BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Game of Cards
A youth of no more than twenty-three years entered a first-class
carriage at the famous station of Swindon in the county of Wiltshire,
proposing to travel to the uttermost parts of the West and to enjoy a
comfortable loneliness while he ruminated upon all things human and
divine; when he was sufficiently annoyed to discover that in the further
corner of the carriage was sitting an old gentleman of benevolent
appearance, or at any rate a gentleman of benevolent appearance who
appeared in his youthful eyes to be old.
For though the old gentleman was, as a fact, but sixty, yet his virile
beard had long gone white and the fringes of hair attaching to his
ostrich egg of a head confirmed his venerable appearance.
When the train had started the young man proceeded in no very good
temper and with great solemnity to fill a pipe. He turned to his senior,
who was watching him in a very paternal and happy manner, and said
formally:
"I hope you do not mind my smoking, sir?"
"Not at all," said the old boy; "it is a habit I have long grown
accustomed to in others."
The young man bowed in a somewhat absurd fashion and felt for his
matches. He discovered to his no small mortification that he had none.
He was so used to his pipe after a meal that he really could not forgo
it. He came off his perch by at least three steps and asked the old man
very gently whether he had any matches.
The older man produced a box and at the same time brought out with it a
little notebook and a playing card which happened to be in his pocket.
The young man took the matches and lit his pipe, surveying the old man
the while with a more complacent eye.
"It is very kind of you, sir," he said a little less stiffly. He handed
back the matches, wrapped his rug round his legs, sat down in his place,
and knowing that one should prolong the conversation for a moment or two
after a favour, said: "I see that you play cards."
"I do," said the old man simply; "would you like a game?"
"I don't mind," said the young man, who had always heard that it was
unmanly and ridiculous to refuse a game of cards in a railway carriage.
The elder man laughed merrily in his strong beard as he saw his junior
begin to spread somewhat awkwardly a copy of a newspaper upon his knees.
"I'll show you a trick worth two of that," he said, and taking one of
the first-class cushions, which alone of railway cushions are movable
from its place, he came over to the corner opposite the young man and
made a table of the cushion between them. "Now," said he genially,
"what's it to be?"
"Well," said the young man like one who expounds new mysteries, "do you
know piquet?"
"Oh, yes," said his companion with another happy little laugh of
contentment with the world. "I'll take you on. What shall it be?"
"Pennies if you like," said the young man nonchalantly.
"Very well, and double for the Rubicon."
"How do you mean?" said the young man, puzzled.
"You will see," said the old man, and they began to play.
The game was singularly absorbing. At first the young man won a few
pounds; then he lost rather heavily, then he won again, but not quite
enough to recoup. Then in the fourth game he won, so that he was a
little ahead, and meanwhile the old man chatted merrily during the
discarding or the shuffling: during the shuffling especially. He looked
out towards the downs with something of a sigh at one moment, and said:
"It's a happy world."
"Yes," answered the younger man with the proper lugubriousness of youth,
"but it all comes to an end."
"It isn't its coming to an end," said the elder man, declaring a point
of six, "that's not the tragedy; it's the little bits coming to an end
meanwhile, before the whole comes to an end: that's the tragedy...." But
he added with another of his jolly laughs: "We must play. Piquet takes
up all one's grey matter."
They played and the young man lost again, but by a very narrow margin:
it was quite an absorbing game. As they shuffled again the young man
said:
"What did you mean by the little bits stopping, or whatever it was?"
"Oh," said the old man as though he couldn't remember, and then he
added: "Oh, yes, I mean you'll find, as you grow older, people die and
affections change, and, though it seems silly to mention it in company
with higher things, there's what Shelley called the 'contagion of the
world's slow stain.'"
Then their conversation was interrupted by the ardour of the game; but
as they played the young man was ruminating, and he had come to the
conclusion that his senior was imperfectly educated and was probably of
the middle classes, whereas he himself was destined to be a naval
architect, and with that object had recently left the university for an
office in the city. The young man thought that a man properly educated
would never quote a tag: he was wrong there. As he had allowed his
thoughts to wander somewhat the young man lost that game rather heavily,
and at the end of it he was altogether about ten shillings to the bad.
