Chapter XL: On Dropping Anchor 344 (7)

Through all these manifold obstacles Mr. Herod found or drove a way, and finally achieved the position we all look back to with such gratitude and pride in the really dangerous crisis which will be fresh in our readers' memory. It required no ordinary skill to pilot the policy of the Empire through those stormy three days in Jerusalem, but Mr. Herod was equal to the task, and emerged from it permanently established in the respect and affection of the Roman people. It is a sufficient testimony to his tact and firmness on this occasion that he earned in that moment of danger the lasting friendship and regard of Sir Pontius Pilate, whose firmness of vision and judgment of men were inferior only to that of his lamented sovereign.

Unlike most non-Italians and natives generally, Mr. Herod was an excellent judge of horseflesh, and his stables upon Mount Carmel often carried to victory the colours--_rose tendre_--of "Sir Caius Gracchus," the _nom-de-guerre_ by which the statesman preferred to be known on the Turf.

Mr. Herod's æsthetic side was more highly developed than is commonly discovered in level-headed men of action. He personally supervised the architectural work in the rebuilding of Tiberias, and, of the lighter arts, was a judge of dramatic or "expressional" dancing.

During the earlier years of this eventful career Mr. Herod's life was greatly cheered and brightened by the companionship of his stepdaughter, Miss Salome Philip (now Lady Caiaphas), whose brilliant _salon_ so long adorned the Quirinal, and who--we are exceedingly glad to hear--has been entrusted with that labour of love, the editing of her stepfather's life, letters, and verses; for Mr. Herod was no mean poet, and we may look forward with pleasurable expectation to his hitherto unpublished elegiacs on the beautiful scenery of his native land.

By the provisions of Mr. Herod's will he is to be cremated, and the ceremony will take place on a pyre of cedar-wood in the Place Bellecour at Lyons.

XXXVIII

THE "MERRY ROME" COLUMN

A weekly feature of the _Carthaginian Messenger_, quoted from its
issue of March 15, 220 B. C.

It is quite a pleasure to be in dear old Rome again after a week spent upon an important mission which your readers are already acquainted with, in the Tuscan country. All that drive through Etruria was very delightful and the investigation will undoubtedly prove of the greatest use. But what a difference it is to be back in the sparkle and gaiety of the Via Sacra. Every day one feels more and more how _real_ the entente is. Probably no nations have become faster friends than those who have learnt to respect each other in war, and though the Romans were compelled to accept our terms, and to undertake the difficult administration of Sicily with money furnished by the Carthaginian Government, all that was more than twenty years ago and the memory of it does not rankle now. Indeed, I think I may say that the Roman character is a peculiarly generous one in this regard. They know what a good fight is, and they enjoy it--none better--but when it is over no one is readier to shake hands and to make friends again than a Roman. I was talking it over with dear little Lucia Balba the other day and I thought she put it very prettily. She said:

Est autem amicitia nihil aliud, nisi omnium divinarum huminarumque
rerum cockalorumque Romanorum et jejorum concinnatio!

Was it not charming?

Of course there is a little jealousy--no more than a pout!--about Hasdrubal's magnificent work in Spain, but every one recognises what a great man he is, and it was only yesterday that M. Catulus (the son of our fine old enemy Lutatius) said to me with a sigh: "The reason we Romans cannot do that kind of thing is because we cannot stick together. We are for ever fighting among ourselves. Just look at our history!" On the other hand, I can't think that our mixture of democracy and common sense would suit the Latin temperament, with its _verve_ and _nescio quid_, which make it at the same time so incalculable and so fascinating. Every nation must have its own advantages and drawbacks. We are a little too stolid, perhaps, and a little too businesslike, but our stolidity and our businesslike capacity have founded Colonies over the whole world and established a magnificent Empire. The Romans are a little too fond of "glory" and give way to sudden emotion in a fashion which seems to us perilously like weakness, but no one can deny that they have established a wonderfully methodical and orderly system of roads all over Italy, and that their capital is still the intellectual centre of the world.

