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
I had not veered too much in the interval. (Whether there were an inset
to this bay I had forgotten, and I could not leave the tiller to go
below and read my directions. But if there were it had not affected me,
though we were on the flood.)
As we came nearer to the light the difficulty increased, because it
was essential to keep in that direction, and the recurrent blankets of
rain blotted out the mark for five minutes and more at a time. Happily,
however, the wind, though increasing, went a little more southerly,
and left me free to play with the direction. She was a trifle
over-canvassed, and was leaning heavily over, stiff boat though she is,
and the beam-sea over that low freeboard of hers took me on the face
and body time and again with little packets of salt water and spray.
It was important to get through the North Passage with the flood, for
the ebb runs furiously through that trench, and I had known half a
dozen times the necessity of dropping anchor outside in a seaway if
one failed to get through in time, and of waiting through six hours of
darkness, during which the wind could not stem the tide.
That night, however, I had good fortune, for there was no rain during
the last mile of my approach. I took the Nona quite close to the
Shingles, and then round through the racing channel into the calmer
water beyond.
It was as well; for all that ground of big round stones is bad for
holding an anchor. The good holding-ground in this part is round the
back of Hurst Spit, in what they call the Roads; and if with your
anchor on that bottom the wind rises and it drags, then, whether from
the north or from the south, you are done; for you will either come up
against Hampshire or break up at your leisure upon the Shingles, which
shifts with every gale, and has upon it in the least sea a boiling of
white water all around.
In the Solent I carried the flood with me and, at the same time, the
wind diminished and all rain ceased, so that when day broke, which it
did before I had come near Little Yarmouth (the stream was then just
turning), the first dull light appeared in a watery but open grey sky
to the eastward, over the hills of my own county far away.
There was a great number of craft about, for it was the season of the
year, and their riding lights swung and twinkled like a dance of stars.
They were so beautiful that I forgave the rich their spickness and
their spanness, and their great yachts kept like toys. Yet neatness is
a virtue of a kind: though the Nona will have none of it, but keeps as
plain (and dirty) as a fishing-boat, to which sort of ship she is first
cousin, but no relation at all to the R.Y.S.
This character of smartness in certain externals is one of the things
which separates modern nations most sharply one from another. It
is based, of course, upon states of mind, and these in their turn,
ultimately, upon religions; but there are cross categories.
If you dig down to the fundamental, the real difference is not so
much that one mood goes in everywhere for smartness, and the other
allows all things to get dirty and slipshod, as that one mood wants
smartness in one kind of thing, and the other wants it in another kind
of thing; one mood wants accuracy and the satisfaction of proportion in
one set of things, and another wants it in another set of things. The
difference to the eye is very striking. I fancy it is the difference
which the average casual and rapid observer notes most strongly in
travel. Every one has remarked it in the contrast between Belfast and
Dublin, between an English ship and a French one, between a Basque
village or road, and a Castilian or Galician one over the boundary:
between the Swiss-German railway management and the Italian. I am told,
by those familiar with those countries, that there is a similar sharp
change when you pass over the border of Finland from Russia.
It is exceedingly difficult in so subtle a matter of human motive to
ferret out the root, though obviously that root must lie in the mind,
and we have to seek for some mental need which is being satisfied. It
is no good, for instance, saying that the Italian railway looks more
slipshod than the German-Swiss railway because the Italian is lazy and
the German-Swiss is industrious. We all know that both are industrious,
and that of the two the Italian is, on the whole, the harder worker.
It would not be true to say that Englishmen aboard ship were men of
more energy than Frenchmen aboard ship. The whole point of a Frenchman
is the intensity of his energy,—indeed, its excess,—which is what
accounts for most of the achievements of the French, and also for all
their disasters. What one has to do in examining the thing is to find
out what it is which makes the Englishman, say, or the Dutchman or the
Prussian uncomfortable in circumstances which he feels to be dirty and
slipshod, so that he cannot rest until they have been put right, while
the other sort of man is equally uncomfortable in another set of slack
circumstances, and cannot rest until they are put right.
What are the two categories?
I say again it is exceedingly difficult to judge, and still more
difficult to put into words, but they seem to me in my travels
something of this kind. The one set of people feel their whole
community to be dependent upon a _gentry_, a class possessed of more
than the average of wealth in their society. When people take such a
standard, an appetite spreads throughout the whole of the community
to reduce all, as far as possible, to the conditions under which a
wealthy person would live. While in the other set of people you have a
conception that the community must be taken as a whole. Their centre
of gravity is necessarily much lower than a gentry: it is lower even
than a middle-class. It is the standard of the people. Thus, in the
one sort of community certain forms of decoration in a room, such as
having a carpet and curtains, will seem essential. If that standard
cannot be maintained, then one must expect degradation and dirt—as in
our lodging-houses of London. But in the other sort of community they
aim at the cleanliness of a very poor room, of which the floor is bare
boards. They wash and scrub the bare boards, as in every cottage of
Normandy.