It was his turn to shuffle. The older man was at leisure to speak, and
did so rather dreamily as he gazed at the landscape again.
"Things change, you know," he said, "and there is the contagion of the
world's slow stain. One gets preoccupied: especially about money. When
men marry they get very much preoccupied upon that point. It's bad for
them, but it can't be helped."
"You cut," said the young man.
His elder cut and they played again. This time as they played their game
the old man broke his rule of silence and continued his observations
interruptedly:
"Four kings," he said.... "It isn't that a man gets to think money
all-important, it is that he has to think of it all the time.... No,
three queens are no good. I said four kings.... four knaves.... The
little losses of money don't affect one, but perpetual trouble about it
does, and" (closing up the majority of tricks which he had just gained)
"many a man goes on making more year after year and yet feels himself in
peril.... And the last trick." He took up the cards to shuffle
them. "Towards the very end of life," he continued, "it gets less, I
suppose, but you'll feel the burden of it." He put the pack over for the
younger man to cut. When that was done he dealt them out slowly. As he
dealt he said: "One feels the loss of little material things: objects to
which one was attached, a walking-stick, or a ring, or a watch which one
has carried for years. Your declare."
The young man declared, and that game was played in silence. I regret to
say that the young man was Rubiconed, and was thirty shillings in the
elder's debt.
"We'll stop if you like" said the elder man kindly.
"Oh, no," said the youth with nonchalance, "I'll pay you now if you
like."
"Not at all, I didn't mean that," said the older man with a sudden prick
of honour.
"Oh, but I will, and we'll start fair again," said the young man.
Whereupon he handed over his combined losses in gold, the older man gave
him change, they shuffled again, and they went on with their play.
"After all," said the older man, musing as he confessed to a point of no
more than five, "it's all in the day's work.... It's just a day's work,"
he repeated with a saddened look in his eyes, "it's a game that one
plays like this game, and then when it's over it's over. It's the little
losses that count."
That game again was unfortunate for the young man, and he had to shell
out fifteen and six. But the brakes were applied, Bristol was reached,
the train came to a standstill, and the young man, looking up a little
confused and hurried, said: "Hello, Bristol! I get out here."
"So do I," said the older man. They both stood up together, and the jolt
of the train as it stopped dead threw them into each other's arms.
"I am really very sorry," said the youth.
"It's my fault," said the old chap like a good fellow, "I ought to have
caught hold. You get out and I'll hand you your bag."
"It's very kind of you," said the young man. He was really flattered by
so much attention, but he knew himself what a good companion he was and
he could understand it; besides which they had made friends during that
little journey. He always liked a man to whom he had lost some money in
an honest game.
There was a heavy crowd upon the platform, and two men barging up out of
it saluted the old man boisterously by the name of Jack. He twinkled at
them with his eyes as he began moving the luggage about, and stood for a
moment in the doorway with his own bag in his right hand and the young
man's bag in his left. The young man so saw it for an instant, a fine
upstanding figure--he saw his bag handed by some mistake to the second
of the old man's friends, a porter came by at the moment pushing through
the crowd with a trolley, an old lady made a scene, the porter
apologized, the crowd took sides, some for the porter, some for the old
lady; the young man, with the deference of his age, politely asked
several people to make way, but when he had emerged from the struggle
his companion, his companion's friends, and his own bag could not be
found; or at any rate he could not make out where they were in the great
mass that pushed and surged upon the platform.
He made himself a little conspicuous by asking too many questions and by
losing his temper twice with people who had done him no harm, when, just
as his excitement was growing more than querulous, a very heavy,
stupid-looking man in regulation boots tapped him on the shoulder and
said: "Follow me." He was prepared with an oath by way of reply, but
another gentleman of equal weight, wearing boots of the same pattern,
linked his arm in his and between them they marched him away, to a
little private closet opening out of the stationmaster's room.
"Now, sir," said he who had first tapped him on the shoulder, "be good
enough to explain your movements."
"I don't know what you mean," said the young man.
