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 shore, or as the companion and regulator of human things, like the bell on board ship. For Mr. Masefield is very just when he notes how the clang of the ship’s bell by accident in the swoop of a ship down the great waves of an Atlantic storm, has an unnatural call: being rung without the aid of men’s hands.
Now this bell, as I heard it plainting away deeply, unable as yet to see the thing on which it swung, mixed up its noise in my mind with the great story of Saint Patrick: a story I had designed to write many years ago in Arras, where I went to see the manuscript which most vividly recalls him. But of that task I found myself incapable. However, I did visit his staff in Rome.
For the bell thus swinging on its buoy far out to sea swings on the western edge of that strange, long undersea road which they call the ‘Sarn Badrig’ (which means ‘The Causeway of Saint Patrick’) and cannot but awake the great story of the coming of Europe to Ireland.
How right they were to call that sunken ridge pointing straight to Ireland ‘The Roman Road of Patrick’! And how its sudden cessation symbolises the break, the wound, the rupture, by which this island was cut off from that: more than two hundred years ago! The ridge ends suddenly in deep water and continues no more. But the bell tolls on, appealing.
Saint Patrick is the second of those witnesses which remain to us of the more than natural quality of Ireland. The first is the old pagan story of the western harbours from which the dead were ferried over by night to their felicity. The second is that undying phrase in the ‘Confessio,’ where Saint Patrick himself says that at night and in dreams ‘he heard the voices of the Irish calling.’
It is gloom upon the mind to remember that the magnitude of the task set to Britain (a Roman land) in the matter of Holy Ireland, has been so missed: as though a man, having to encounter a mountain a little before the day thought it no more than a slight hill against the dawn. Here was the difficult land—but inspired—which Agricola said (and he knew his business) he could have mastered for Rome and right order with one legion. That legion was not given him, any more than the divisions were given that might have made the break through before Cambrai. Would that the officials at Rome had listened to him! Here was Ireland that most difficult of subjects, most intriguing of friends, most tenacious of enemies, set up against the western shores of Britain, of Roman land; and through all those centuries nothing was done to enrich the subject, to acquire the friend, to reconcile the enemy. But I am weak enough to believe that this failure also was in the Providence of God.