In other words, the French gunner looks at an English battery very much as you or I would look at a good poet who had been something of a dandy. It would never occur to us that his clothes were a function of his poetry, and, on the whole, we would more likely connect the idea of good verse with slackness in clothes than with neatness in clothes.
Still, neatness is a virtue, and an excess of polish, even at sea, must be forgiven.
What is less forgivable in the rich is their contempt for the usage of the sea, and their forgetfulness of its brotherhood. I minded me as I ran down that water under the dawn, of how, when I was still young, I picked up a buoy in Cowes Roads after a long night outside, and in desperate fatigue I made fast to it and slept. I had not slept three hours when I was woken by a man so rich that he must have stolen it. He came up, rowed in a boat—I had almost written ‘of pure gold,’ anyhow all glittering with wealth, and rowed by many serfs in white raiment shining like the sun. He hollered and he swore like Mrs. McKinley in the song, and his face was purple with passion; all because I had picked up a buoy which he had bought and paid for. Now this is not the custom of the sea. One may pick up a buoy at need, though one must let go when they ask you. As for this man, his monstrous great ship soon steamed away down westward, and I sincerely hope that he struck that honest reef, the reef called Calvados, in a fog, making for Deauville, and was drowned.
But of all the picking up of buoys and moorings, the most astonishing cast I ever made was in Orford River. There was a tearing wind upstream, and I was bowling along in front of it with a tall great noisy comber of foam at the bows, and straining my eyes for something to round up to, as it was at Orford that I had planned to lie for the night. There was a crowd of men upon the shore. They shouted to me and pointed, and I took their cries to be an invitation, for there, sure enough, was a little buoy of a fine red colour. My companion put up the helm, but not so abruptly as to lose all way, and, when I came near to the buoy I picked it up and made sure that she would swing round head to wind when she felt the strain of the moorings. Far from it: there was no strain. The little buoy came up as light as a cork, and, as the poet has it, ‘the waves still broke about the bows and the ship sailed on.’ The people on the shore were behaving with frenzy, and even at that distance I gathered that they were threatening us. The more readily, therefore, did I beg my companion to put her right before it, and go upstream into the night as fast as we could. And so we hung until the darkness fell, when we brought up outside Aldborough. Then it was we learned what we had done; for the buoy was a marking-buoy for a race, laid down with the most loving precision, and showing to an inch where the winner should pass. Nor have I since dared to land at Orford.
There is no piece of inland water in the world so crowded, so too well known, as this three-spoked lake of the Solent, Spithead, and Southampton Water. There is none upon which so many thousands for a lifetime past have spent their leisure, and none which is thought to be more exhausted in all that can be known of it. But those who think so, neglect the dimension of time. For, though you should know every entry and every sounding, the first hour in every flood when your craft can safely go over the banks, the dredged channel under the Hampshire coast, and Lymington River, and Cowes Roads and Ryde Sands, and Beaulieu and Buckler’s Hard, where I am told they launched great men-of-war, and Portsmouth Harbour right up to Fareham, and the Hamble to its bridge, and all the yard and wharfs of the Test and the Itchen, yet you do not possess that piece of water unless you see moving upon it the fulness of its past. You must see the last tragedy of the Civil Wars: the craft that might have taken Charles away from Southampton to freedom, and his young son cruising with the loyal fleet (which had declared for the King against the oligarchy) cruising just outside the Wight, but unable to save the King at Carisbrooke. You must see that which I shall always regret that I am twenty years too young to have seen—the great ships under full sail making out through Spithead in line for the open water. You must see the pirate boats of a thousand years ago stranded on the Bramble, because they did not know the water, and Alfred’s men capturing them so, and taking them off to Chichester to be hanged: a proper end for all Vikings. And you must see the great fleet of Roman transports coming in by an August night with a comet in the sky, for the recovery of Britain seceded and turned into a separate realm; the German mercenaries landing and pouring up the Winchester road, and meeting their fellow Germans in battle before London, and the Emperor Theodosius riding up Ludgate Hill in triumph after the usurper’s death.
Because of its size and of its security, because of its nearness to Europe, because of its many harbours, and one great harbour, this patch of water has been packed with history as no other in Britain, except London River; and now in our time the great London Dock Strike, more than thirty years ago, has brought Southhampton Water back to the mass of modern traffic, and made it the great port of entry from the West.
For it was the great London Dock Strike of ’89 did that, of which you may say, as of all the industrial battles of our time, that the victors lost.
Well do I remember the fevers of that struggle! I was but nineteen years of age; it was my delight to follow the intense passions of the time; and those passions were real. It was before the socialist creed had been captured for sham battle at Westminster. The leaders _did_ desire, and _did_ think they could achieve an England in which the poor should be poor no longer, and in which there should be sustenance and happiness for all. They _did_ still believe the amazing proposition that what they called ‘the community’—that is, in practice, the politicians—could own all we have and handle it with a superhuman justice. Great God! They believed it!
I well remember that I was myself near to believing it, but I had the excuse of youth. They had also another excuse: not intellectual, indeed, but moral; for, intellectually, the socialist has not a leg to stand on, seeing that his theory is but a piece of arithmetic, and its application, coincidently with honour and freedom, a contradiction in terms. Morally I say, those men, those socialists of ’89, were justified by the imbecility of their opponents.
Nor has that imbecility grown less. The arguments for the capitalist scheme have to-day, after half a lifetime, the same bewildering fatuity they had then. In the interval the power of combined capital, the control exercised over us by a few exceedingly unworthy men, has multiplied I know not how many fold; but the valueless defence of such a condition goes on. One might imagine, to hear them, that the defenders of capitalism honestly believed their ephemeral and empoisoned chaos to have been present amongst us from the beginning of time, and to be normal to the human race.
It is no little irony to remember that those who have to state the most contemptible of such arguments in the press are themselves men commonly indifferent, or even hostile, to the interests they are paid to serve. It is not your sudden millionaire out of the gutter who writes in the paper he owns; he could not write ten lines if he tried. It is not your monopolist in ships, who, bleeding his country dry during her life-and-death struggle in the Great War, sets out to prove that his vile wealth is of divine origin. It is not the great bankers, getting their usury out of nothingness, who could put forward that apologetic which is necessary for the continuance of the affair—even for its doubtful and uncertain continuance to-day. No; it is a scribbling proletariat, insecure and exigent, which regularly turns out column by column daily to explain how right and just it is that he should himself remain insecure and exigent. It is as though the torture were applied to some poor prisoner to compel him to proclaim the beauty of torture.
That old socialist fervour of the great Dock Strike of ’89 and its time is dead: I regret it, for there was something very noble in its folly. A good half of it or more was made up of the love of men, and of a passionate hunger and thirst for justice. There was also in it that Apocalyptic, that Messianic, expectation of a new heaven and a new earth, and of its near approach, which is out of place in men of European blood, for it is not native to them, but it moves them all the same with the flame of its enthusiasm. In those days one paper at least, and that a paper of power in the London press, supported the revolt of the poor. No one has such enthusiasm to-day.
It was a time when men who have since been caught into the net of professional politics, and have lost their souls, went down to speak fiercely at street corners, and to light in the hearts of broken men the flame of human dignity.