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
then again, rather sharper this time, came the honest thrust into the
sand, and, what was more, she had run up against it so high this time
that she was careening a little; she was taking it very hard, as the
highbrows used to say of their beloved Prussia after the Armistice.
This time it was a good half-hour before she floated, and all that time
the culprit was silent, nor did I reproach him. He at least had some
vague memory of where the channel might be, and that I certainly had
not.
As we lay there, waiting for the rising water to lift us, a clear sound
of hammering rang from the black shore, far away, over the vast expanse
of sand. It meant something to the pseudo-pilot, for he called out in
loud, sing-song tones five or six words in the Welsh language, wherein
I distinguished the word ‘afon,’ which means ‘water’; and his very
distant Kymric fellow, there unperceived in the night, answered with a
distant cry. What they said I know not; perhaps the unjust man at the
helm was asking at what hour she would have water enough to lie higher
up.
She floated again (it was now deep into the night, and the dim stars,
through the haze overhead, watched our misery). The Nona glided on.
To be coming thus into a very shoal fairway, after dark, and to be in
the hands of a pilot who was quite clearly one of God’s Three Welsh
Fools—one of the Triad, one of the Three Great Fools of Britain—was
a strain to the temper, a strain to breaking point. It was no good my
taking the tiller, for I had no idea of the channel, and only saw now
and then, straining my eyes forward, a little blob on the darkness that
would be a drum-headed buoy slowly drifting past as we lifted on the
young flood.
I used to think that the irritation against fools was irrational and
purposeless. Where it is written in Holy Whit that one should tolerate
fools even with gladness, I thought that this was a general rule of
conduct. But now I know it to be a counsel of perfection and, indeed,
like so many things in the Old Testament, a counsel generally to
be avoided. For the strong exasperation against fools is, I am now
sure, an instinct implanted in us (or, as fools themselves would say,
‘evolved’) whereby we defend ourselves against such accidents as this
perpetual bumping which the Nona was undergoing on the sands of Port
Madoc. Our anger against fools is a natural faculty of conservation,
like the sensitiveness of the nerves of the skin; and in those
countries where fools are too much tolerated (of which England) many
little disasters proceeding from such tolerated fools combine to make a
great one at last and to break down the state.
It is high time that a new book were written on Fools, like those of
the sixteenth century, which are so excellent, and which you have in
Latin, in German, in French, and in English: ‘The Praise of Folly,’
‘The Ship of Fools,’ ‘The Fool’s Paradise,’ and others. If I had the
leisure, it is one of the many hundred books which I should like to
write myself: ‘The Fool, sociological, biological, and pathological,
with many portraits and an appendix on the newly discovered Giant Fool
of Aphasia.’ As I have not the leisure (and never had it) I bequeath
the idea to other and younger and wealthier men, just as some years ago
I bequeathed them the idea of a Cads’ Encyclopædia.
Among other chapters in this book I would have one on the Fool and the
Label. For I maintain that labels are the great support and sustenance
of the Human Fool.
Labels help the fool to do what little dull thinking he manages to get
through. He knows whom to respect and whom to despise and what wine to
choose, and so on—all by the label. And then again, labels are very
useful to the fool by getting him taken for more than he is worth. Any
number of my friends have said to me at one time or another, when I was
having my laugh at the politicians: ‘A man does not get to a position
like that (Secretary of State for Drainage, or Prime Minister, or what
not) without abilities.’ Now this error shows how useful the label is
to the fool. For a matter of fact I can testify, if any living man
can, that the politicians who get their share of the swag are of all
degrees in the matter of intelligence. Some have first-rate abilities,
especially among the lawyers; many are of the ordinary second-rate,
fifty-eight per cent, β _minus_ or Wandsworth intelligence; and quite
a large proportion are Plumb Stuffed Fools, true Fools Absolute and of
the Nadir; Rooted Fools. I knew one Fool Secretary of State who, in his
Whitehall office, used to look at his official documents with a sort
of tragic stare, as men look on the dead, and slowly wag them up and
down in front of his face with a hopeless gesture. Then he would call
upon his permanent official, who would explain to him what they meant,
whereupon he would use one after another of the great Fool Phrases
which are the furniture of the Fool’s Mind, such as, ‘Yes,’ ‘I see,’
‘Quite,’ ‘Precisely,’ and then again ‘Yes.’ Having done this, he would
sign his name to a number of papers which meant no more to him than
so many Chinese tracts, and with a groan he would go off to spend his
hundred pounds a week at Brighton.
Even in those trades where you would think there must be activity of
brain for a man to advance at all, your fool drifts forward somehow.
You find him quite high up in armies, and as for his number in the
great cheating professions, notably share-shuffling, it is prodigious.
Half the wealthy share-shufflers I have known have been fools animal,
fools crass, fools to be driven blindfold or led about on a halter;
but to do that great modern profession justice, there is a minority
of share-shufflers as keen as needles and as wide-awake as ferrets.
