I would not go about into the open and try the Needles channel itself for three reasons: first, that it would have meant a long beat to windward; next, that in the Needles channel I should have had to meet all the outward and inward shipping, which on a night like this might have put me in some danger; and, lastly, that I should have missed my tide and, I think, met the ebb; that is why I made for Hurst and for the narrow passage between that light and the Shingles Bank: a shifting mass of gravel that shows its changing back like a whale above the seas. Now that passage demands skill.
For the first five miles or so beyond Hengestbury Head it was easy going, for after each heavy gust of rain the light appeared again, and 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.