Talking of that I ought to pay a tribute to the Roman home and to Roman thrift. We hear too much in our country of the Roman amphitheatre and all the rest of it. What many Carthaginians do not yet know is that the stay-at-home sober Roman is the backbone of the whole place. He hates war as heartily as we do, and though his forms of justice are very different from ours he is a sincere lover of right-dealing according to his lights. It is due to such men that Rome is, after ourselves, the chief financial power in the world.

But you will ask me for more interesting news than this sermon. Well! Well! I have plenty to give you. The Debates in the Senate are as brilliant and, I am afraid, as theatrical as usual. Certainly the Romans beat us at oratory. To hear Flaccus deliver a really great speech about the introduction of Greek manners is a thing one can never forget! Of course, it will seem to you in Carthage very unpractical and very "Roman," and it is true that that kind of thing doesn't make a nation great in the way we have become great, but it is wonderful stuff to hear all the same--and such a young man too! The Senate has, however, none of our ideas of order, and the marvel is how they get through their work at all. There are no Suffetes, and sometimes you will hear five or six men all talking at once and gesticulating in that laughable Italian fashion which our caricaturists find so valuable!

Those of my readers who run over to Rome two or three times a year for the Games will be interested to hear that the great Aurelian house near the New Temple of Saturn (the rogues with their "Temples!" But still there is a good deal of real religion left in Rome) is being pulled down and a splendid one is being put in its place upon the designs of a really remarkable young architect, Pneius Caius Agricola. He is the nephew, by the way, of Sopher Masher Baal, whom we all know so well at Carthage, and who is, I think, technically, a Carthaginian citizen. Possibly I am wrong, for I remember a delightful dinner with him years ago among our cousins overseas, and he may very possibly be Tyrian. If so, and if these humble lines meet his eye, I tender him my apologies. But anyhow, his nephew is a very remarkable and original artist whom all Rome is eager to applaud. When the new Aurelian House is finished it will have a façade in five orders, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, heavy Egyptian on the fourth story, and Assyrian on the top, the whole terminating in a vast pyramid, which is to have the appearance of stone, but which will really be a light erection in thin plaster slabs.

Last Wednesday we had the review of the troops. You may imagine how the Roman populace delighted in _that_! There is a good deal that is old-fashioned to our ideas in the accouterments, and it was certainly comic to see an "admiral" leading his "sailors" past the saluting post like so many marines! But it is always a pleasant spectacle for a warmhearted man to see the humbler classes of Rome picnicking in true Roman fashion upon the Campus Martius and cheering their sons and brothers. The army is very popular in Rome, although the men are paid hardly anything--a mere nominal sum. The Romans do not come up to our standard of physique, and I am afraid the Golden Legion would laugh at them. But they are sturdy little fellows, and not to be despised when it comes to marching, or turning their hands to the thousand domestic details of the camp; moreover, they are invariably good-humoured, and that is a great charm.

It is unfortunately impossible to officer all the troops with gentlemen, and that is a drawback of which thoughtful Romans are acutely conscious. It is on this account that there is none of that cordial relation between officer and man which we take for granted in our service. An intelligent and travelled Roman said to me the other day: "How I envy you your Carthaginian officers! Always in training! Always ready! Always urbane!" But we must remember that our service is not so numerous as theirs.

I must not ramble on further, for the post is going, and you know what the Roman post _is_. It starts when it feels inclined, and the delivery is _tantum quantum_, as we say in Italy. I have to be a good hour before the official time or risk being told by some shabbily uniformed person that my letter missed _through my own fault_! Next week I hope to give you an interesting account of Sapphira Moshetim's début. She is a Roman of the Romans, and I was quite carried away! Such subtlety! Such declamation! I hope to be her herald, for she is to come to Carthage next season, and I am sure she will bear out all I say.

XXXIX

OPEN LETTER TO A YOUNG PARASITE

_My dear Boy:_

As you know, I was your father's closest friend for many years, and I have watched with interest, but I confess not without anxiety, your first attempts in a career of which he was in my young days the most brilliant exemplar.

