"So we squared up there and then, and the bung and his men hyked us out into the street and we was having our scrap out when the police came up. He ran! 'Eh, Mr Liar!' I yelled after him. 'Did you say you was never afraid?'
"If I hadn't wasted time doing that, I shouldn't have got caught either. Very nearly landed me in chokey, that did. We was shipmates afterwards, me and that man, and very good friends. He's a warrant officer now."
LOWER DECK TO QUARTER-DECK
Thence the conversation passed naturally to promotion from the ranks. "I don't believe in it, not as a general rule," said Luscombe. "Officers ought to be officers, and men ought to be men, and a ship's always more comfortable when both keep their places. Rankers as officers are apt to be bullies: that we all know jolly well. And besides that, the likes of us can't keep our kecker up the same as gen'lemen, and therefore I says we ain't fit for the quarter-deck, not yet awhile. Tisn't that the lower deck ain't so brave as the quarter-deck, because it is; only it can't keep it up so long; it gets discouraged like, when 'tis a long job, specially when 'tis one of those waiting-an-doing-nothing jobs. We ain't bred up to it, and our fathers wasn't, and there's no good to be got out of trying to pretend 'tisn't so."
We argued on. Luscombe would not yield an inch of his position. I can't say offhand how far history bears him out, but I fancy that he is right to this extent: the lower deck has less flexibility of mind. It cannot view a depressing situation from so many sides at once. It is not, for instance, so quick to see the underlying humour of an emergency; not so ready to appreciate the so-called irony of fate. It cannot so easily turn round and laugh at itself and its predicament. So, though the lower deck's courage may be fully as great as, or greater than, that of the upper deck, it is applied more constantly, with less mental diversion, and therefore it tires sooner. Hence, it may not be so effective.
The argument undoubtedly has a true bearing on that sort of promotion which, in the prevailing educational cant, is called giving every poor boy (by free education, scholarships and other lures) his chance of climbing to the top of the ladder—as if success in life were one great tall ladder instead of many ladders of varying builds and heights. In attempting to justify modern educational policy, its victims are egged on too fast into a field of commercial, intellectual, or emotional stress for which they lack the fundamental grit, or rather for which the fundamental grit they do possess is not adapted, nor can be adapted in a generation. Their spirit, fine and valuable for the old purpose perhaps, is not suited to the new. Therefore, of good workmen in posse we make bad clerks and shopmen in esse; of good clerks detestable little bureaucrats or mean-minded commercial men, and so on. Possible wives and mothers we turn into female creatures. And Merrie England swarms with makeshift folk and breakdowns.
Happily nature, heredity, sometimes intervenes, and at adolescence the sharp boy, the pride of the examination room, develops into quite a nice commonplace young man, like the missionaries' nigger boy, and is saved, if he be not already committed to an unsuitable career. Otherwise, what mental deformity and slaughter! It was well said that education—what is called education—was the cruellest thing ever forced upon the poor. Mam Widger agrees. She knows her two boys are above the average in brains, but she says: "I'd far rather for them to fend for themselves an' make gude fishermen like their father or gude sailors like their uncles, than for 'em to be forced on by somebody else to what they ain't fitted for. 'Tis God helps them as helps themselves, they du reckon, but I can't see as he helps them as is pushed."
25
Uncle Jake allows us fine weather for the Regatta. "But when it du break up, after this yer logie [dull, hazy, calm] spell, look out!" he says. "Iss; look out!"
WINKLING