I have delayed on this subject too long. It is public property, and filth at that, and people are tired of it, for in their heart of hearts they know that nothing more can be done, that public life in its Parliamentary form is past saving.
It is possible that I exaggerate the effect of the evil; it is possible that some novel remedy besides the obvious one of increasing the power of the Crown may set things right. It has certainly done so in the past; the breakup of one institution apparently necessary to society has discovered the importance of other forces which have saved society by bringing up new forces unsuspected. It is possible. Perhaps it is probable. It is to be hoped. And that is all one can say.
Such thoughts are suitable for a drizzling calm, and for wet canvas hanging useless and dead in a hopeless dawn upon a sea without life. But with the coming of a little wind, a little northeasterly wind in the growing light; with its blowing away of the misty rain, and its bringing a heartening into the morning, I prefer to turn to better things, to the realities: to the English water and to the English land.
The mist scudded off from the Folkestone waters, the light not only brightened, but grew coloured, until at last there was a fine, flaming dawn over the Kentish chalk and the Bastion cliffs of the Kentish salient, and very soon she was running to it prettily, her wet canvas holding the wind well, and, if anything, pressing her a little too hard. My companion came on deck with the morning, woken by the new life in the hull, and by the run of the sea along the sides. As yet the water was smooth, for the wind was a trifle off shore, and would so remain until we had come into the hollow bend of the flat coast, the last of which runs almost due south, and which ends in the shingle of Dungeness. Also we were still on the ebb and the wind followed the stream.
After the sun had risen the breeze grew stronger, and even violent; but as I greatly desired to round the Ness before the tide should catch me and raise a sea, I would not take in a reef. So I held on, though with the more southerly course we were setting, and with the wind still rising, it was not over safe; for that wind was now coming almost due aft, her boom was right out, and I feared a gybe. To take every advantage of any slight northing of the wind that might come, I ran closer into the coast at a still greater risk of gybe, of course, if the wind should hold where it did when we came to the sharp turn of the Ness. We were now running for it very hard indeed, and the Nona, splendidly as she lifts when properly trimmed, was burying a little owing to too great press of mainsail, and with head sails doing no work to support her bows. A slight sea had risen, although the tide was still with us and with the wind, and once or twice she took it green as she plunged forward.
Then it was, as I held the Nona with difficulty thus, right in front of a wind that was now much too strong for her canvas, that I understood what had long puzzled me, and that is, why the ancients, down to the end of the Dark Ages in the Mediterranean, and to, perhaps, the fourteenth century in the North, continued to step the masts of their square rig so far aft. It was to prevent burying; to give the bow its chance of lifting to the sea. For this rig sailed at its best with the wind aft, and when their boats were running so with the great square sail driving them into the seas, had their mast been stepped forward, they would have buried dangerously.
And why do you think men were so long in adapting the fore-and-aft to larger boats?
But I cannot delay to consider such things of the past, for I am at the edge of Dungeness, and with my heart in my mouth lest at any moment she should gybe over.
I handed the helm to my companion, who had a better eye than I had, and a firmer hold, and he, with great skill, did just save the gybe. We had not the luck to hold the tide; we caught the turn of it and the early flood nearly two miles from Dungeness Point, and, as you may imagine, it raised a short and buffeting sea, which made our task the more perilous. My companion handled her beautifully, until I told him he could go as near as he liked to the end of the Ness, because the land shelves down here so steeply as to give one deep water right up against the shore. We were, perhaps, five minutes in the worst of the ordeal just opposite the lighthouse before we could put the helm a trifle over and get the wind fairly on our quarter and breathe again. It seemed about half an hour, for the strength of the tide, even against that wind, made us forge very slowly past
