The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
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THE CRUISE OF THE NONA
The Cruise of the Nona
The Story of a Cruise from Holyhead to
the Wash, with Reflections and Judgments
on Life and Letters, Men and Manners
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
Boston and New York
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
_=The Riverside Press Cambridge=_
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY HILAIRE BELLOC
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_=The Riverside Press=_
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
TO THE MEMORY OF
PHILIP KERSHAW MY
BRAVE AND CONSTANT
COMPANION UPON THE
SEA: BUT NOW HE
WILL SAIL NO MORE
DEDICATION
TO MAURICE BARING
MY DEAR MAURICE,—
I have dedicated to you two books: one was a book ‘On Nothing.’ This
I dedicated to you because, being on nothing, it dealt with what is
better than the fullness of life.
Another book I dedicated to you was the ‘Green Overcoat,’ and this
I dedicated to you because you had written a play called the ‘Green
Elephant,’ and we thereby held communion in green things.
I now dedicate to you this book, because you also have written a
book upon Things That Come to Mind, and this book may well turn into
something of the same sort. Yours was called ‘The Puppet Show of
Memory,’ and dealt with the things and people you had seen and known.
What mine will be called I do not yet know, for I hold that a child
should be born before it is christened.
I have been led into this opinion by the action of an acquaintance,
who much disputed with his wife what name the child should bear, it
being not yet born. To this choice they attached great issues; for they
rightly thought that a name determines a lifetime much more than does
a horoscope, and for this reason they consulted no astrologer. First
they explored the grander sounds, names of dominion and power. They
considered Esmeralda, Ruhala, Semiramis, Darumdibaba, and Rimbomba,
as also Haulteclaire, following the noise of pomps and wars. Wearying
of this, the glamour of strangeness seized them, and they attempted
Pelagia, Sonia, Mehitabel, Oona, Célimène, Mamua and Berengarde,
Machuska, Gounor, and Zaire; but these seemed, upon a second reading,
affected: as indeed they were. So they fell into childishness, and
wallowed in gardening, reciting Pansy, Daisy, Rose, Violet, Pimpernel,
and even Forget-me-Not, which led them into the Furor Hebraicus, and
such terms as Miriam, Lilith, Deborah, Eve, Mizraim, Sheba, and the
rest—very unsuitable; from which they reacted to mere abstractions,
such as Mercy, Peace, Charity, Grace, and what not. But these seeming
insipid, they fell maundering after a donnish fashion and dared
consider Æthelburga, Fristhwith, Ealswitha, and other abominations,
till an angel compelled them to desist and they were driven to the
solid path of the queens, and advanced Maud, Adelaide, Matilda,
Elizabeth, Guinevere, Anne, and jibbed at Jezebel. Next they ran wild
and careered through Tosca, Faustine, Theodora, Athalie, Antigone,
Medea, Pasiphaë, and many others. Finally, they perched, she upon the
name Astarte, but he upon the, to my mind, lovelier word, Cytherea.
They both mean the same thing, only one was a well-modelled Greek, and
the other a horrible Hittite. It was the woman who wanted Astarte, and
the man who wanted Cytherea; so the child was to be called Astarte, and
she was not even allowed to have the second name of Cytherea.
All that was on Thursday, the 2d June. On the 13th, being a Monday, in
the early afternoon, the child was born, and was a boy.
There was no more discussion upon its name, because its uncle, a rich
man, was called James. So the boy was James, and there was an end of it.
I have been led on, as you see, but the essence of this book is that
it shall be a sailing through the seas of the years, that is, a flight
through the airs of time, or, again, a leading on and a passage through
the vales of life: now culling this sour fruit, now that poisonous
herb, and now again this stinging plant, which I had thought to be
innocuous.
For whether I should write, Maurice, a book of reminiscences or of
wandering, or of extravagances or of opinions, or of conclusions, or of
experiences, I could not make up my mind after a cogitation of three
weeks and four days, which occupied the whole of my remaining faculties
between the town of Blois, upon the Loire, and the town of Châlons,
upon the Marne, my journey from the one to the other being taken this
very year circuitously, in the company of a Bear, by way of Bayonne,
where the bayonet, Rosalie, was first made; Saint John at the foot of
the Pass, where they boil crayfish in white wine; Roncesvalles, where
Roland died, and I nearly did; Burguete, where they charge too much
and where the kitchen smoke goes out through the middle of the roof;
Pamplona, the only permanent thing Pompey ever did; Saragossa, which
never changes; Reus, where they spin cotton; Tarragona, which is biding
its time; Barcelona, which got there first; Puycerda, and, after that,
the Gorges of the Tet.
