Part 11

And there is another landscape of the sea, which is that where two countries stand upon either side from the midway of a passage; it is a sight which explains history for one better than most things of travel. Often enough one is told, for instance, how the Irish hills of Wicklow can be caught from the Snowdon range or those of Wexford from the lesser heights of the south, the line of Pembrokeshire near Fishguard and St. David's. But I remember something which makes one realise the separation and the neighbourhood of the two islands far better than such an inland view: I remember how on a certain November day, very clear and frosty, with a touch of snow upon the hillsides, the Wexford heights and the Welsh stood equidistant from the deck; each plain and neighbourly, yet with all that sea between. Nor shall I ever forget a certain late evening in summer, twenty years ago, when the sun set upon an even sea line, flooding the dark water with crimson, and how Grisnez and the Kentish cliffs to the left and to the right gave to the narrows of the Channel the aspect of a great river mouth, so that one thought, as one gazed, of those wide mountain estuaries of the West, along the coast of the Pacific, where such a river as the Columbia swells down into the sea.

But of all those sacramental sights the chief is the landfall from very far away. When a man after days at sea first hesitates whether some tenuous outline or level patch barely perceived, a vast way off, is land or cloud and then comes to the moment of certitude and knows it for land, all his mind changes; the ship becomes a different thing; the world, which has been formless and simple, takes on at once name and character. He is back among human things.

ON A PIECE OF ROPE

The other day as I was sailing down channel at dawn I contemplated a piece of rope (which was my only companion) and considered how many things attached to it, and of what sort these were.

I considered in the first place (as it has become my unhappy custom to do about most things) how mighty a theme this piece of rope would be for the modern rubbish, for the modern abandonment of common sense. I considered how many thousand people would, in connexion with that bit of rope, write that man had developed it through countless ages of upward striving from the first dim savage regions where some half-apelike creature first twisted grass, to the modern factory of Lord Ropemaker-in-chief, which adorns some Midland Hell to-day. I considered how people made up history of that kind entirely out of their heads and how it sold by the waggon-load. I considered how the other inventions which I had seen arise with my own eyes had always come suddenly, with a burst, unexpectedly, from the oddest quarters. I considered how not even this glaring experience was of the least use in preventing fools from talking folly.

Next I considered, as I watched that bit of rope, the curious historical fact of anonymity. Some one first thought out the bowline knot. Who was it? He never left a record. It seems that he desired to leave none. There would appear to be only two kinds of men who care about leaving a record of themselves: artists and soldiers. Innumerable other creators since the world began are content, it would seem, with creation and despise fame. I have often wondered, for instance, who invented forming fours. I very much doubt his being a soldier. Certainly he was not a poet. If he had been a soldier he would not have let you forget him in a hurry--and as for poets, they are good for nothing and could no more invent a useful thing than fly.

Note you, that forming fours is something which must have been invented at one go. There is no "Development" about it. It is a simple, immediate and revolutionary trick. It was not--and then it was. Note you also that until the trick of forming fours was discovered, no conversion from line into column was possible, and therefore no quick handling of men. So with knots and so with splicing. There are, indeed, one or two knots that have names of men attached to them. There is Walker's knot, for instance. But Walker (if Walker it was who invented it) made no great effort to perpetuate his fame, and all the common useful knots without which civilisation could not go on, and on which the State depends, were modestly given to mankind as a Christian man, now dead, used to give his charity! without advertisement.

And this consideration of knots led me to another, which was of those things which had been done with ropes and which without ropes would never have happened. The sailing of the sea, the execution of countless innocent men, and now and then, by accident, of somebody who really deserved death: The tying up of bundles, which is the solid foundation of all trade: The lasso for the catching of beasts: The hobbling of horses: The strengthening of man through pulleys: The casting of bridges over chasms: The sending of great messages to beleaguered cities: The escapes of kings and heroes. All these would not have been but for ropes.

