When the thermometer drops, man ceases—with
all his lusts and wrestlings and achievements; with
all his race-adventures and race-tragedies; and with
all his red killings, billions upon billions of human
lives multiplied by as many billions more. This
is the last word of Science, unless there be some
further, unguessed word which Science will some day
find and utter. In the meantime it sees no farther
than the starry void, where the “fleeting systems
lapse like foam.” Of what ledger-account
is the tiny life of man in a vastness where stars
snuff out like candles and great suns blaze for a
time-tick of eternity and are gone?
And for us who live, no worse can happen than has
happened to the earliest drifts of man, marked to-day
by ruined cities of forgotten civilisation—ruined
cities, which, on excavation, are found to rest on
ruins of earlier cities, city upon city, and fourteen
cities, down to a stratum where, still earlier, wandering
herdsmen drove their flocks, and where, even preceding
them, wild hunters chased their prey long after the
cave-man and the man of the squatting-place cracked
the knuckle-bones of wild animals and vanished from
the earth. There is nothing terrible about it.
With Richard Hovey, when he faced his death, we can
say: “Behold! I have lived!”
And with another and greater one, we can lay ourselves
down with a will. The one drop of living, the
one taste of being, has been good; and perhaps our
greatest achievement will be that we dreamed immortality,
even though we failed to realise it.
SMALL-BOAT SAILING
A sailor is born, not made. And by “sailor”
is meant, not the average efficient and hopeless creature
who is found to-day in the forecastle of deepwater
ships, but the man who will take a fabric compounded
of wood and iron and rope and canvas and compel it
to obey his will on the surface of the sea.
Barring captains and mates of big ships, the small-boat
sailor is the real sailor. He knows—he
must know—how to make the wind carry his
craft from one given point to another given point.
He must know about tides and rips and eddies, bar
and channel markings, and day and night signals; he
must be wise in weather-lore; and he must be sympathetically
familiar with the peculiar qualities of his boat which
differentiate it from every other boat that was ever
built and rigged. He must know how to gentle
her about, as one instance of a myriad, and to fill
her on the other tack without deadening her way or
allowing her to fall off too far.
The deepwater sailor of to-day needs know none of
these things. And he doesn’t. He
pulls and hauls as he is ordered, swabs decks, washes
paint, and chips iron-rust. He knows nothing,
and cares less. Put him in a small boat and
he is helpless. He will cut an even better figure
on the hurricane deck of a horse.