Yet that difference in social ideals is not really the heart of the
difference. The heart of the difference lies surely in the relative
values which people put upon different human activities. In the one
community people will take it for granted that a certain smartness of
externals is essential to what they call efficiency: in the other the
actual working of the instrument towards its end is alone considered.
The impression produced upon the citizen of the one type when he sees
untidy accessories, even where these are of no service at all to the
end the instrument has to serve, is that such untidiness connotes
inefficiency throughout. But the other kind of man disassociates those
two ideas, and is contemptuous of any one who confuses such different
things. In Picardy they keep out cows with chance thorns, in England
with a three-pound gate. Both keep out cows.
I have had sharp personal experience of the matter in one definite
instance, and that is a battery of field artillery. In the ideas of
the English service, a French field battery is extremely slack. The
harness is dull, often old, and pieced together, sometimes shamefully
tied up with string. The uniforms are not over-clean. There is nothing
too smart about the pieces themselves, even when they are prepared
for a review. The conclusion is immediately arrived at that these
foreigners ought not to have guns at all, seeing they do not know how
to treat them. It is the same connotation of ideas as makes one think
that a man without a collar is poor, though he may be a millionaire who
has just taken it off to ease his neck. Now the other commentary is
worth remarking, for I have heard it from the lips of many men, and it
shows the difference of mood. The smartness of the English batteries
I have always heard vastly admired by the French gunners, _but never
in connection with gunnery_. They regard it as an adjunct, as a sort
of ornament which a wealthy nation possessed (as England normally is
in peace time) of but a small armed force can afford. They think
it rather like wearing a top hat, or like a woman wearing jewels;
something having no relation whatsoever to the function of a gun and
its gunners, which is to deliver projectiles accurately and rapidly
rather than to look pretty.
In other words, the French gunner looks at an English battery very
much as you or I would look at a good poet who had been something of a
dandy. It would never occur to us that his clothes were a function of
his poetry, and, on the whole, we would more likely connect the idea of
good verse with slackness in clothes than with neatness in clothes.
Still, neatness is a virtue, and an excess of polish, even at sea, must
be forgiven.
What is less forgivable in the rich is their contempt for the usage of
the sea, and their forgetfulness of its brotherhood. I minded me as I
ran down that water under the dawn, of how, when I was still young,
I picked up a buoy in Cowes Roads after a long night outside, and in
desperate fatigue I made fast to it and slept. I had not slept three
hours when I was woken by a man so rich that he must have stolen it. He
came up, rowed in a boat—I had almost written ‘of pure gold,’ anyhow
all glittering with wealth, and rowed by many serfs in white raiment
shining like the sun. He hollered and he swore like Mrs. McKinley in
the song, and his face was purple with passion; all because I had
picked up a buoy which he had bought and paid for. Now this is not the
custom of the sea. One may pick up a buoy at need, though one must let
go when they ask you. As for this man, his monstrous great ship soon
steamed away down westward, and I sincerely hope that he struck that
honest reef, the reef called Calvados, in a fog, making for Deauville,
and was drowned.
But of all the picking up of buoys and moorings, the most astonishing
cast I ever made was in Orford River. There was a tearing wind
upstream, and I was bowling along in front of it with a tall great
noisy comber of foam at the bows, and straining my eyes for something
to round up to, as it was at Orford that I had planned to lie for the
night. There was a crowd of men upon the shore. They shouted to me and
pointed, and I took their cries to be an invitation, for there, sure
enough, was a little buoy of a fine red colour. My companion put up the
helm, but not so abruptly as to lose all way, and, when I came near
to the buoy I picked it up and made sure that she would swing round
head to wind when she felt the strain of the moorings. Far from it:
there was no strain. The little buoy came up as light as a cork, and,
as the poet has it, ‘the waves still broke about the bows and the ship
sailed on.’ The people on the shore were behaving with frenzy, and even
at that distance I gathered that they were threatening us. The more
readily, therefore, did I beg my companion to put her right before it,
and go upstream into the night as fast as we could. And so we hung
until the darkness fell, when we brought up outside Aldborough. Then it
was we learned what we had done; for the buoy was a marking-buoy for a
race, laid down with the most loving precision, and showing to an inch
where the winner should pass. Nor have I since dared to land at Orford.
There is no piece of inland water in the world so crowded, so too
well known, as this three-spoked lake of the Solent, Spithead, and
Southampton Water. There is none upon which so many thousands for a
lifetime past have spent their leisure, and none which is thought