You will not take it ill in a man of my years and in one as devoted to your family as I am and have proved myself to be, if I tender you a word of advice.

The profession upon which you have engaged is one of the most difficult in the world. It does not offer the great prizes which attend the best forms of cheating, bullying, and blackmail, and at the same time it is highly limited, and offers opportunities to only a handful of the finer souls.

Nevertheless, I am not writing this to dissuade you for one moment from its pursuit. There is something in the fine arts difficult to define, but very deeply felt by every one, which makes them of themselves a sort of compensation for their economic limitations. The artist, the poet, and the actor expect to live, and hope to live well, but each one knows how few are the prizes, and each in his heart expects something more than a mere money compensation. So should it be in that great profession which you have undertaken in the light of your father's example.

In connection with that, I think it my duty to point out to you that even the greatest success in this special calling is only modest compared with successes obtained at the Bar, in commerce, or even in politics. You will never become a wealthy man. I do not desire it for you. It should be yours, if you succeed, to enjoy wealth without its responsibility, and to consume the good things our civilisation presents to the wealthy without avarice, without the memory of preceding poverty, and, above all, without the torturing necessity of considering the less fortunate of your kind.

You must not expect, my dear young man, to leave even a modest competence; therefore you must not expect to marry and provide for children. The parasite must be celibate. I have never known the rule to fail, at least in our sex. You will tell me, perhaps, that in the course of your career, continually inhabiting the houses of the rich, studying their manners, and supplying their wants, you cannot fail to meet some heiress; that you do not see why, this being the case, you should not marry her, to your lasting advantage.

Let me beg you, with all the earnestness in my power, to put such thoughts from you altogether. They are as fatal to a parasite's success as early commercial bargaining to that of a painter. You must in the first ten years of your exercises devote yourself wholly to your great calling. By the time you have done that you will have unlearned or forgotten all that goes with a wealthy marriage; its heavy responsibilities will be odious to you, its sense of dependence intolerable. Moreover (though you may think it a little cynical of me to say so), I must assure you that no one, even a man with your exalted ideal, can make a success of married life unless he enters it with some considerable respect for his partner. Now, it is easy for the man who lays himself out for a rich marriage (and that is a business quite different from your own, and one, therefore, on which I will not enter) to respect his wife. Such men are commonly possessed, or soon become possessed, of a simple and profound religion, which is the worship of money, and when they have found their inevitable choice, her substance, or that of her father, surrounds her with a halo that does not fade. You could hope for no such illusions. The very first year of your vocation (if you pursue it industriously and honestly) will destroy in you the possibility of any form of worship whatsoever. No, it will be yours to take up with dignity, and I trust in some permanent fashion, that position of parasite which is a proper and necessary adjunct in every wealthy family, and which, when it is once well and industriously occupied, I have never known to fail in promoting the happiness of its incumbent.

Let me turn from all this and give you a few rough rules which should guide you in the earlier part of your way. You will not, I am sure, reject them lightly, coming as they do from a friend of my standing and experience. Young men commonly regard the advice of their elders as something too crude to be observed. It is a fatal error. What they take for crudity is only the terseness and pressure of accumulated experience.

The first main rule is to take note of that limit of insult and contempt beyond which your master will revolt. Note carefully what I say. No one, and least of all the prosperous, especially when their prosperity is combined with culture, will long tolerate flattery. A certain indifference, spiced with occasional contempt and not infrequent insolence, is what those of jaded appetite look for in any permanent companion. Without a full knowledge of this great truth, hundreds of your compeers have fallen early upon the field, never to rise again. For if it is true that the wealthy and the refined demand much seasoning in their companionship, it is equally true that there is a fairly sharp boundary beyond which they suddenly revolt. Henry Bellarmine was thrust out of the Congletons' house for no other reason. The same cause led to poor Ralph Pagberry's imprisonment, and I could quote you hosts of others.

My next rule is that you should never, under any temptation of weather, or ill health, or fatigue, permit yourself really and thoroughly to bore either your patron or any one of his guests, near relatives, or advisers. As it is not easy for a young man to know when he is boring the well-to-do, let me give you a few hints.

