (ov 'Armani, or one of those places)—enchanting to look at, as the girls of her race can be, with features of the finest Chinese type,, and vividly scarlet lips, and a rosy flush below the golden skin of the cheeks. Slim shape in a green linen overall, she stood absorbed at her easel and finished an incredibly faithful copy—alas! oi: one of the worst things in the gallery, a commercial success of 40 Salons age. Does she stand there still, so wastirg her talent and delightening the eyeis of some other British tripper? Or is she at homo in Saigon or Hanoi, the rhother of rose-cheeked, golden babies? .... And then, in Port Said—only half a face this time, for half was hidden by a. yashmak. A tawny brow, the bridge of a straight thin nose, and unblinking eyes, unfatliomabla wells of iniquity or .whatever else, that gazed fiercely out at the hateful town. She walked ,with the queenly Biblical 6tep of one who bears a -water-jar on her head; and as she passed a heap of rags in a Bhadowed doorway v it stirred and tottered forward —an old, old man, toothJess and filthy and altogether dreadful. But the fiercest eyes, when they saw ihiin, were suddenly crinkled around with good lines of anxiety and kindness. She fumbled beneath her robe, and brought forth .... a muttonbone, as nearly meatless as might be. The old man clutched it with a thin ,wail of gratitude or discontent, and they/ parted and went their ways; while I, sitting at the cafe table, sipped rather thoughtfully another piastre's worth of jny long, iced drink. . . The Platonlst So many they are, the faces that Keem, some to plead for notice, some to turn shyly or angrily away. Let this last one be nearer home, and more comfortable to see. ... A dozen years ago,' on the way from Bayswater to Takapuna, that wild little train was screaming and racketing through the night, as though to a witches' Sabbath nf bad machinery. Somo of tho passengers had shut their eyes, some gazed at nothing in a mild despair, some read papers or the fiction of weary businesspeople. But beside me a woman of three or five and thirty -was steadily, intently reading—What? Nothing less than tho "Republic" of Plato! Unmindful of the noise and joggle and wretched light, she had somehow contrived to lose herself in tho clear vision of tho world made perfect. I think of her now with a thrill of wonder and envy. To bo able ho to detach oneself from all the miseries of din —it seems tho least attainable of fond desires! And even now tho loud-speaker has begun again upstairs, and the cavalier in the next "apartment " is " lightly touching his steel guitar!"