A Change in the Cabinet

by Hilaire Belloc

The movement of the human mind, says Marcus Aurelius (imitative in this sentence, as in most of his egregious writings), resembles that of a serpent.

There are serpents and serpents. Minds of Demaine’s type move commonly with the motion of a gorged python but just roused from sleep; but even the python will, under compulsion, dart,—and, in those five seconds, not reason but an animal instinct drove the politician’s soul.

He was up, on to the bale, over the bulwark and down ten feet into the sea, before he had even had time to formulate a plan. He could swim, and that was enough for him.

The splash made by Demaine’s considerable form as it displaced in an amount equal to his weight the waters of the English Channel, came to the ears of the Watch, who was leaning comfortably over the farther railing at the other end of the vessel, looking out to seaward and ruminating upon a small debt which he had left behind him in the parish of Wapping. With no loss of dignity the Watch shuffled forward to see whether aught was displaced. The splash had been a loud one, but it might have been something thrown from the galley.

He first of all looked carefully over the starboard bow to seaward. There was no foam upon the water: everything was still. It occurred to him to cross the deck; he did so in a leisurely manner and thought he noted far down the side, and already drifting astern with the tide, a rapidly disappearing ring of foam. He was a stupid man (though I say it that shouldn’t, for he came from Bosham, noble and fateful Mistress of the Sea), and he looked at the ring of foam in a fascinated manner, considering what could have caused it, until he was roused to life and to his duties by the thunder of the first officer who from the bridge demanded of him in perfectly unmistakable language what he had done to the Skunk.

The sense of innocence was so strong in the honest seafaring soul that he replied by a simple stare which almost gave the first officer a fit, and in the midst of the language that followed, the boy, positively pale with fear, came tearing from the galley and found, not his charge, but the Bosham man gazing like a stuck pig at his superior above, and at the world in general.

The reappearance of the boy was a welcome relief to the chief officer’s lungs and intelligence; it added fuel to his flame. He very nearly leapt down from the bridge in his paroxysms of wrath, and heaven only knows what he would have done to the wretched lad whom he would render responsible for the misadventure had he not at that moment caught sight of a little speck upon the sunlit water far astern: it was the head of George Mulross Demaine, battling with fate.

The prospective Warden of the Court of Dowry could swim fairly well. It had been his practice to swim in a tank. He had swum now and then near shore, but he had no conception of the amount of salt water that can get into a man’s mouth in a really long push over a sea however slightly broken, especially if one enters that sea in a sort of bundle, without taking a proper header. Moreover, the phenomenon of the tide astonished him; he had imagined in his innocence that the sea also was a kind of tank and that he had a dead course of it for the shore, the nearest point of which lay just eastward of the harbour mouth.

As it was, England seemed to be flitting by at a terrible rate, and the Lily, when he turned upon his back and floated for a moment to observe her, had all the appearance of a ship proceeding at full speed up Channel, so rapidly did he drift away.

He swam too hurriedly and he exhausted himself, for his mind was full of terrors: they might fire upon him—he did not know what dreadful arsenal the Lily might not contain!