IN A CANADIAN CANOE.
I.
ON ART AND SARDINES—BUT MORE ESPECIALLY SARDINES.
THERE is no pleasanter, sweeter, healthier spot than the Backs of the Colleges.
Get into your canoe at Silver Street. Put into that canoe:—
(1) The cushions of three other boats.
(2) Two pipes, in order that one may be always cool, and tobacco.
(3) One dozen boxes of matches, in order that one box may be always handy.
(4) The spiritual part of your nature, which will not take up much room, but is useful to talk to.
But do not take another man with you. I may frankly say, my reader, that you are absolutely the only man I know who has the keen appreciativeness, the capacity for quiet meditation, the dreaminess, the listlessness, the abominable laziness, that a Canadian canoe requires.
The man who would attempt to get pace on in a Canadian canoe probably would analyse the want of harmony in the death-song which a swan never sings—or worse than that.
The man who would try to make a Canadian canoe go where he wanted would be angry, because the inspiration of a poet does not always disappoint the expectations of a commonplace nature. You must go where the boat wants to go; and that depends upon wind and current, and on the number of other boats that run into you, and the way they do it, and the language of their occupants.
What a beautiful thing it is to lie at full length on the cushions, and see the sky through the trees—only the angels see the trees through the sky. My boat has taken me round to the back of Queen’s, and stopped just short of that little bridge. It is all old and familiar. The fowls coo as they cooed yesterday. The same two men in the same tub have the same little joke with one another in getting under the low bridge. Farther up, there is precisely the same number of flies on the same dead and putrescent animal. My boat went up to look at it, but could not stay. The recoil sent it back here; and here, apparently, it means to stop. You may take my word for it that a Canadian canoe knows a thing or two.
I wish I could paint the song of the birds and set the beauty of the trees to music. But there is a prejudice against it. Music is masculine, Art is feminine, and Poetry is their child. The baby Poetry will play with any one; but its parents observe the division of sexes. That is why Nature is so decent and pleasant. I would treat her to some poetry if I did but know the names of things. For instance, I have no idea what that bird is, and asparagus is the only tree which I recognise at sight.
I suppose you know that Art and Music are separated now. They sometimes meet, but they never speak. In the vacation I met them both one night by the edge of the sea; but they did not notice me. Art was busy in catching the effect of the moonlight and the lights on the pier. She did it well, and made it more beautiful than the reality seemed. Music listened to the wash of the waves, the thin sound of the little pebbles drawn back into the sea, and the constant noise of a low wind. He sat at a big organ, which was hidden from my sight by dark curtains of cloud; and as he played the music of all things came out into a song which was better than all things: for Art and Music are not only imitative, but creative. At present they are allowed to create only shadows, by the rules of the game. But I have been told that the old quarrel between them—I have no conception what the quarrel was about—will be made up one day, and they will love one another again. Their younger child, who will then be born, will take unto himself the strength and beauty of Art and Music and Poetry. He will be different from all three, and his name is not fixed yet.
Oh, confound the boat! I wish I’d tied it up. It’s just taken the painter between its teeth, and whipped sharp round and bolted. Woa, my lass, steady! It’s a little fresh, you see, not having been out before this week. I beg your pardon, sir—entirely my fault.
I don’t think he need have been so offensively rude about it. It’s not as if I’d upset him.
A fish jumped.
I know not the names of fishes, but it was not salmon steak or filleted soles, of that I’m sure. My boat goes waggling its silly old bows as if it knew but would not tell me. Can it have been a sardine?
No; the sardine is a foreign fish. It comes from Sardinia, where the Great Napoleon was exiled, as likely as not. It cannot swim in fresh water, but is brought to us in tins, which are packed in crates on trucks. It comes en huiles, in fact. Hence the inscription.
I cannot help thinking of the sad story of those two historical sardines—a buck-sardine and a doe-sardine—that lived on opposite sides of an island, which happened to be in the Ægean Sea.