"You were in the company," said the older man severely, "of an old man,
bald, with a white beard and a blue sailor suit. He had come from
London; you joined him at Swindon. We have evidence that he was to be
met at this station and it will be to your advantage if you make a clean
breast of it."
The young man was violent and he was borne away.
But he had friends at Bristol. He gave his references and he was
released. To this day he believes that he suffered not from folly, but
from injustice. He did not see his bag again, but after all it contained
no more than his evening clothes, for which he had paid or rather owed
six guineas, four shirts, as many collars and dress ties, a
silver-mounted set of brushes and combs, and useless cut-glass bottles,
a patented razor, a stick of shaving soap, and two very, very
confidential letters which he treasured. His watch, of course, was gone,
but not, I am glad to say, his chain, which hung dangling, though in his
flurry he had not noticed it. It made him look a trifle ridiculous. As
he wore no tie-pin he had not lost that, and beyond his temper he had
indeed lost nothing further save, possibly, a textbook upon
Thermodynamics. This book he thought he remembered having put
into the bag, and if he had it belonged to his library, but he could not
quite remember this point, and when the Library claimed it he stoutly
disputed their claim.
In this dispute he was successful, but it was the only profit he made
out of that journey, unless we are to count his experience, and
experience, as all the world knows, is a thing that men must buy.
The great unity which was built up two thousand years ago and was
called Christendom in its final development split and broke in pieces.
The various civilizations of its various provinces drifted apart, and it
will be for the future historian to say at what moment the isolation of
each from all was farthest pushed. It is certain that that point is
passed.
In the task of reuniting what was broken--it is the noblest work a
modern man can do--the very first mechanical act must be to explain one
national soul to another. That act is not final. The nations of Europe,
now so divided, still have more in common than those things by which
they differ, and it is certain that when they have at last revealed to
them their common origin they will return to it. They will return to it,
perhaps, under the pressure of war waged by some not Christian
civilization, but they will return. In the meanwhile, of those acts not
final, yet of immediate necessity in the task of establishing unity, is
the act of introducing one national soul to another.
Now this is best accomplished in a certain way which I will describe.
You will take that part in the letters of a nation which you maturely
judge most or best to reflect the full national soul, with its
qualities, careless of whether these be great or little; you will take
such a work as reproduces for you as you read it, not only in its
sentiment, but in its very rhythm, the stuff and colour of the nation;
this you will present to the foreigner, who cannot understand. His
efforts must be laborious, very often unfruitful, but where it is
fruitful it will be of a decisive effect.
Thus let anyone take some one of the immortal things that Racine wrote
and show them to an Englishman. He will hardly ever be able to make
anything of it at first. Here and there some violently emotional passage
may faintly touch him, but the mass of the verse will seem to him dead.
Now, if by constant reading, by association with those who know what
Racine is, he at last sees him--and these changes in the mind come very
suddenly--he will see into the soul of Gaul. For the converse task,
to-day not equally difficult but once almost impossible, of presenting
England to the French intelligence--or, indeed, to any other alien
intelligence--you may choose the play "King Lear."
That play has every quality which does reflect the soul of the community
in which and for which it was written. Note a few in their order.
First, it is not designed to its end; at least it is not designed
accurately to its end; it is written as a play and it is meant to be
acted as a play, and it is the uniform opinion of those versed in plays
and in acting that in its full form it could hardly be presented, while
in any form it is the hardest even of Shakespeare's plays to perform.
Here you have a parallel with a thousand mighty English things to which
you can turn. Is there not institution after institution to decide on,
so lacking a complete fitness to its end, larger in a way than the end
it is to serve, and having, as it were, a life of its own which proceeds
apart from its effect? This quality which makes so many English things
growths rather than instruments is most evident in the great play.
Again, it has that quality which Voltaire noted, which he thought
abnormal in Shakespeare, but which is the most national characteristic
in him, that a sort of formlessness, if it mars the framework of the
thing and spoils it, yet also permits the exercise of an immeasurable
vitality. When a man has read "King Lear" and lays down the book he is
like one who has been out in one of those empty English uplands in a
storm by night. It is written as though the pen bred thoughts. It is
possible to conjecture as one reads, and especially in the diatribes,
that the pen itself was rapid and the brain too rapid for the pen. One
feels the rush of the air. Now, this quality is to be discovered in the
literature of many nations, but never with the fullness which it has in
the literature of England. And note that in those phases of the national
life when foreign models have constrained this instinct of expansion in
English verse, they never have restrained it for long, and that even
through the bonds established by those models the instinct of expansion
breaks. You see it in the exuberance of Dryden and in the occasional
running rhetoric of Pope, until it utterly loosens itself with the end
of the eighteenth century.
