Part 5 (2/2)
She kept like that. And one day young Belfast MacCormick slipped a tar-brush over her dial. Said it was idolatry. And what happened to him?
You answer me that!”
”Yes, I know,” broke in one of us. ”But you can't say it was along of that tar-brush...”
”You young chaps ain't got no sense,” here interrupted Uncle, his voice evidently under control, but shaky. ”I'd like to know where you were brought up. You learn it all wrong at them schools of yours, and you never get it right afterwards. You learn about the guts of engines and 'lectricity, and you mix it up with the tales your grandmothers told you, and you get nothing straight. What you've got is all science and superst.i.tion. And then you wonder why you make a mess of it. Listen! It don't matter what you do to a figger-'ed, if you're fool enough to spoil it. It's having it that matters. It's something to go by, and a s.h.i.+p you're glad to work in.”
He turned on the stoker. There was astonishment and pity in his glance.
”Look at you. In and out of a s.h.i.+p, and you forget her name when you've signed off. You don't care the leavings in a Dago's mess-kit for any s.h.i.+p you work in, if you can get a bit out of her and skip early.”
”That's me, Uncle,” muttered the stoker.
”Can you remember names, like some of us remember the _Mermus_, the _Blackadder_, and the _t.i.tania_? Not you. Your s.h.i.+ps haven't got names, properly speaking. They're just a run out and home again for you, and a row about the money and the grub.”
”Sure to be a row about the grub,” murmured the stoker.
”What are s.h.i.+ps nowadays?” he went on, raising a shaking index finger.
”Are they s.h.i.+ps at all? They're run by companies on the make, and worked by factory hands who curse their own house-flags. It's a dirty game, I call it. Things are all wrong. I can't make them out. You fellers take no pride in your work, and you've got no work to take pride in. You don't know who you work for or what, and your s.h.i.+ps got no names. They might be d.a.m.ned goods vans. No good in a figger-'ed! Then I'll tell you this.
Then I'll tell you this. _You'll_ get no good till you learn better, my lad.”
XXI. Economics
MARCH 22, 1919. There is an astonis.h.i.+ng number of books on what is called Reconstruction in the new publications of this spring. Reconstruction seems to be as easy as conscription or destruction. We have only to change our mind, and there we are, as though nothing had happened. It is the greatest wonder of the human brain that its own accommodating ratiocination never affords it any amus.e.m.e.nt. We use reason only to make convincing disguises for our desires and appet.i.tes. Perhaps it is fear of the wrath to come that is partly responsible for the clamour of the economists and sociologists in the publishers' announcements, almost drowning there the drone of the cataract of new novels. But it is too late now. The wrath will come. After mischievously bungling with the magic which imprisoned the Djinn, we may wish we had not done it; but once he is out there is nothing for it but to be surprised and sorry.
The lid is off; and it is useless for the clever reconstructionists to press in upon us with their little screw-drivers, chattering eagerly about locks and hinges. When the crafty but ignorant Russian generals and courtiers got from the Czar the order for mobilizing the armies, and issued it, they did not know it, but that was when they released Lenin.
And who on earth can now inveigle that terrific portent safely under lid and lock again?
XXII. Old Sunlight
APRIL 5, 1919. I find the first signs of this spring, now the War is over, almost unbelievable. I have watched this advent with astonishment, as though it were a phantom. The feeling is the same as when waking from an ugly dream, and seeing in doubt the familiar objects in a morning light. They seem steadfast. Are they real, or is the dream? The morning works slowly through the mind to take the place of the night. Its brightness and tranquillity do not seem right. And is it not surprising to find the spring has come again to this world? The almond tree might be an untimely, thoughtless, and happy stranger. What does it want with us?
That spiritual and tinted fire with which its life burns touches and kindles no responsive and volatile essence in us. I pa.s.sed a hedge-bank which looked south and was reviving. There were crumbs and nuggets of chalk in it, and they were as remarkable to me this year as though I had once seen those flecks of white showing through the herbage of another planet. That crumbling earth with the grey matting of old gra.s.s was as warm to the touch as though some inner virtue had grown, all unsuspected by us, in the heart of this glacial ball. I picked up a lump of chalk with its cold greenish shadows, and powdered it in my fingers, wondering why it looked so suddenly bright. It confirmed my existence. Its smell was better than any news I have heard of late.
I saw suddenly the gleaming coast of a continent of dark cloud, and the blue ocean into which it jutted its headlands; memory had suddenly returned. At that moment the sun touched my hand. All this was what we used to know in a previous life. When I got home I took down _Selborne_.
Two photographs fell out of it, and when I picked them up--they were those of a young amateur and were yellow with age--spring really began to penetrate the bark. But it was not the spring of this year.
How often, like another tortoise, has the mind come out of its winter to sun itself in the new warmth of a long-gone Selborne April? Did Gilbert White imagine he was bequeathing light to us? Of course not. He lived quietly in the obscure place where he was born, and did not try to improve or influence anybody. It seems he had no wish to be a great leader, or a great thinker, or a great orator. The example of Chatham did not fire him. He was friendly with his neighbours, but went about his business. When he died there did not appear to be any reason whatever to keep him in memory. He had harmed no man. He left us without having improved gunpowder. Could a man have done less?
Think of the events which were stirring men while he was noting the coming and going of swallows. While he lived, Clive began the conquest of India, and Canada was taken from the French. White heard the news that our American colonists had turned Bolshevik because of the traditional skill of the administrators of other people's affairs at Whitehall. The world appears to have been as full then of important uproar as it is to-day. I suppose the younger Pitt, ”the youngest man ever appointed Prime Minister,” had never heard of White. But Gilbert does not seem to have heard of _him_; nor of Hargreaves' spinning jenny, nor of the inventor of the steam engine. ”But I can show you some specimens of my new mice,” he remarks on March 30, 1768. That was the year in which the great Pitt resigned. His new mice!
Yet for all the stirring affairs and inventions of his exciting time, with war making and breaking empires, and the foundations of this country's wealth and power being n.o.bly laid, it would not be easy to show that we to-day are any the happier. Our own War was inherent in the inventions of mechanical cotton-spinning and the steam-engine--the need to compel foreign markets to buy the goods we made beyond our own needs.
We know now what were the seeds the active and clever fellows of Gilbert's day were sowing for us. We were present at the harvesting. Why did not those august people, absorbed in the momentous deeds which have made history so sonorous, the powder shaking out of their wigs with the awful gravity of their labours (while all the world wondered), just stop doing such consequential things, and accept Gilbert's invitation to go and listen to him about those new mice? The mice might have saved us, and the opportunity was lost.
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