The Pleasures of Ignorance | Page 5

two
pairs of handles--come up alongside, and the fish are ladled into the
gurries from tin pans. As each gurry is filled the men hasten off with it
to where the auctioneer is standing. With the help of a small notebook
and a lead pencil he auctions it before an outsider can wink, and the
gurry is taken a few yards further, where women are pouring herrings
into barrels. They, too, are covered with fish-scales from head to foot.
They are dabbled like a painter's palette. So great is the haul that every
cart in the country-side has come down to lend a hand. The fish are
poured into the carts over the sides of the boats like water. Old
fishermen stand aside and look on with a sense of having wasted their

youth. They recall the time when they went fishing in the North Sea
and had to be content to sell their catch at a shilling and sixpence a
cran--a cran being equal to four gurries, or about a thousand herrings.
Who is there now who would sell even a hundred herrings for one and
sixpence? Who is there who would sell a hundred herrings for ten and
sixpence? Yet one gig alone this morning has brought in fourteen
thousand herrings. No wonder that there is an atmosphere of excitement
in the harbour. No wonder that the carts almost run over you as they
make journey after journey between boat and barrel. No wonder that
three different sorts of sea-gulls--the herring gull, the lesser
black-headed gull, and the black-backed gull--have gathered about us
in screaming multitudes and fill the air like a snowstorm. Every child in
the town seems to be making for home with its finger in a fish's mouth,
or in two fishes' mouths, or in three fishes' mouths. Artists have hurried
down to the harbour, and have set up their easels on every spot that is
not already occupied by a fish barrel or an auctioneer or a man with a
knife in his teeth preparing to gut a dogfish. The town has lost its head.
It has become Midas for the day. Every time it opens its mouth a
herring comes out. A doom of herrings has come upon us. The smell
rises to heaven. It is as though we were breathing fish-scales. Even the
pretty blue overalls of the children have become spotted. Everywhere
barrels and boxes have been piled high. We are hoisting them on to
carts--farm carts, grocers' carts, coal carts, any sort of carts. We must
get rid of the stuff at all costs. Anything to get it up the hill to the
railway station. The very horses are frenzied. They stick their toes into
the hill and groan. The drivers, excited with cupidity as they think of all
the journeys they will be able to make before evening, bully them and
beat them with the end of the reins. Their eyes are excited, their
gestures impatient. They fill the town with clamour and smell. It is an
occasion on which, as the vulgar say, they wouldn't call the Queen their
aunt....
This, I fancy, is where all the romance of the sea began--in the story of
a greedy man and a fresh herring. The ship was a symbol of man's
questing stomach long before it was a symbol of his questing soul. He
was a hungry man, not a poet, when he built the first harbour. Luckily,
the harbour made a poet of him. Sails gave him wings. He learned to

traffic for wonders. He became a traveller. He told tales. He discovered
the illusion of horizons. Perhaps, however, it is less the sailor than the
ship that attracts our imagination. The ship seems to convey to us more
than anything else a sense at once of perfect freedom and perfect
adventure.
That is why we are content to stand on the harbour stones all day and
watch anything with sails. We ourselves want to live in some such
freedom and adventure as this. We are feeding our appetite for liberty
as we gaze hungrily after the ships making their way out of harbour
into the sea.

III

THE BETTING MAN
If The Panther wins the Derby,[He didn't] as most people apparently
expect him to do, his victory will carry more weight among frequenters
of race-courses as an argument for Socialism than any that has yet been
invented. For The Panther is a Government-bred horse, born and
brought up in defiance of the laissez-faire principles of Mr Harold Cox.
He will therefore carry the colours of a great principle at Epsom as well
as those of his present lessee. Who would have thought five years ago
that the Derby favourite of 1919 would start under so grave a
responsibility?