has nothing to do with its life. It is as helpful to us as wall-texts and
those wonders we know as works of Pure Thought. Let us remember all the
noble volumes of philosophy and metaphysics we ought to have read, to
learn how wonderfully far our brains have taken us beyond the relic of
Piltdown; and then recall what Ypres was like, and buy a teetotum
instead. That much is saved. Now we need not read them. If we feel
ourselves weakening towards such idleness, let us spin tops. If we had to
choose between Garvice and say Hegel or Locke for a niche in the Temple
of Letters, we should make an unintelligible blunder if we did not elect
Mr. Garvice without discussion. He is human, he is ingenuous and funny,
and the philosophers are only loosening with the insinuations of moth and
rust. The philosophers are like the great statesmen and the great
soldiers--we should be happier without them. If we are not happy and
enjoying life, then we have missed the only reason for it. If books do
not help us to this, if they even devise our thoughts into knots and put
straws in our hair, then they ought to be burned. It is true that some
of us may get pleasure from searching novels for solecisms and collecting
evidence by which shall be guessed the originals of the novelist's
characters, just as others extract amusement from puzzle pictures. But
book-worming has the same relation to literature, even when it is done by
a learned doctor in the Bodleian, as flies in a dairy with our milk
supply. If most of the books in the British Museum were destroyed, we
might still have a friend who would go with us to Amiens to get one more
dinner in a well-remembered room, and drink to the shades; we might
still, from the top of Lundy at dusk, watch the dim seas break into lilac
around the Shutter Rock, while the unseen kittiwakes were voices from the
past; and we might still see Miss Muffet tiptoe on a June morning to
smell the first rose. That is what we look for in books, or something
like it, and when it is not there they are not books to us.
XVIII. Sailor Language
FEBRUARY 1, 1919. "What's in a word?" asks Admiral W. H. Smyth, with
ironic intent, in his _Sailors' Word Book_. There are people who are
derided because they are inclined to hesitate over that unimportant
doubt, selecting their words with a waste of time which is grievous, when
the real value of the sovereign is but nine and ninepence, in an
uneconomic desire to be as right as their knowledge will allow. There is
something to be said for them. There is a case to be made for getting a
task finished as well as one knows how, if interest in it was sufficient
to prompt a beginning. A friend of mine, who could write a thousand
interesting and popular words about an event, or even about nothing in
particular, while I was still wondering what I ought to do with it, once
exclaimed in indignation and contempt when I put in a plea for Roget and
his _Thesaurus_. He declared that a writer who used such a reference-book
ought to be deprived of his paper and ink. _He_ never used even a
dictionary. His argument and the force of it humbled me, for I gathered
that when he wrote he had but to put his hand in his pocket and pull out
all the words he wanted by the fistful. I envy him. I wish I could do it,
but there are times when every word I try seems opaque. It is useless to
pretend that Roget is of material assistance then; for what remedy is
there under heaven for the slow and heavy mind? But to me Roget is full
of amusing suggestions, which would really have been very helpful to me
had I wanted to use his words for any other purpose than the one in hand.
It is true he rarely gives you the word you think you want, but not
seldom in his assorted heaps of unused ornaments you are surprised by a
glance of colour from an unsuspected facet of a common word.
The _Sailor's Word Book_ is no pamphlet; not in the least the kind of
pocket book which once helped hurried British soldiers in a French shop
to get fried eggs. It weighs, I should think, seven pounds, and it is
packed with the vocabulary which has been built into the British ship
during the thousand years and more of her growth. The origin of very many
of the words retires, often beyond exact definition, into the cold mists
of the prehistoric Baltic, and to the Greek Islands, among the shadows
of the men who first found the courage to lose sight of the hills.
Commonly they are short words, smoothed by constant use till they might
be imagined to be born of the circumstances in which they are known, like
the gulls and the foam of the wake. They carry like detonations in a
gale. Yet quite often such words, when they are verbs, were once of the
common stock of the language, as in the case of "belay," and it has
happened that the sailor alone has been left to keep them alive. Dr.
Johnson seems not to have known the meaning of the verb "to belay" among
the other things he did not know but was very violent about. He thought
it was a sea-phrase for splicing a rope, just as he supposed "main-sheet"
was the largest sail of a ship.