The play is national, again, in that permanent curiosity upon knowable
things--nay, that mysterious half-knowledge of unknowable things--which,
in its last forms, produced the mystic, and which is throughout history
so plainly characteristic of these Northern Atlantic islands. Every play
of Shakespeare builds with that material, and no writer, even of the
English turn, has sent out points further into the region of what is not
known than Shakespeare has in sudden flashes of phrase. But "King Lear,"
though it contains a lesser number of lines of this mystical and
half-religious effect than, say, "Hamlet," yet as a general impression
is the more mystical of the two plays. The element of madness, which in
"Hamlet" hangs in the background like a storm-cloud ready to break, in
"King Lear" rages; and it is the use of this which lends its amazing
psychical power to the play. It has been said (with no great profundity
of criticism) that English fiction is chiefly remarkable for its power
of particularization of character, and that where French work, for
instance, will present ideas, English will present persons. The judgment
is grossly insufficient, and therefore false, but it is based upon a
proof which is very salient in English letters, which is that, say, in
quite short and modern work the sense of complete unity deadens the
English mind. The same nerve which revolts at a straight road and at a
code of law revolts against one tone of thought, and the sharp contrast
of emotional character, not the dual contrast which is common to all
literatures, but the multiple contrast, runs through "King Lear" and
gives the work such a tone that one seems as one reads it to be moving
in a cloud.
The conclusion is perhaps Shakespearean rather than English, and in a
fashion escapes from any national labelling. But the note of silence
which Shakespeare suddenly brings in upon the turmoil, and with which he
is so fond of completing what he has done, would not be possible were
not that spirit of expansion and of a kind of literary adventurousness
present in all that went before.
It is indeed this that makes the play so memorable. And it may not be
fantastic to repeat and expand what has been said above in other words,
namely, that King Lear has something about him which seems to be a
product of English landscape and of English weather, and if its general
movement is a storm its element is one of those sudden silences that
come sometimes with such magical rapidity after the booming of the wind.
It is so old a theme that I really hesitate to touch it; and yet it is
so true and so useful that I will. It is true all the time, and it is
particularly useful at this season of the year to men in cities: to all
repetitive men: to the men that read these words. What is more, true as
it is and useful as it is, no amount of hammering at people seems to get
this theme into their practice; though it has long ago entered into
their convictions they will not act upon it in their summers. And this
true and useful theme is the theme of little freedoms and discoveries,
the value of getting loose and away by a small trick when you want to
get your glimpse of Fairyland.
Now how does one get loose and away?
When a man says to himself that he must have a holiday he means that he
must see quite new things that are also old: he desires to open that
door which stood wide like a window in childhood and is now shut fast.
But where are the new things that are also the old? Paradoxical fellows
who deserve drowning tell one that they are at our very doors. Well,
that is true of the eager mind, but the mind is no longer eager when it
is in need of a holiday. And you can get at the new things that are also
the old by way of drugs, but drugs are a poor sort of holiday fabric. If
you have stored up your memory well with much experience you can get
these things from your memory--but only in a pale sort of way.
I think the best avenue to recreation by the magical impressions of the
world upon the mind is this: To go to some place to which the common
road leads you and then to get just off the common road. You will be
astonished to find how strange the world becomes in the first mile--and
how strange it remains till the common road is reached again.
It always sounds like a mockery for a man who has travelled to a great
many places, as I have, to advise his fellows to travel abroad; they are
most of them hard tied. Yet it is really a much easier thing than men
bound to the desk and the workshop understand. Britain is but one great
port, and its inward seas are narrow--and the fares are ridiculously
low. If you are a young man you can go almost anywhere for almost
anything, sitting up by night on deck, and not expecting too much
courtesy. But, of course, if you shirk the sea you are a prisoner.