When the rich begin to talk one to the other in your presence without noticing you, it is a sign. When they answer what you are saying to them in a manner totally irrelevant, it is another. When they smile very sympathetically, but at something else in the room, not your face, it is a third. And when they give an interested exclamation, such as, "No doubt. No doubt," or, "I can well believe it," such expressions having no relation to what passed immediately before, it is a fourth.

Add to these criteria certain plain rules, such as never upon any account to read aloud to the rich unless they constrain you to do so, never to sing, never to be the last to leave the room or to go to bed, and you will not sin upon this score.

Let me give you a further rule, which is, to agree with the women. It is very difficult for one of our sex to remember this, because our sex loves argument and is with difficulty persuaded that contradiction and even controversy are intolerable to ladies. Mould your conversation with them in such a fashion that they may hear from you either a brilliant account at second hand of themselves or a very odious one of their friends; but do not be so foolish as to touch upon abstract matters, and if these by any chance fall into the conversation, simply discover your companion's real or supposed position, and agree with it.

I have little more to add. Be courteous to all chance guests in the house. You will tell me, justly enough, that the great majority of them will be unimportant or poor or both. But the point is that you can never tell when one of them may turn out to be, either then or in the future, important or rich or both. The rule is simple and absolute. Cultivate courtesy, avoid affection; use the first upon all occasions, and forget so much as the meaning of the second.

Lastly, drink wine, but drink it in moderation. I have known admirably successful parasites who were total abstainers, but only in the houses of fanatics with whom this peculiar habit was a creed. The moment these successful men passed to other employers, I was interested to note that they at once abandoned the foolish trick. But if it is important not to fall into the Mohammedan foible of total abstinence from wine, it is, if anything, even more important never upon any occasion whatsoever to exceed in it. Excess in wine is dangerous in a degree to the burglar, the thief, the money-lender, the poisoner, and many professions other than your own, but in that which you have chosen it is not _dangerous_, but _fatal_. Let such excess be apparent once in the career of a young parasite, and that career is as good as done for. I urge this truth upon you most solemnly, my dear lad, by way of ending.

I wish you the best of luck, and I am your poor father's devoted friend and your own.

XL

ON DROPPING ANCHOR

The best noise in all the world is the rattle of the anchor chain when one comes into harbour at last, and lets it go over the bows.

You may say that one does nothing of the sort, that one picks up moorings, and that letting go so heavy a thing as an anchor is no business for you and me. If you say that you are wrong. Men go from inhabited place to inhabited place, and for pleasure from station to station, then pick up moorings as best they can, usually craning over the side and grabbing as they pass, and cursing the man astern for leaving such way on her and for passing so wide. Yes, I know that. You are not the only man who has picked up moorings. Not by many many thousands. Many moorings have I picked up in many places, none without some sort of misfortune; therefore do I still prefer the rattle of the anchor chain.

Once--to be accurate, seventeen years ago--I had been out all night by myself in a boat called the _Silver Star_. She was a very small boat. She had only one sail; she was black inside and out, and I think about one hundred years old. I had hired her of a poor man, and she was his only possession.

It was a rough night in the late summer when the rich are compelled in their detestable grind to go to the Solent. When I say it was night I mean it was the early morning, just late enough for the rich to be asleep aboard their boats, and the dawn was silent upon the sea. There was a strong tide running up the Medina. I was tired to death. I had passed the Royal Yacht Squadron grounds, and the first thing I saw was a very fine and noble buoy--new-painted, gay, lordly--moorings worthy of a man!

I let go the halyard very briskly, and I nipped forward and got my hand upon that great buoy--there was no hauling of it in-board; I took the little painter of my boat and made it fast to this noble buoy, and then immediately I fell asleep. In this sleep of mine I heard, as in a pleasant dream, the exact motion of many oars rowed by strong men, and very soon afterwards I heard a voice with a Colonial accent swearing in an abominable manner, and I woke up and looked--and there was a man of prodigious wealth, all dressed in white, and with an extremely new cap on his head. His whiskers also were white and his face bright red, and he was in a great passion. He was evidently the owner or master of the buoy, and on either side of the fine boat in which he rowed were the rowers, his slaves. He could not conceive why I had tied the _Silver Star_ to his magnificent great imperial moorings, to which he had decided to tie his own expensive ship, on which, no doubt, a dozen as rich as himself were sailing the seas.