The _Sailors' Word Book_ would be much more interesting than it is,
though greatly heavier, if the derivation of the words were given, or
even guessed at, a method which frequently makes the livelier story. We
begin to understand what a long voyage our ship has come when we are told
that "starboard" is steer-board, the side to which the steering-paddle
was made fast before the modern rudder was invented in the fourteenth
century. Skeat informs us that both steor and bord are Anglo-Saxon; in
fact, the latter word is the same in all the Celtic and Teutonic
languages, so was used by those who first cut trees in Western Europe,
and perhaps was here before they arrived to make our civilization what we
know it. The opposite to starboard was larboard; but for good reason the
Admiralty substituted port for larboard in 1844. Why was the left side of
a ship called the port side? That term was in use before the Admiralty
adopted it. It has been suggested that, as the steering-paddle was on the
right side of a ship, it was good seamanship to have the harbour or port
on the left hand when piloting inwards. But it is doubtful if that reason
was devised by a sailor.
A few words in sea life--as fish, mere, and row--are said to be so old
that the philologists refer them to the Aryans, or, as others might say,
give them up as a bad job. These words appear to be common to all the
sons of Adam who preferred adventurous change to security in monotony,
and so signed on as slaves to a galley. Anchor we imported from the
Greeks--it is declared to be the oldest word from the Mediterranean in
the language of our ships; admiral from the Arabs, and hammock and
hurricane from the Caribs, through the Spaniards. But other words of our
seamen are as native to us as our grey weather, for we brought them with
other habits overseas from the North--words like hail, storm, sea, ship,
sail, strand, cliff, shower, mast, and flood.
To examine words in this manner is simply to invite trouble, as did the
man who assumed that "bending a sail" was done as one would bend a cane,
not knowing that the sailor uses that word in the original sense of
"fastening." Once, in my ignorance, I imagined "schooner" was of Dutch
origin, but was careful to refer to the invaluable Skeat. Only just in
time, though. And he says that the word was born on the Clyde, grew up in
New England, migrated to Holland, and then came back to us again. Once
upon a time (1713) at Gloucester, Massachusetts, a man was witnessing a
new fore-and-aft rigged vessel glide away on a trial trip, and exclaimed
"She scoons!" So all her kind were christened. Science of that kind is
almost as good as romance.
XIX. Illusions
FEBRUARY 15, 1919. Southwark Street is warehouses and railway bridges,
and at its best is not beautiful; but when at night it is a deep chasm
through which whirl cataracts of snow, and the paving is sludge, then, if
you are at one end of it, the other end is as far away as joy. I was at
one end of it, and at the other was my train, due to leave in ten
minutes. Yet as there was a strike, there might be no train, and so I
could not lose it; I had that consolation while judging that, with more
than half a mile of snow and squall intervening from the north-east, I
could not do the length of the street in ten minutes. So I surrendered
the train which might not run to whoever was able to catch it, and in
that instant of renunciation the dark body of a motor lorry skidded to
the kerb and stopped beside me. A voice that was as passionless as
destiny told me to hop up, if I were going towards the station. The
headlong lorry, the sombre masses of the buildings which were now
looming through the diminishing snow, and the winter's night, roused a
vision of another place, much like it, or else the snow and the night
made it seem like it, and so my uppermost thought became too personal,
unimportant, and curious for converse. All I said, as I took my place
beside the steering wheel, was: "It's a wretched night." (But I might
have been alone in the lorry. There was no immediate answer.) I communed
secretly with my memory. Then the voice returned out of the darkness. It
startled me. "This corner," it remarked, "always reminds me of a bit of
Armentieres." The voice had answered my thought, and not my words.
The lorry stopped and I got down. I never saw the driver. I do not know
whose voice it was; if, indeed, there was with me in that lorry more than
a shadow and an impersonal voice.
Yet now the night could do its worst. I had the illusion that I had seen
through it. Were these bleak and obdurate circumstances an imposture?