I was by this time a long way from Blois, but I had come to no
conclusion on the name of my book, and my mind was still like one of
those conferences to which the parliamentarians of various countries
travel at our expense from time to time, and are there delivered of
heavy speeches without meaning, which make one think of a corpulent
elderly man groaning across a ploughed clay field after a week’s rain
in the dark of the moon. At Nîmes I had not decided what to call the
book, nor down in a valley of the Cévennes, nor at Lyons, nor in the
Jura, nor in the Vosges, nor in Strasbourg; until at last I came to
Châlons, as I have said. And, sitting down there to a meal in the hotel
very finely called ‘The House of the High Mother of God,’ I still
remained undecided. And I am so, to this day.
I cannot make it a book of reminiscences, because I can remember
nothing for more than about two days, and also because I will not
write about my contemporaries for fear of offending them. They are
very good fellows, they have no particular characters or talents, they
do nothing lasting, they are a generation of saltless butter with too
much skim milk about it, there is little to say about them, and almost
anything one says gives the little fellows offence. I would not call
it ‘Opinions,’ because I have none either, only convictions; and if I
called it ‘Convictions’ I might be misunderstood. I tell you I do not
know what to call this book, but I am dedicating it to you because it
has at least this parallel with your work that it is all about things
that have passed through my mind.
Indeed, the naming of a book has always seemed to me a thing fastidious
in both senses; that is, both a thing wearisome and a thing of picking
and choosing. I am not quite sure that books ought to be named at all.
If they were numbered, like the streets in America, they would be very
much easier to catalogue and shelf (or shelve) and remember the places
of. Thus your next book or so might be ‘Baring 32,’ and this ‘Belloc
106.’ And why not? It would in no way diminish their souls, their
connotations. Cannot a man be head over ears in love with Number 15,
Parham Street, and sick of 30, Tupton Square? I can!
Numbers, I say, leave us free to give personality and emotions to
things. An anniversary is but a numbered day in a month, yet it shakes
a man more than any feast name.
So should it be with books. When they are named, they give a false
indication; moreover, the vast crowd of books that are poured out in
this our day like fugitives from a plague-stricken city is so immense
that the discovery of a new title is impossible. However, it will have
a title before I have done, stap me, and it is dedicated to you.
At this point I ought to end; but, as I have already told you, it
is in the very character of this book, of its essence, nature, and
personality, that it has only an accidental beginning, no real end,
and nothing in particular between the two. It is like those rivers of
the Middle West which trickle out of a marsh, and then wander aimless,
without banks or shape, mere wetnesses, following the lowest land until
they reach the shapeless Mississippi, and at last the flats and mud of
a steaming sea.
What a book!...
My mind now suggests to me (for my mind is separate from myself, and
may properly be regarded as no more than an inconsequent companion)
that I should do very well not to cut off the Dedication from the rest
of the Opus. The putting of a dedication separately from a book has
something about it of form; and form is just what I have to avoid. I am
to wander at large, setting down such things as pass before my eyes of
memory, leaving out pretty well all that is of importance (reserving
that for posthumous publication), and doing no more than present this,
that, or the other, of ephemeral things. For there comes a time in life
after which a man discovers no more, has lost through the effect of
the years the multitude of what he possessed both within and without,
can only repeat phrases or decisions already well worn. He is fixed,
sterilised, hardened, and has nothing left to say; that is the moment
in which he is expected to set down, for the benefit of others, the
full treasury of what was once his soul.
Some two to five years ago there was an outburst of books in England
which I myself labelled (and, I think, justly) ‘The Cads’ Concert.’
These were books in which men set down their connection with their
fellows, giving each by name familiarly, purported to publish diaries
which they had never kept, maligned the dead, insulted the living, and
lied impudently upon both. They had a great sale, had these books,
because they brought in rich or otherwise important men and women,
known already by newspapers vaguely to the readers of such books, so
that those readers had from ‘The Cads’ Concert’ a faint reflection of
High Life.
It was something quite new in the history of letters, and had, I am
glad to say, a very short life. I do not propose to add one more
vileness to that nasty little list.
How then should I approach this task which has been set me of writing
down, in the years between fifty and sixty, some poor scraps of
judgment and memory? I think I will give it the name of a Cruise;
for it is in the hours when he is alone at the helm, steering his
boat along the shores, that a man broods most upon the past, and most
deeply considers the nature of things. I think I will also call it
by the name of my boat, the Nona, and give the whole book the title
‘The Cruise of the Nona,’ for, in truth, the Nona has spent her years,
which are much the same as mine (we are nearly of an age, the darling,
but she a little younger, as is fitting), threading out of harbours,
taking the mud, trying to make further harbours, failing to do so,
getting in the way of more important vessels, giving way to them,
taking the mud again, waiting to be floated off by the tide, anchoring
in the fairway, getting cursed out of it, dragging anchor on shingle
and slime, mistaking one light for another, rounding the wrong buoy,
crashing into other people, and capsizing in dry harbours. It seemed to