I told him that I was sorry I had picked up his moorings, but that, in this country, it was the common courtesy of the sea to pick up any spare moorings one could find. I also asked him the name of his expensive ship, but he only answered with curses. I told him the name of my ship was the _Silver Star_.

Then, when I had cast off, I put out the sweeps and I rowed gently, for it was now slack water at the top of the tide, and I stood by while he tied his magnificent yacht to the moorings. When he had done that I rowed under the stern of that ship and read her name. But I will not print it here, only let me tell you it was the name of a ship belonging to a fabulously rich man. Riches, I thought then and I think still, corrupt the heart.

Upon another occasion I came with one companion across the bar of Orford River, out of a very heavy wind outside and a very heavy sea. I just touched as I crossed that bar, though I was on the top of the highest tide of the year, for it was just this time in September, the highest springs of the hunter's moon.

My companion and I sailed up Orford River, and when we came to Orford Town we saw a buoy, and I said to my companion, "Let us pick up moorings."

Upon the bank of the river was a long line of men, all shouting and howling, and warning us not to touch that buoy. But we called out to them that we meant no harm. We only meant to pick up those moorings for a moment, so as to make everything snug on board, and that then we would take a line ashore and lie close to the wharf. Only the more did those numerous men (whom many others ran up to join as I called) forbid us with oaths to touch the buoy. Nevertheless, we picked up the little buoy (which was quite small and light) and we got it in-board, and held on, waiting for our boat to swing to it. But an astonishing thing happened! The boat paid no attention to the moorings, but went careering up river carrying the buoy with it, and apparently dragging the moorings along the bottom without the least difficulty. And this was no wonder, for we found out afterwards that the little buoy had only been set there to mark a racing point, and that the weights holding the line of it to the bottom were very light and few. So it was no wonder the men of Orford had been so angry. Soon it was dark, and we replaced the buoy stealthily, and when we came in to eat at the Inn we were not recognised.

It was on this occasion that was written the song:

The men that lived in Orford stood
Upon the shore to meet me;
Their faces were like carven wood,
They did not wish to greet me.
etc.

It has eighteen verses.

I say again, unless you have moorings of your own--an extravagant habit--picking up moorings is always a perilous and doubtful thing, fraught with accident and hatred and mischance. Give me the rattle of the anchor chain!

I love to consider a place which I have never yet seen, but which I shall reach at last, full of repose and marking the end of those voyages, and security from the tumble of the sea.

This place will be a cove set round with high hills on which there shall be no house or sign of men, and it shall be enfolded by quite deserted land; but the westering sun will shine pleasantly upon it under a warm air. It will be a proper place for sleep.

The fair-way into that haven shall lie behind a pleasant little beach of shingle, which shall run out aslant into the sea from the steep hillside, and shall be a breakwater made by God. The tide shall run up behind it smoothly, and in a silent way, filling the quiet hollow of the hills, brimming it all up like a cup--a cup of refreshment and of quiet, a cup of ending.

Then with what pleasure shall I put my small boat round, just round the point of that shingle beach, noting the shoal water by the eddies and the deeps by the blue colour of them where the channel runs from the main into the fair-way. Up that fair-way shall I go, up into the cove, and the gates of it shall shut behind me, headland against headland, so that I shall not see the open sea any more, though I shall still hear its distant noise. But all around me, save for that distant echo of the surf from the high hills, will be silence; and the evening will be gathering already.

Under that falling light, all alone in such a place, I shall let go the anchor chain, and let it rattle for the last time. My anchor will go down into the clear salt water with a run, and when it touches I shall pay out four lengths or more so that she may swing easily and not drag, and then I shall tie up my canvas and fasten all for the night, and get me ready for sleep. And that will be the end of my sailing.

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