Well, then, supposing you abroad, or even in some other part of this
highly varied kingdom in which you live, and supposing you to have
reached some chosen place by some common road--what I desire to dilate
upon here is the truth which every little excursion of business or of
leisure (and precious few of leisure) makes me more certain of every
day: That just a little way off the road is fairyland.
It was exactly three days ago that I had occasion to go down the railway
line that is the most frequented in Europe: I was on business, not
leisure, but in the business I had two days' leisure, and I did what I
would advise all other men to do in such a circumstance.
I took a train to nowhere, fixing my starting-point thus:--
I first looked at the map and saw where nearest to me was a
quadrilateral bare of railways. This formula, to look for a
quadrilateral bare of railways, is a very useful formula for the man who
is seeking another world. Then I fixed at random upon one little
roadside station upon the main line; I determined to get out there and
to walk aimlessly and westward until I should strike the other side of
the quadrilateral. I made no plan, not even of the hours of the day.
I came into my roadside station at half-past eight of the long summer
night, broad daylight that is, but with night advancing. I got out and
began my westward march. At once there crowded upon me any number of
unexpected and entertaining things!
The first thing I found was a street which was used by horses as well as
by men, and yet was made up of broad steps. It was a sort of stair-case
going up a hill. At the top of it I found a woman leading a child by the
hand. I asked her the name of the steps. She told me they were called
"The Steps of St. John."
A quarter of a mile further down the narrow lane I saw to my
astonishment an enormous castle, ruined and open to the sky. There are
many such ruins famous in Europe, but of this one I had never even
heard. I went lonely under the evening and looked at its main gate and
saw on it a moulded escutcheon, carved, and the motto in French,
"Henceforward," which word made me think a great deal, but resolved no
problem in my mind.
I went on again westward as the darkness fell and saw what I had not
seen before, though my reading had told me of its existence, a long line
of trees marking a ridge on the horizon, which line was the border of
that ancient road the Roman soldiers built leading from the west into
Amiens. "Along that road," thought I, "St. Martin rode before he became
a monk, and while he was yet a soldier and was serving under Julian the
Apostate. Along that road he came to the west gate of Amiens and there
cut his cloak in two and gave the half of it to a beggar."
The memory of St. Martin's deed entertained me for some miles of my way,
and I remembered how, when I was a child, it had seemed to me ridiculous
to cut your coat in two whether for a beggar or for anybody else. Not
that I thought charity ridiculous--God forbid!--but that a coat seemed
to me a thing you could not cut in two with any profit to the user of
either half. You might cut it in latitude and turn it into an Eton
jacket and a kilt, neither of much use to a Gallo-Roman beggar. Or you
might cut it in meridian and leave but one sleeve: mere folly.
Considering these things, I went on over the rolling plateau. I saw a
great owl flying before me against the sky, different from the owls of
home. I saw Jupiter shining above a cloud and Venus shining below one.
The long light lingered in the north above the English sea. At last I
came quite unexpectedly upon that delight and plaything of the French: a
light railway, or steam tram such as that people build in great
profusion to link up their villages and their streams. The road where I
came upon it made a level crossing, and there was a hut there, and a
woman living in it who kept the level crossing and warned the
passers-by. She told me no more trains, or rather little trams, would
pass that night, but that three miles further on I should come to a
place called "The Mills of the Vidame."
Now the name "Vidame" reminded me that a "Vidame" was the lay protector
of a Cathedral Chapter in feudal times, so the name gave me a renewed
pleasure.
But it was now near midnight, and when I came to this village I
remembered how in similar night walks I had sometimes been refused
lodging. When I got among the few houses all was dark. I found, however,
in the darkness two young men, each bearing an enormous curled trumpet
of the kind which the French call cors de chasse, that is,
hunting horns, so I asked them where the inn was. They took me to it and
woke up the hostess, who received us with oaths. This she did lest the
young men with hunting horns should demand a commission. Her heart,
however, was better than her mouth, and she put me up, but she charged
me tenpence for my room, counting coffee in the morning, which was, I am
sure, more than her usual rate.
