Complete Works

long future which I shall not see.
    My confidence rests on the hearts of men who do not change, though they may forget many things for a time and even forget to be themselves in a moment of false enthusiasm.  But of that I am not afraid.  It will not be for long.  I know the men.  Through the kindness of the Admiralty (which, let me confess here in a white sheet, I repaid by the basest ingratitude) I was permitted during the war to renew my contact with the British seamen of the merchant service.  It is to their generosity in recognising me under the shore rust of twenty-five years as one of themselves that I owe one of the deepest emotions of my life.  Never for a moment did I feel among them like an idle, wandering ghost from a distant past.  They talked to me seriously, openly, and with professional precision, of facts, of events, of implements, I had never heard of in my time; but the hands I grasped were like the hands of the generation which had trained my youth and is now no more.  I recognised the character of their glances, the accent of their voices.  Their moving tales of modern instances were presented to me with that peculiar turn of mind flavoured by the inherited humour and sagacity of the sea.  I don’t know what the seaman of the future will be like.  He may have to live all his days with a telephone tied up to his head and bristle all over with scientific antennæ like a figure in a fantastic tale.  But he will always be the man revealed to us lately, immutable in his slight variations like the closed path of this planet of ours on which he must find his exact position once, at the very least, in every twenty-four hours.
    The greatest desideratum of a sailor’s life is to be “certain of his position.”  It is a source of great worry at times, but I don’t think that it need be so at this time.  Yet even the best position has its dangers on account of the fickleness of the elements.  But I think that, left untrammelled to the individual effort of its creators and to the collective spirit of its servants, the British Merchant Service will manage to maintain its position on this restless and watery globe.
     

FLIGHT — 1917
     
    To begin at the end, I will say that the “landing” surprised me by a slight and very characteristically “dead” sort of shock.
    I may fairly call myself an amphibious creature.  A good half of my active existence has been passed in familiar contact with salt water, and I was aware, theoretically, that water is not an elastic body: but it was only then that I acquired the absolute conviction of the fact.  I remember distinctly the thought flashing through my head: “By Jove! it isn’t elastic!”  Such is the illuminating force of a particular experience.
    This landing (on the water of the North Sea) was effected in a Short biplane after one hour and twenty minutes in the air.  I reckon every minute like a miser counting his hoard, for, if what I’ve got is mine, I am not likely now to increase the tale.  That feeling is the effect of age.  It strikes me as I write that, when next time I leave the surface of this globe, it won’t be to soar bodily above it in the air.  Quite the contrary.  And I am not thinking of a submarine either. . . .
    But let us drop this dismal strain and go back logically to the beginning.  I must confess that I started on that flight in a state — I won’t say of fury, but of a most intense irritation.  I don’t remember ever feeling so annoyed in my life.
    It came about in this way.  Two or three days before, I had been invited to lunch at an R.N.A.S. station, and was made to feel very much at home by the nicest lot of quietly interesting young men it had ever been my good fortune to meet.  Then I was taken into the sheds.  I walked respectfully round and round a lot of machines of all kinds, and the more I looked at them the more I felt somehow that for all the effect they produced on me they might have been so many land-vehicles of an eccentric design.  So I said to Commander O., who very kindly was conducting me: “This is all very fine, but to realise what one is looking at, one must have been up.”
    He said at once: “I’ll give you a flight to-morrow if you like.”
    I postulated that it should be none of those “ten minutes in the air” affairs.  I wanted a real business flight.  Commander O. assured me that I would get “awfully bored,” but I declared that I was willing to take that