They appeared to have me imprisoned helplessly in time and snow; yet I
had seen them shaken, and by a mere thought. Did their appearance depend
on the way we looked at them? Perhaps it was that. We are compelled by
outside things to their mould, and are mortified; but occasionally they
fail to hide the joke. The laugh becomes ours, and circumstance must
submit to the way we see it. If Time playfully imprisons us in a century
we would rather have missed, where only the stars are left undisturbed to
wink above the doings and noises of Bedlam, and where to miss the last
train--supposing it runs at all--is the right end to a perfect day of
blizzards and social squalls, what does it matter when we find that the
whole of it is shaken by a single idea? Might it not vanish altogether if
enough of us could be found to laugh at it? This dream assisted me to
some warmth of mind through the rest of the cold night till I arrived on
the station platform, after the train had left.
To help further in destroying my faith in the permanence of our affairs
and institutions, it then appeared the platform was vacant because my
train was not yet in. It was coming in at that moment--or so a porter
told me. Our protean enemy took his most fearful form in the War when he
became a Hidden Hand. Was this porter an agent of the gods for whose
eternal leisure our daily confusion and bad temper make an amusing
diversion? Was he one of the malicious familiars who are at work amongst
us, disguised, and who playfully set us by the ears with divine traps
for boobies? This porter was grinning. He went away with his hand over
his mouth, and at that moment a train stopped at the platform. The engine
was at the wrong end of it.
One official told me its proper locomotive was at East Grinstead, and
that we might not get it. Perhaps its home was there. And yet another
official whose face was as mysterious as that of the station clock, which
was wearing a paper mask, said that the engine of my train had, in fact,
gone. It had gone to Brighton. He did not know why. It had gone alone. I
turned vacantly from this bewilderment and saw a man with the sort of
golden beard an immortal might have worn standing under a station lamp,
and breaking now and then into peals of merriment, occasioned, it seemed
to me, by what the first porter was telling him. Then both of them looked
towards me, and stopped. If in one more gust of hearty laughter that
hollow wilderness of a station had vanished, gloom and dreary echoes and
frozen lights, and I had found myself blinking in a surprising sunlight
at that fellow in the golden beard, while he continued to laugh at me in
another world than this, where he was revealed for what he was, I was in
the mind for placid acceptance. Well, the miraculous transformation was
as likely as an engine for that train.
The bearded one approached me. I did not run away. I waited for the next
thing. He had a book under his arm, and it is likely that the gods, who
have no need to learn the truth, never read books. "If," he told me, "you
want to get to Sheepwash, you had better take this other train. It is
going half the way. The engine for the train for Sheepwash can't be
found."
We both boarded the train for half the journey, and it did not appear to
have any other passengers. Yet, reckless of the risks I was taking in
travelling alone with a suspected being at such a time--for where might
not he and the train go?--I accepted the chance; and as I took my seat
and regarded that bright beard, the shadow of my awful doubt became
really serious, for it was only this week that I have been reading _The
Twilight of the Gods_. There was the disintegrating recollection of that
book, with its stories of homeless immortals in search of new and more
profitable employ; and there had been a bodiless voice in a motor lorry
which ignored what I said but spoke instead to an inconsequential memory
of mine that was strictly private; and there was the levity with which
uniformed officials treated the essential institutions of civilization.
All this gave me the sensation that even the fixed policy of our strong
government might, at any moment now, roll up as a scroll.
Off we went. My fellow-traveller was silent, though he was smiling at
something which was not in the carriage, to my knowledge. When he spoke,
his eyes were not fixed on me. He looked into the air, and talked to
whatever it was he saw. He pointed a finger at the light of the city
lying beyond and below our carriage window. "All they've built," he said,
"stands only on a few odd notions. Now they're changing their notions, so
down comes everything with a run. And don't they look surprised and
pained!" (I felt like an eavesdropper, and thought I'd better show him I
was present.) I apologized for overhearing him. He nodded shortly, a
little condescendingly. "We've accepted _that_"--he poked his stick
towards where stood our Imperial city in the night--"as if it came by
itself. We never knew our city was like that just because we never saw it
in any other light. Now we're upset to find the magic-lantern picture is
fading. Got to put up with it, though." His book had been on the seat.
It fell to the floor, and I picked it up and handed it to him. It was
_The Twilight of the Gods_.
If I could have remembered at that moment one of the simple dodges for
averting the evil eye I should have used it. The laughing malice of that
book had so confused me for some days that I had begun to feel that even
St. Paul's, a blue bubble floating over London on the stream of Time,
might vanish, as bubbles will. The Hidden Hand, I began to believe, had
something in it.