As I looked at the rope I further considered how strange it was that ropes had never been worshipped. Men have worshipped the wall, and the post, and the sun, and the house. They have worshipped their food and their drink. They have, you may say, ceremonially worshipped their clothes; they have worshipped their headgear especially, crowns, mitres, ta-ra-ras; and they have worshipped the music which they have created. But I never heard of any one worshipping a rope. Nor have I ever heard of a rope being made a symbol. I can recollect but one case in which it appears in a coat-of-arms, and that is, I think, in the case of the County or City of Chester, where, as I seem to remember, the Chester knot is emblazoned. But no one used it that I can remember in the Crusades, when all coats-of-arms were developing. And this is odd, for they used every other conceivable thing--windmills, spurs, boots, roses, staffs, waves of the sea, the crescent moon, lions and leopards and even the elephant, and black men's heads, birds, horses, unicorns, griffons, jolly little dogs, chess boards, eagles--every conceivable thing human or imaginary they pressed into service; but no ropes.

One would have thought that the rope would have been a basis of measurement, but there are only two ways in which it comes in for so obvious a purpose, and one of these is lost. There was the old Norman _hrap_, which was vague enough, and there is the cable, the tenth of a sea mile. But the rope does not come into any other measurement; for you cannot count the knots on a log line as a form of measurement with ropes. The measurement itself is not drawn from the rope but from geographical degrees.

Further, I considered the rope (as it lay there) on its literary side. No one has written verses to ropes. There is one verse about ropes, or mainly about ropes in a chaunty, but I do not think there is any poem dedicated to ropes and dealing mainly with ropes. They are about the only thing upon which verse has not been accumulated--bad verse--for centuries.

Yet the rope has one very important place in literature which is not recognised. It is this: that ropes more than any other subject are, I think, a test of a man's power of exposition in prose. If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English tongue. You are not only a master--you are a sign, a portent, a new discoverer, an exception among your fellow men, a unique fellow. For no one yet in this world surely has attained to lucidity in this most difficult branch of all expression. I find over and over again in the passages of those special books which talk of ropes, such language as--"This is a very useful knot and is made as follows:--a bight is taken in the standing apart and is then run over right handedly, that is with the sun or, again, the hands of a watch (only backward), and then under the running part and so through both times and hauled tight by the free end." But if any man should seek to save his life on a dark night in a sudden gust of wind by this description he would fail: he would drown.

Take the simplest of them. Take the Clove Hitch. Write a sentence in English which will explain (without a picture) how to cast a Clove Hitch. I do not think you will succeed.

Talking of this literary side of ropes, see how the rope has accumulated, like everything else, a vast army of technical terms, a whole regiment of words which are its family and of which it is very jealous. People who write of ropes are hardly able to keep off these words although they mean nothing to the reader and are but a darkening and a confusion. There is stranding and half-stranding and there is parcelling, serving and whipping, and crowning and all the rest of it. How came such words there? Who thought them to the point? On what possible metaphors were they founded? In nearly all other groups of technical words you can trace the origin, but here you cannot. Nor can you find the origin of the names for all the hundred things that are made of ropes. Why is a gasket called a gasket? Why is a grommet called a grommet? Why is a true lover's-knot called a true lover's-knot? or a tack a tack? Now and then there is a glimmering of sense. Halyard is obvious and sheet is explicable. Outhaul and downhaul might be Greek or German so plainly do they reveal their make-up. But what are you to make of bobstay, parrel, runner and shroud? Why are ratlines ratlines? What possible use could they be to a rat? They are no good for _leaving_ a sinking ship, though excellent for running up out of the rising water. "Springs" I half understand, but whence in the name of Chelsea came "painter"? Reef points might pass. That is if you admit reef--which, I suppose, is the same as "reave" and "rove"--but, great heavens, where did they get "earrings"--and why do you "mouse" hooks, and what have cats to do with anchors?

A ship is a little world, a little universe, and it has a language of its own, which disdains the land and its reasons.

"ULTIMA RATIO"

I came out of the sea the other day into a little English harbour and landed there. After I had put away everything on board and left my boat in charge of the old man who looks after her in the tidal lock, I stood waiting outside the railway station till my train should come and take me home. And there it was that I saw a German gun.

They had put it up for a trophy. Never was a war with trophies so promiscuous! Never was a war with trophies so much of an anti-climax! The nearest thing to a real trophy which they have had since this war ended was the great pyramid of guns in the middle of the Champs Elysées, all heaped together pell-mell with the cock crowing on the top of them. But I never see a Bavarian or a Prussian gun stuck up mournfully in a little English town without thinking of the English and French guns which are knocking about somewhere among the German states. And what is more, I never see one without thinking how poor a trophy the modern gun makes; especially the German gun, the carriage of which always reminds me of rather heavy and bad agricultural machinery. I think of the trophies of old, of the fine bronze guns taken in the wars against the French, and of the flags in the churches, and especially that amazing ragged dusty double line of them in the Invalides in Paris, which looks down slantwise through a yellow window and sees, in its solemn gulf below, the huge marble sarcophagus of Napoleon.