Next day I took the little steam tram away from the place and went on
vaguely whither it should please God to take me, until the plateau
changed and the light railway fell into a charming valley, and, seeing a
town rooted therein, I got out and paid my fare and visited the town. In
this town I went to church, as it was early morning (you must excuse the
foible), and, coming out of church, I had an argument with a working man
upon the matter of religion, in which argument, as I believe, I was the
victor. I then went on north out of this town and came into a wood of
enormous size. It was miles and miles across, and the trees were higher
than anything I have seen outside of California. It was an enchanted
wood. The sun shone down through a hundred feet of silence by little
rounds between the leaves, and there was silence everywhere. In this
wood I sojourned all day long, making slowly westward, till, in the very
midst of it, I found a troubled man. He was a man of middle age, short,
intelligent, fat, and weary. He said to me:
"Have you noticed any special mark upon the trees? A white mark of the
number 90?"
"No," said I. "Are there any wild boars in this forest?"
"Yes," he answered, "a few, but not of use. I am looking for trees
marked in white with the number 90. I have paid a price for them, and I
cannot find them."
I saluted him and went on my way. At last I came to an open clearing,
where there was a town, and in the town I found a very delightful inn,
where they would cook anything one felt inclined for, within reason, and
charged one very moderately indeed. I have retained its name.
By this time I was completely lost, and in the heart of Fairyland, when
suddenly I remembered that everyone that strikes root in Fairyland loses
something, at the least his love and at the worst his soul, and that it
is a perilous business to linger there, so I asked them in that hotel
how they worked it when they wanted to go west into the great towns.
They put me into an omnibus, which charged me fourpence for a journey of
some two miles. It took me, as Heaven ordained, to a common great
railway, and that common great railway took me through the night to the
town of Dieppe, which I have known since I could speak and before, and
which was about as much of Fairyland to me as Piccadilly or Monday
morning.
Thus ended those two days, in which I had touched again the unknown
places--and all that heaven was but two days, and cost me not fifty
shillings.
Excuse the folly of this.
I wish I had been one of those men who first sailed beyond the Pillars
of Hercules and first saw, as they edged northward along a barbarian
shore, the slow swinging of the sea. How much, I wonder, did they think
themselves enlarged? How much did they know that all the civilization
behind them, the very ancient world of the Mediterranean, was something
protected and enclosed from which they had escaped into an outer world?
And how much did they feel that here they were now physically caught by
the moving tides that bore them in the whole movement of things?
For the tide is of that kind; and the movement of the sea four times
daily back and forth is a consequence, a reflection, and a part of the
ceaseless pulse and rhythm which animates all things made and which
links what seems not living to what certainly lives and feels and has
power over all movement of its own. The circuits of the planets stretch
and then recede. Their ellipses elongate and flatten again to the
semblance of circles. The Poles slowly nod once every many thousand
years, there is a libration to the moon; and in all this vast harmonious
process of come and go the units of it twirl and spin, and, as they
spin, run more gravely in ordered procession round their central star:
that star moves also to a beat, and all the stars of heaven move each in
times of its own as well, and their movement is one thing altogether.
Whoever should receive the mighty business moving in one ear would get
the music of it in a perfect series of chords, superimposed the one upon
the other, but not a tremble of them out of tune.
The great scheme is not infinite, for were it infinite such rhythms
could not be. It was made, and it moves in order to the scheme of its
making without caprice, not wayward anywhere, but in and out and back
and forth as to a figure set for it. It must be so, or these exact
arrangements could not be.
Now with this regulated breathing and expiration, playing itself out in
a million ways and co-extensive with the universe of things, the tides
keep time, and they alone of earthly things bring its actual force to
our physical perception, to our daily life. We see the sea in movement
and power before us heaving up whatever it may bear, and we feel in an
immediate way its strong backward sagging when the rocks appear above it
as it falls. We have our hand on the throb of the current turning in a
salting river inland between green hills; we are borne upon it bodily as
we sail, its movement kicks the tiller in our grasp, and the strength
beneath us and around us, the rush and the compulsion of the stream, its
silence and as it were its purpose, all represent to us, immediately and
here, that immeasurable to and fro which rules the skies.