I intrigued a serious interview with my fellow-passenger, hoping to find
evidence; and then the train stopped finally, six miles from home. At
that very instant of time the train which we had previously rejected
because it had no engine chose to run express through the station where
we stood.
XX. Figure-Heads
MARCH 1, 1919. When the car got to the Board of Trade Office, which is
opposite the old chapel of ease where the crews of John Company's ships
"used to worship," as a local history tells us, I saw Uncle Dave by the
kerb, with time apparently on his hands. I got down.
He told me old Jackson is dead. Jackson was a mast and block maker, but
his fame was the excellence of his figure-heads. It is many years since
old Jackson made one, but if it is doubted that he was an artist, there
is a shop near where he once lived which still displays three of his
images, the size of life, reputed to have been conjured from baulks of
timber with an ax. I remember Jackson. He rarely answered you when you
questioned him about those ships to which he had given personality and
eyes that looked sleeplessly overseas from their prows. He regarded you,
and only his whiskers moved in silent indifference (he chewed), as
though you were wasting the time of a man and an artist. Those images of
his were all of women. He would make no figure-head for a ship bearing
the name of a man, though it were that of a Greek hero. And, of course,
you dare not even think of the trousered legs of a modern man stuck each
side of a ship's prow, boots and all; but the drapery of a woman flows
with grace there. She would look indeed its vigilant guardian spirit. It
would be pleasing to write of some of the more famous of those idols, as
I remember them in repose, above the quays of the docks.
Here we were joined by some young men who knew Uncle Dave. They were
looking for a ship. But Uncle continued to tell me of the merits of his
friend the maker of figure-heads. A stoker became a trifle irritated.
"Well, what's the good of 'em, anyway?" he interjected. "Lumber, I call
'em. They can't be carried on straight stems, and clipper-bows aren't
wanted these days, wasting good metal. Why, even Thompson's White Star
liners have chucked that sort of truck. They're not built like it now.
What's the good of figger-'eds?"
This youth's casual blasphemy in the presence of Uncle Dave (who once
was bo'sun of a China clipper), extolling as he did his age of mere
machines against the virtues of an age when ships were expected to look
good as well as do good things, made us shrink in anticipation of the
storm. For Uncle Dave has a habit of listening to a talk about ships in a
deliberate and contemptuous silence, with nothing to show of his inward
heat but a baleful light in the eye. He does not like steamers. He does
not think steamer-men are seamen. He declares they can never be seamen.
And now we waited, dreading that his anger, when it burst, would be quite
incoherent with force. There was really something of hatred in his look
as he gazed at the youngster, his mouth a little open, his hand holding
his trembling pipe just away from his mouth, which had forgotten it. The
old sailor bent forward, screwing his eyes at this young man as though
trying to believe it was real.
An older hand interposed. "Ah, come away now! I've heard chaps make game
of figger-'eds, an' call 'em superstition. But I say let such things
alone. I know things that's happened to funny fellows through making game
of figger-'eds. There was the _Barbadian Lass_. She was a brigantine.
She used to run to Trinidad. There was something queer about her
figger-'ed. It was a half-breed woman. She was smiling. She had bare
breasts, and she used to wear earrings. Her chaps used to keep a spare
pair for her in a box. She was always fresh and bright, but I've heard
say she was never painted--no, not since the day the ship was launched.
She kept like that. And one day young Belfast MacCormick slipped a
tar-brush over her dial. Said it was idolatry. And what happened to him?
You answer me that!"
"Yes, I know," broke in one of us. "But you can't say it was along of
that tar-brush..."
"You young chaps ain't got no sense," here interrupted Uncle, his voice
evidently under control, but shaky. "I'd like to know where you were
brought up. You learn it all wrong at them schools of yours, and you
never get it right afterwards. You learn about the guts of engines and
'lectricity, and you mix it up with the tales your grandmothers told you,
and you get nothing straight. What you've got is all science and
superstition. And then you wonder why you make a mess of it. Listen! It
don't matter what you do to a figger-'ed, if you're fool enough to spoil
it. It's having it that matters. It's something to go by, and a ship
you're glad to work in."
He turned on the stoker. There was astonishment and pity in his glance.