However, there was the gun. And as the time of waiting for a train is the most empty time in the world (because you cannot limit it and you do not know whether it is long enough to start a geometrical problem or some other entertaining pastime), I filled it up by walking round that gun.

I guessed it to be a 150, say six inch, but I judge these things badly. At any rate it was a heavy piece, not a howitzer.

I know not what it is, it may be youth and its permanent memories, but when I see a gun firing at the moon cocked up at its utmost elevation, I feel that the weapon has suffered an indignity. It is as though it were an animal going through a performance. For the natural position of a gun is some slight elevation for a normal range, and not this isolated, head-in-the-air, barking attitude which the guns of captivity too often wear. They are noblest, these poor prisoners, when they stand level with the earth as though they were firing at close range in the hopeless effort to stop an advancing wave.

Well, anyhow, there it was, all lifted up, absurdly, like a dog baying.

Then, when I got nearer to the gun, and looked closely at it, I saw something which I have seen so often in a million German things that it has become a commonplace for them in my mind, but I know it is perilous to whisper it on this side of the Channel. The thing that has become a commonplace in my mind is the fact that Germans cannot _make_, but can only _copy_. They have many negative virtues, very unsuited to their vast aberrations. They are fairly industrious, very simple, normally kind and domestic, and in their dreamy way, they half catch now and then what the older civilisation of Europe expresses in strong and positive beauty. But they copy. They are impressed. They are a soft metal and ancient Europe is the die. What made me think of this commonplace was the seeing on that gun--actually engraved upon a modern gun!--a poor little copy of Louis XIV. Think of it! After now much more than two hundred years! There it was before my astonished eyes, and I could hardly believe it; the motto of the great king copied upon a Hohenzollern gun! It was like reading the "_Honi soit qui mal y pense_" of the Plantagenets on the Menu of a Cosmopolitan Hotel....

For Louis XIV in his proudest moment had engraved upon his cannon, just above the middle point where cannons turn upon their trunnions, a great "L" written in a flourishing script, with a crown above it, and then along the breach, just above the touch-hole, he had had engraved upon a sort of scroll the phrase "_Ultima ratio regum_." It was a famous phrase in Europe then. The greatest of English writers made good fun of it when he said: "It seems that his arguments have been turned against himself."

That was Louis XIV's manner; and, I say, I thought everybody had forgotten it. I thought that no one remembered that motto except a few miserable people like myself who potter about doing useless things. But I was wrong. The last King of Prussia, the last of the Hohenzollerns, the man upon whom the famous oracle of the thirteenth century has fallen, _he_ remembered it--William II, last and most grotesque German Emperor, was responsible for this silly thing.

For there on that gun in the wretched little, absurd little, squalid little station square of a little port, with no one to pay it the honour even of curiosity, I remarked graven things slavishly copied from Louis XIV. First, just above the trunnion, there was a crown and under it, in exactly the same flourishing script of the seventeenth century, the two letters "W. R." interlaced, and between them an eagle looking fiercely to its right.... So I take it that this gun was worked for the King of Prussia.

Then at the breach there was a scroll, and in the scroll was a similar script just like that of Louis XIV. And the motto ran: "_Ultima ratio regis_"--"_regis_" mind you, not "_regum_."

We all have the defects of our qualities, and there does go with the German, even with the Prussian, simplicity, an astonishing lack of critical power. "_Ultima ratio regum_" is one thing: "_Ultima ratio regis_" is quite another. It reminded me of the famous quotation: "Frailty, thy name is lady."

Now why was that script ever engraven? (The date was 1909.) Against whom was this ephemeral Prussian king going to use his argument--his last argument? I carry back my mind to 1909, and I can remember no one against whom at that moment he was preparing to argue in such a fashion. It was a quiet time. There was no worry within the Prussian state; Agadir had not been heard of. Yet that was the date and that was the motto. And there was the eagle and there was the inscribed flourishing initial, and there was the crown.