They have no more luck, however, than their duller brethren, for Fate
rules them all, and alternate wealth and poverty is as much the rule
with them as with the stupidest men. I will bargain that if you were to
take samples of share-shufflers out of three sacks, the House of Lords,
Monte Carlo, and the gaols, you would find the same percentage of fools
in each sample.
Which leads me on to say that never was an old proverb of less accurate
modern application than the proverb about the fool and his money. You
will have heard it said that the fool and his money are soon parted.
That was true enough for the yokel at the fair, but in this modern city
life of ours it is just the other way. The Fool of Inherited Money
(not the Gambling Fool) holds on to it with fish-hooks. It is the
intelligent man, with many interests and (by some freak of nature) a
generous heart, who squanders his hoard. But your fool gets his legs
round the money-bag and crosses his ankles on the other side, clasps it
higher up with both arms right round it and fingers tightly interlocked
beyond; digs his teeth into the mouth of the same and, screwing up his
eyes, clutches it all over desperately with the rigour of death, making
himself wholly one with the beloved object. From this attitude nothing
can move him save the lure of a plausible fellow promising to increase
his wealth. I have seen a clot of fools thus hanging on to money-bags,
all pressed up together like bats in a steeple, when a repulsive,
overdressed young adventurer would slither by singing a light song of
great wealth to be made in some scheme of his devising; and, behold,
the fools would turn their round heads ungummed from their money-bags
and listen in rapture to that song, and many of them would even hand
over their bags to the young adventurer, never to see their gold again.
But I say that, save when they are thus tempted by their blind avarice,
fools are not easily parted from their money.
However, this harbour or pilot fool of mine was not, I think, troubled
in this regard, for had he been a Fool of Wealth he would not have been
blundering to get the Nona up-channel in the dark.
Five separate times did we touch and wait with increasing anger each
time till the flood released us, but at last we came to the pool, and
to reasonable deep water, and to a quay.
There did we put out our warping ropes, and springs, and the fenders
alongside, and there did we give money to the fool as a reward for all
the pain his folly had given us.
For also this is the rule in human life; that when you suffer anything
you must pay a good price for the entertainment.
It is true of bad cooking, and of bad wine, and of a painful illness,
started or continued by doctors, and of all the intolerable noisy
hotels, full of insolence and maddening bells. It is true of all the
bad things of the world. Nor does it follow that all cheap things are
good. Far from it! But all good things are cheap (except caviare), and
the way to get good things is to look for them as you would look for a
penny which you had dropped in the straw of the (once again!) dear old
omnibuses of my youth which were pulled by horses, and had standing at
their door a guardian of the poorest of the people, foul in speech,
grimy of skin, unshaven, bloodshot, from the gutter—but (oh, believe
me!) a better citizen of a better time than ours.
Nona, cruising and voyaging Nona, wanderer over the seas of Britain,
how in the solitude of your companionship my mind does lead me from one
thing to another!
But that’s all one. It is time for sleep.
The new day having come, we got the half-ebb a little before six
o’clock, and threaded away down the Channel for the open sea.
I ought, I suppose, to have stopped in Port Madoc, and renewed the
memories of my childhood. But a fig for the memories of my childhood,
at six o’clock in the morning: at six o’clock of a May morning, and
a nice little leading breeze, all cold and merry! The memories of
childhood and the contemplation of the divine are for the evening;
they go with candle-light, and with a wine I know, and with friends
of twenty years. But, so help me He that made me, when I find the
morning wind blowing well for the salt and myself freshly roused from
a good sleep, I am full of nothing but the coming of the course and an
eagerness for the line of the sea against the sky and the making of a
further shore.
It ought to be more dangerous to float down on the ebb without a local
trickster, than to come up upon the flood. But fortune served, and
the swirl of the ebb plainly marked the channel under that heartening
light, with the glory of the new day shooting over the tops of the
great and solemn mountains eastward, by the land.
Therefore, without misadventure, we came to the last marking buoy and
took the sea; running easily with the wind nearly aft, but a little on
the port quarter, so that all was well.
The great field or marsh before Harlech stretched there to landward;
and, on its splendid defiant height, the old castle watched us as we
went; the place where they hid poor Henry the Saint when the true
Plantagenet was pacing for his blood.
Here is a landscape inhabited everywhere by things not of this world;
by the gods of these hills whom our God has ousted; by the memory of
great men dead and their wraiths, I suppose; and by the troops of the
Empire, marching up the inland road, and by the chieftains, and by the
very saintly men who cast their spell fifteen hundred years ago over
the islands and the rocks of Lyonesse.
So we sailed on and on, heading over to the Atlantic southern corner of
Wales. Then, far away in the midst of the sea, we heard the tolling of
a bell....
The tolling of the bell was not only mournful (and at the same time
terrible), but had in it an odd quality of message; as though it were
not of the world through which we moved. For a bell is a land thing,
and even in salt water we think of it as sounding upon a buoy near