They loved one another dearly; but they never, never told their love. He had no self-confidence, and she had too much self-respect. They met but once before their last day. It was at a place of worship in the neighbourhood of the Goodwin Sands. She caught his eye, and the umpire gave it out, and he had to go out. “Am I a hymn?” he said, just a little bitterly, “that I should be given out?” He was not a hymn, but he was a he, and had a tender heart.
All day long he sat on a stone, tail uppermost, and felt his position acutely. “Ah, if she only knew!” he sighed to himself.
And she was the life and soul of a select party in the roaring Adriatic. She quipped, and quirked; she became so brilliant that the surface of the sea grew phosphorescent. And no one guessed that beneath that calm exterior the worm was gnawing at the heart of the poor doe-sardine. No one would have been so foolish. For is it not well known that when a worm and a fish meet it’s mostly the fish that does the gnawing? Still, the doe-sardine did feel a trifle weary. Why might she not tell her love? Why must she suffer?
“Il faut souffrir pour être belle,” as the gong said when the butler hit it.
About this time a young man, who was dancing attendance on Queen Cleopatra, happened to be passing on a P.N.O. steamer. This was in the republican era, when Duilius introduced the P.N.O. line. The Carthaginian merchants, with a keen eye for business, always used P.T.O. steamers, which were insured far beyond their value by unsuspecting offices in the less tutored parts of Spain. These wild tribes did not know what P.T.O. signified, but the steamers did; so did the crews of low Teutonic slaves, who were thus saved all the worry and expense of burial.
But let us return to our sardines. The young man on the P.N.O. steamer was reading a novel of Ouida’s; and, misliking the book, he flung it into the ocean. The attendants of the doe-sardine brought it to their mistress, and she read it with avidity, and after that she became very elegant, and very French.
She sat in the rose-tinted boudoir, with a sad smile on her gills, dreaming of her love. “Ah!” she murmured faintly, “Si vous saviez.”
She could not sleep! No sooner had she closed her eyes than she was haunted by an awful vision of a man soldering up tins of fish. The doctors prescribed narcotics. When she had taken the morphia of the doctors she had no more fear of the dream. But she took too much of it. She took all there was of it. Then the doctors prescribed coral, and she took any amount of coral. She would have taken in a reef; but the auctioneer was away for his Easter holidays, and consequently there were no sales. So she took in washing instead. Then, and not till then, she knew that she must die.
A fishing-net was passing, and a conductor stood on the step. “’Ere yer are, lyedy!” he called out. “Hall the way—one penny! Benk, Benk, Gritty Benk!” He used to say this so quickly that he was called the lightning conductor. She entered the net, and as she did so she saw the buck-sardine seated there. She staggered, and nearly fell!
“Moind the step, lyedy,” cried the conductor.
And so they were brought to the gritty bank of the Mediterranean, and received temporary accommodation without sureties or publicity—on note-of-hand simply. As they came in with the tide, they were naturally paid into the current account.
They were preserved in the same tin, and served on the same piece of buttered toast.
As the man consumed the bodies of the buck-sardine and the doe-sardine, the two spiritualities of the two fishes walked down the empyrean, and cast two shadows.
When he had gulped down the last mouthful, the two shadows melted into one.
So they found peace at last; and I do not refer to buttered toast. But the queerest part of it is that they were both sprats.
It has turned chilly. No one but myself is left on the river, and the solitary end of the afternoon is good to look at. The thing that you and I want most is a power of expression. When I say you, I mean the sympathetic reader who can enter into the true spirit of loafing: the loafing of the body in the wayward Canadian canoe that does what it likes, and the loafing of the mind that does not take the nauseous trouble to think straight. I want the younger child who is to be born when Art and Music are reconciled again, who will never take aim and yet never miss the mark, who will be quite careless but quite true. That child will know all about the sympathy which exists between one man and one scene in which he finds himself, and may perhaps reveal it to us.
But I am sorry for poor Art. She is a woman, and, though her beauty will not leave her, she desires reconciliation and love.
I am taken with a sudden verse or two. Kindly excuse them:—