Chapter 6
Sometimes there was a hint. Once again, when I returned from France in 1916, unhappy with a guess at what the future would be like, I learned that our workers were not working. They were drinking. They had been passionately denounced by the Great and Popular, and our Press was forced to admit this disastrous crime to the world, for fidelity to the truth is a national quality. I went to an engineer who would know the worst, and would not be afraid to tell me what it was. I found him asleep in his overalls, where he had dropped after thirty-six hours of continuous duty. Afterwards, when his blasphemous indignation over profiteers, politicians, and newspapers had worn itself out, he told me. His men, using dimmed lights while working on the decks of urgent ships, often forced to work in cramped positions and in all weathers, and while the ship was under way to a loading berth, with no refreshment provided aboard, and dropped at any hour long distances from home, were still regarded by employers in the old way, not as defenders of their country's life, but as a means to quick profits, against whom the usual debasing tricks of economy could be devised. A battleship in the north had been completed five months under contract time. Working girls, determined to make a record output of ammunition, persisted twenty-two hours at a stretch, topped their machines with Union Jacks, and fainted next morning while waiting for the factory gates to open. The spirit of the English! What virtue there is in bread and tea! Yet we might have guessed it. And again we might have remembered, as a corrective, how many grave speeches, which have surprised, shocked, and directed the nation, have been made by Great Men too soon after a noble dinner, words winged by the Press without an accompanying and explanatory wine list.
But the Nobodies are light-minded, casual, and good-hearted. Their great labour over, and their sacrifices buried, they have come out this day to celebrate the occasion with hilarious and ironic gaiety. They have won the Greatest of Wars, so they ride in motor-lorries and make delirious noises with comic instruments. Their heroic thoughts are blattering through penny trumpets. They have accomplished what had been declared impossible, and now they rejoice with an inconsequential clatter on tea-trays and tin cans.
Yet some of us who watched their behaviour saw the fantastic brightness in the streets on Armistice Day only as a momentary veiling of the spectres of a shadow land which now will never pass. Who that heard "Tipperary" sung by careless men marching in France in a summer which seems a century gone will hear that foolish tune again without a sudden fear that he will be unable to control his emotion? And those Nobodies of Mons, the Marne, and the Aisne, what were they? The "hungry squad," the men shut outside the factory gates, the useless surplus of the labour market so necessary for a great nation's commercial prosperity. Their need kept the wages of their neighbours at an economic level. The men of Mons were of that other old rearguard, the hope of the captains of industry when there are revolts against the common lot of our industrial cities where the death-rates of young Nobodies, casualty lists of those who fall to keep us prosperous, are as ruinous as open war; a mutilation of life, a drainage of the nation's body that is easily borne by Christian folk who are moved to grief and action at the thought of Polynesians without Bibles.
Yet the Nobodies stood to it at Mons. They bore us no resentment. We will say they fought for an England that is not us, an England that is nobler than common report and common speech. Think of the contempt and anger of the better end of London just before the War, when, at the other end, the people of Dockland revolted and defied their masters! I knew one mother in that obscure host of ignorant humanity in revolt. Two of her infants were slowly fading, and she herself was dying of starvation, yet she refused the entrance of charity at her door, and dared her man to surrender. He died later at Ypres. He died because of that very quality of his which moved his masters and superiors to anger; he refused at Ypres, as he did in Dockland, like those who were with him and were of his kind, to do more than mock defeat when it faced him.
That figure of Nobody in sodden khaki, cumbered with ugly gear, its precious rifle wrapped in rags, no brightness anywhere about it except the light of its eyes (did those eyes mock us, did they reproach us, when they looked into ours in Flanders?), its face seamed with lines which might have been dolorous, which might have been ironic, with the sweat running from under its steel casque, looms now in the memory, huge, statuesque, silent but questioning, like an overshadowing challenge, like a gigantic legendary form charged with tragedy and drama; and its eyes, seen in memory again, search us in privacy. Yet that figure was the "Cuthbert." It was derided by those onlookers who were not fit to kneel and touch its muddy boots. It broke the Hindenburg Line. Its body was thrown to fill the trenches it had won, and was the bridge across which our impatient guns drove in pursuit of the enemy.
What is that figure now? An unspoken thought, which charges such names as Bullecourt, Cambrai, Bapaume, Croiselles, Hooge, and a hundred more, with the sound and premonition of a vision of midnight and all unutterable things. We see it in a desolation of the mind, a shape forlorn against the alien light of the setting of a day of dread, the ghost of what was fair, but was broken, and is lost.
XVII. Bookworms
JANUARY 18, 1919. In Fleet Street yesterday there was at lunch with us an American Army officer who discoursed heartily about a certain literary public-house. He quoted a long passage from Dickens showing how somebody took various turnings near Fetter Lane, easily to be recognized, till they arrived at this very tavern. Such enthusiasm is admirable, yet embarrassing. In return, I inquired after several young American poets, whose work, seldom seen here, interests me, and I named their books. He had never heard of them. This enthusiast did not even appear to have the beginning of an idea that his was unforgivable ignorance seeing that he knew more than a native ought to know about some of our taverns. Had he been an Englishman and a friend of mine I should have told him that I thought his love of letters was as spurious as the morality of the curate who speaks in a trembling baritone about changes in the divorce laws, but who accepts murder without altering the statutory smile of benediction.
Literature would be lighter without that scroll work and top hamper. It 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.