I know very well that some, perhaps most, of my readers--of those who do me the honour to read this rambling--will think me a fool for what I am next to say. But I confess a sentimentality towards that gun. When I was a boy and they were teaching me to drive in the artillery school at Toul they used to give us a sort of vile body on which to experiment our horses and ourselves: old guns of '48--old bronze guns. And these the French had made with great art. They were beautiful things. What touched me most about them was that each of them had a name. One was called "Liberty," another "The Voice of the People," another "Equality," and so on. It is a human instinct and a just one to give names to things. It is part of the truth that we ourselves are made in the image of God. Why, even my boat, which is but a material, inanimate body (may She forgive me), has a name. I must tell you, though you ridicule me, that when I saw that German gun I wished it also had a name.

And what sort of name should it have had? It could not have had a name for an abstract virtue or idea, like a French gun. It might have had the name of a great German man, but the names of such men are soon exhausted. It might have had the name of a jest, for jests are innumerable; but then the reader would have had to understand the jest which would probably have been local--like "Grandmamma" or "Archie" or the huge French gun I knew in my youth, which the men of my youth called "Silence in the Ranks"--an enormous piece on the top of a fort. Indeed, I cannot conceive what name could have been given to this one gun out of so many guns. Still I wish it had had a name.

If it had had a name I could look back on it, now that I have left it, and say to myself: "What fun I had in those few minutes before the train came in, examining the outward expression of ----, his character, his toilet, his elevation, and all the rest of it!"

But the gun had no name, and so I must still carry it in my mind anonymously as "the German gun."

Of all the hundreds of guns that I have seen lying about or being carried on trucks or drawn by horses, or standing in the great factories during these years, only one gun has touched me more, and this also was a German gun. I saw it in February, 1915. It lay derelict in a ditch close to the road near the river Ourcq, within an hour of Meaux, and Paris not forty miles away. It was perhaps the extreme gun of all the invasion; the mark of the high tide. It lay pitifully on one side, like the corpse in Beaudelaire's poem. One wheel it had not at all, but only the axle sticking up into the air, and the other wheel was rotted into the ground. And there lay the poor dead German gun like a fool.

I said to my companion: "Why does not some one of the peasants take it away and keep it for a relic?" To which my companion answered in the hard French fashion (which differs so much from the more human English way): "Why should he?"

ON A TAG PROVIDER

There are a great number of trades in the world of which one does not hear, because men do not make a full living by them. Most of them are interesting trades.

There is the famous example of the man who gave his trade on the Inquisition Form as "Maker of smoked glasses through which to watch such total eclipses of the sun as may be visible from Greenwich." There is the less known but equally remarkable case of the worm-eater; and to this I can swear to, because I read it in print with my own eyes. It happened years ago in a police court in London. The magistrate said to the poor man who was (as is the fashion of the poor) in trouble, "What is your trade?" to which he answered, "I am a worm-eater." It turned out that he was not a person who ate little worms, nor, metaphorically, a man who made his living out of dejection and humility, but a person who simulated the action of worms upon old wood. He was employed by the furniture fakers to discharge a load of very fine shot from a great distance at wood which had already been scraped and treated with acid and chipped about so that it looked old. This very fine shot made very fine holes which made the wood look as if it had been worm-eaten. Thus was he a worm-eater.

Then there are the men who do the hind legs of an animal in a pantomime, and there is the trade of the man who is not exactly a detective but, as it were, a detective's servant, and is not let into the secret but simply told to watch. There are great numbers of these honest folk. You may see them all up and down London, and you may mark them by two things. First of all, they always have something new about them, usually a new hat, because they are miserable men and their employers think that if they looked too poor they would be too conspicuous. It is a muddle-headed idea, but there it is. Therefore, they are always given something new in the way of clothing, and usually a hat. This done, they are apt to stay all day within a very narrow area, looking at a particular door and at the same time trying to look as though they were not looking at it. In this they fail. I had a long conversation with one of these innumerable London police-spies two years ago, and gave him great agony by going up to the house after he had spoken to me and warning the people inside.

But of all these hidden trades, the one I like most is that of Tag-Provider (as it used to be called in the old days of party politics). I believe the last of them is dead; at any rate, when I saw him ten years ago he was in a very anxious state, coughing, badly broken by age, and telling me he knew not which way to turn for a meal; yet he had had his prosperous days.