Even in those trades where you would think there must be activity of brain for a man to advance at all, your fool drifts forward somehow. You find him quite high up in armies, and as for his number in the great cheating professions, notably share-shuffling, it is prodigious. Half the wealthy share-shufflers I have known have been fools animal, fools crass, fools to be driven blindfold or led about on a halter; but to do that great modern profession justice, there is a minority of share-shufflers as keen as needles and as wide-awake as ferrets. They have no more luck, however, than their duller brethren, for Fate rules them all, and alternate wealth and poverty is as much the rule with them as with the stupidest men. I will bargain that if you were to take samples of share-shufflers out of three sacks, the House of Lords, Monte Carlo, and the gaols, you would find the same percentage of fools in each sample.
Which leads me on to say that never was an old proverb of less accurate modern application than the proverb about the fool and his money. You will have heard it said that the fool and his money are soon parted. That was true enough for the yokel at the fair, but in this modern city life of ours it is just the other way. The Fool of Inherited Money (not the Gambling Fool) holds on to it with fishhooks. It is the intelligent man, with many interests and (by some freak of nature) a generous heart, who squanders his hoard. But your fool gets his legs round the moneybag and crosses his ankles on the other side, clasps it higher up with both arms right round it and fingers tightly interlocked beyond; digs his teeth into the mouth of the same and, screwing up his eyes, clutches it all over desperately with the rigour of death, making himself wholly one with the beloved object. From this attitude nothing can move him save the lure of a plausible fellow promising to increase his wealth. I have seen a clot of fools thus hanging on to moneybags, all pressed up together like bats in a steeple, when a repulsive, overdressed young adventurer would slither by singing a light song of great wealth to be made in some scheme of his devising; and, behold, the fools would turn their round heads ungummed from their moneybags and listen in rapture to that song, and many of them would even hand over their bags to the young adventurer, never to see their gold again. But I say that, save when they are thus tempted by their blind avarice, fools are not easily parted from their money.
However, this harbour or pilot fool of mine was not, I think, troubled in this regard, for had he been a Fool of Wealth he would not have been blundering to get the Nona up-channel in the dark.
Five separate times did we touch and wait with increasing anger each time till the flood released us, but at last we came to the pool, and to reasonable deep water, and to a quay.
There did we put out our warping ropes, and springs, and the fenders alongside, and there did we give money to the fool as a reward for all the pain his folly had given us.
For also this is the rule in human life; that when you suffer anything you must pay a good price for the entertainment.
It is true of bad cooking, and of bad wine, and of a painful illness, started or continued by doctors, and of all the intolerable noisy hotels, full of insolence and maddening bells. It is true of all the bad things of the world. Nor does it follow that all cheap things are good. Far from it! But all good things are cheap (except caviar), and the way to get good things is to look for them as you would look for a penny which you had dropped in the straw of the (once again!) dear old omnibuses of my youth which were pulled by horses, and had standing at their door a guardian of the poorest of the people, foul in speech, grimy of skin, unshaven, bloodshot, from the gutter—but (oh, believe me!) a better citizen of a better time than ours.
Nona, cruising and voyaging Nona, wanderer over the seas of Britain, how in the solitude of your companionship my mind does lead me from one thing to another!
But that’s all one. It is time for sleep.
The new day having come, we got the half-ebb a little before six o’clock, and threaded away down the Channel for the open sea.
I ought, I suppose, to have stopped in Port Madoc, and renewed the memories of my childhood. But a fig for the memories of my childhood, at six o’clock in the morning: at six o’clock of a May morning, and a nice little leading breeze, all cold and merry! The memories of childhood and the contemplation of the divine are for the evening; they go with candlelight, and with a wine I know, and with friends of twenty years. But, so help me He that made me, when I find the morning wind blowing well for the salt and myself freshly roused from a good sleep, I am full of nothing but the coming of the course and an eagerness for the line of the sea against the sky and the making of a further shore.
It ought to be more dangerous to float down on the ebb without a local trickster, than to come up upon the flood. But fortune served, and the swirl of the ebb plainly marked the channel under that heartening light, with the glory of the new day shooting over the tops of the great and solemn mountains eastward, by the land.
Therefore, without misadventure, we came to the last marking buoy and took the sea; running easily with the
