An Englishman Looks at the World | Page 6

much more difficult than, let us say,
twice the difficulty in learning the control and management of a
motor-bicycle. I cannot understand the sort of young man who won't
learn how to do it if he gets half a chance.
The development of these waterplanes is an important step towards the
huge and swarming popularisation of flying which is now certainly
imminent. We ancient survivors of those who believed in and wrote
about flying before there was any flying used to make a great fuss

about the dangers and difficulties of landing and getting up. We wrote
with vast gravity about "starting rails" and "landing stages," and it is
still true that landing an aeroplane, except upon a well-known and quite
level expanse, is a risky and uncomfortable business. But getting up
and landing upon fairly smooth water is easier than getting into bed.
This alone is likely to determine the aeroplane routes along the line of
the world's coastlines and lake groups and waterways. The airmen will
go to and fro over water as the midges do. Wherever there is a square
mile of water the waterplanes will come and go like hornets at the
mouth of their nest. But there are much stronger reasons than this
convenience for keeping over water. Over water the air, it seems, lies in
great level expanses; even when there are gales it moves in uniform
masses like the swift, still rush of a deep river. The airman, in Mr.
Grahame-White's phrase, can go to sleep on it. But over the land, and
for thousands of feet up into the sky, the air is more irregular than a
torrent among rocks; it is--if only we could see it--a waving, whirling,
eddying, flamboyant confusion. A slight hill, a ploughed field, the
streets of a town, create riotous, rolling, invisible streams and cataracts
of air that catch the airman unawares, make him drop disconcertingly,
try his nerves. With a powerful enough engine he climbs at once again,
but these sudden downfalls are the least pleasant and most dangerous
experience in aviation. They exact a tiring vigilance.
Over lake or sea, in sunshine, within sight of land, this is the perfect
way of the flying tourist. Gladly would I have set out for France this
morning instead of returning to Eastbourne. And then coasted round to
Spain and into the Mediterranean. And so by leisurely stages to India.
And the East Indies....
I find my study unattractive to-day.

OFF THE CHAIN
(_December, 1910_)
I was ill in bed, reading Samuel Warren's "Ten Thousand a Year," and
noting how much the world can change in seventy years.
I had just got to the journey of Titmouse from London to Yorkshire in
that ex-sheriff's coach he bought in Long Acre--where now the
motor-cars are sold--when there came a telegram to bid me note how a
certain Mr. Holt was upon the ocean, coming back to England from a

little excursion. He had left London last Saturday week at midday; he
hoped to be back by Thursday; and he had talked to the President in
Washington, visited Philadelphia, and had a comparatively loitering
afternoon in New York. What had I to say about it?
Firstly, that I wish this article could be written by Samuel Warren. And
failing that, I wish that Charles Dickens, who wrote in his "American
Notes" with such passionate disgust and hostility about the first
Cunarder, retailing all the discomfort and misery of crossing the
Atlantic by steamship, could have shared Mr. Holt's experience.
Because I am chiefly impressed by the fact not that Mr. Holt has taken
days where weeks were needed fifty years ago, but that he has done it
very comfortably, without undue physical exertion, and at no greater
expense, I suppose, than it cost Dickens, whom the journey nearly
killed.
If Mr. Holt's expenses were higher, it was for the special trains and the
sake of the record. Anyone taking ordinary trains and ordinary passages
may do what he has done in eighteen or twenty days.
When I was a boy, "Around the World in Eighty Days" was still a
brilliant piece of imaginative fiction. Now that is almost an invalid's
pace. It will not be very long before a man will be able to go round the
world if he wishes to do so ten times in a year. And it is perhaps
forgivable if those who, like Jules Verne, saw all these increments in
speed, motor-cars, and airships aeroplanes, and submarines, wireless
telegraphy and what not, as plain and necessary deductions from the
promises of physical science, should turn upon a world that read and
doubted and jeered with "I told you so. Now will you respect a
prophet?"
It was not that the prophets professed any mystical and inexplicable