When the Roman soldiers came marching northward with Caesar and first
saw the shores of ocean: when, after that occupation of Gaul which has
changed the world, they first mounted guard upon the quays of the Itian
port under Gris-Nez, or the rocky inlets of the Veneti by St. Malo and
the Breton reefs, they were appalled to see what for centuries chance
traders and the few curious travellers, the men of Marseilles and of the
islands, had seen before them. They saw in numbers and in a corporate
way what hitherto individuals alone had seen; they saw the sea like a
living thing, advancing and retreating in an ordered dance, alive with
deep sighs and intakes, and ceaselessly proceeding about a work and a
doing which seemed to be the very visible action of an unchanging will
still pleased with calculated change. It was the presence of the Roman
army upon the shores of the Channel which brought the Tide into the
general conscience of Europe, and that experience, I think, was among
the greatest, perhaps the greatest, of those new things which rushed
upon the mind of the Empire when it launched itself by the occupation of
Gaul.
The tide, when it is mentioned in brief historical records of times long
since, suddenly strikes one with vividness and with familiarity, so that
the past is introduced at once, presented to us physically, and obtruded
against our modern senses alive. I know of no other physical thing
mentioned in this fashion, in chronicle or biography, which has so
powerful an effect to restore the reality of a dead century.
The Venerable Bede is speaking in one place of Southampton Water, in his
ecclesiastical history, or, rather, of the Isle of Wight, whence those
two Princes were baptized and died under Cadwalla. As the historian
speaks of the place he says:
"In this sea" (which is the Solent) "comes a double tide out of the seas
which spring from the infinite ocean of the Arctic surrounding all
Britain."
And he tells us how these double tides rush together and fight together,
sweeping as they do round either side of the island by the Needles and
by Spithead into the land-locked sheet within.
Now that passage in Bede's fourth book is more real to me than anything
in all his chronicle, for in Southampton Water to-day the living thing
which we still note as we sail is the double tide. You take a falling
tide at the head of the water, near Southampton Town, and if you are not
quick with your business it is checked in two hours and you meet a
strange flood, the second flood, before you have rounded Calshott
Castle.
Then there is a Charter of Newcastle. Or, rather, the inviolable Customs
of that town, very old, drawn up nearly eight hundred years ago, but
beginning from far earlier; and in these customs you find written:
"If a plea shall arise between a burgess and a merchant it must be
determined before the third flowing of the sea"--that is, within three
tides; a wise provision! For thus the merchant would not miss the last
tide of the day after the quarrel. How living it is, a phrase of that
sort coming in the midst of those other phrases!
All the rest, worse luck, has gone. Burgage-tenure, and the economic
independence of the humble, and the busy, healthy life of men working to
enrich themselves, not others, and that corporate association which was
the blood of the Middle Ages, and the power of popular opinion, and, in
general, freedom. But out of all these things that have perished, the
tide remains, and in the eighteen clauses of the Customs, the tidal
clause alone stands fresh and still has meaning. The capital, great
clinching clause by which men owned their own land within the town has
gone utterly and altogether. The modern workman on the Tyne would not
understand you perhaps, to whom in that very place you should say, "Many
centuries ago the men that came before you here, your fathers, were not
working precariously at a wage, or paying rent to others, but living
under their own roofs and working for themselves." There is only one
passage in the document that all could understand in Newcastle
to-day--the very few rich who are hardly secure, the myriads of poor who
are not secure at all--and that passage is the passage which talks of
the third tide; for even to-day there is some good we have left
undestroyed and the sea still ebbs and flows.
This little note of the Newcastle men, and of the flowing and the ebbing
of their sea, is to be found, you say, in the archives of England? Not
at all! It is to be found in the Acts of the Parliament of Scotland--at
least, so my book assures me, but why I do not know. Perhaps of the
times when between Tyne and Tees, men looked northward and of the times
when they looked southward (for they alternately did one and the other
during many hundreds of years) those times when they looked northward
seemed the more natural to them. Anyhow, the reference is to the Acts of
the Parliament of Scotland, and that is the end of it.
BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Game of Cards