"Look at you. In and out of a ship, and you forget her name when you've
signed off. You don't care the leavings in a Dago's mess-kit for any ship
you work in, if you can get a bit out of her and skip early."
"That's me, Uncle," muttered the stoker.
"Can you remember names, like some of us remember the _Mermus_, the
_Blackadder_, and the _Titania_? Not you. Your ships haven't got names,
properly speaking. They're just a run out and home again for you, and a
row about the money and the grub."
"Sure to be a row about the grub," murmured the stoker.
"What are ships nowadays?" he went on, raising a shaking index finger.
"Are they ships at all? They're run by companies on the make, and worked
by factory hands who curse their own house-flags. It's a dirty game, I
call it. Things are all wrong. I can't make them out. You fellers take no
pride in your work, and you've got no work to take pride in. You don't
know who you work for or what, and your ships got no names. They might
be damned goods vans. No good in a figger-'ed! Then I'll tell you this.
Then I'll tell you this. _You'll_ get no good till you learn better, my
lad."
XXI. Economics
MARCH 22, 1919. There is an astonishing number of books on what is called
Reconstruction in the new publications of this spring. Reconstruction
seems to be as easy as conscription or destruction. We have only to
change our mind, and there we are, as though nothing had happened. It is
the greatest wonder of the human brain that its own accommodating
ratiocination never affords it any amusement. We use reason only to make
convincing disguises for our desires and appetites. Perhaps it is fear of
the wrath to come that is partly responsible for the clamour of the
economists and sociologists in the publishers' announcements, almost
drowning there the drone of the cataract of new novels. But it is too
late now. The wrath will come. After mischievously bungling with the
magic which imprisoned the Djinn, we may wish we had not done it; but
once he is out there is nothing for it but to be surprised and sorry.
The lid is off; and it is useless for the clever reconstructionists to
press in upon us with their little screw-drivers, chattering eagerly
about locks and hinges. When the crafty but ignorant Russian generals and
courtiers got from the Czar the order for mobilizing the armies, and
issued it, they did not know it, but that was when they released Lenin.
And who on earth can now inveigle that terrific portent safely under lid
and lock again?
XXII. Old Sunlight
APRIL 5, 1919. I find the first signs of this spring, now the War is
over, almost unbelievable. I have watched this advent with astonishment,
as though it were a phantom. The feeling is the same as when waking from
an ugly dream, and seeing in doubt the familiar objects in a morning
light. They seem steadfast. Are they real, or is the dream? The morning
works slowly through the mind to take the place of the night. Its
brightness and tranquillity do not seem right. And is it not surprising
to find the spring has come again to this world? The almond tree might be
an untimely, thoughtless, and happy stranger. What does it want with us?
That spiritual and tinted fire with which its life burns touches and
kindles no responsive and volatile essence in us. I passed a hedge-bank
which looked south and was reviving. There were crumbs and nuggets of
chalk in it, and they were as remarkable to me this year as though I had
once seen those flecks of white showing through the herbage of another
planet. That crumbling earth with the grey matting of old grass was as
warm to the touch as though some inner virtue had grown, all unsuspected
by us, in the heart of this glacial ball. I picked up a lump of chalk
with its cold greenish shadows, and powdered it in my fingers, wondering
why it looked so suddenly bright. It confirmed my existence. Its smell
was better than any news I have heard of late.
I saw suddenly the gleaming coast of a continent of dark cloud, and the
blue ocean into which it jutted its headlands; memory had suddenly
returned. At that moment the sun touched my hand. All this was what we
used to know in a previous life. When I got home I took down _Selborne_.
Two photographs fell out of it, and when I picked them up--they were
those of a young amateur and were yellow with age--spring really began to
penetrate the bark. But it was not the spring of this year.
How often, like another tortoise, has the mind come out of its winter to
sun itself in the new warmth of a long-gone Selborne April? Did Gilbert
White imagine he was bequeathing light to us? Of course not. He lived
quietly in the obscure place where he was born, and did not try to
improve or influence anybody. It seems he had no wish to be a great
leader, or a great thinker, or a great orator. The example of Chatham did
not fire him. He was friendly with his neighbours, but went about his
business. When he died there did not appear to be any reason whatever to
keep him in memory. He had harmed no man. He left us without having
improved gunpowder. Could a man have done less?