For which reason, human nature being what it is, it surrounds itself
with an ungracious atmosphere of absurd ritual to cover grudged and
inadequate performance.
What it really needs is to be dropped into a March North Atlantic,
without any lascars, and made to swim for its life between a C.P.R. boat
and a North German Lloyd - till it learns to smile.
II
A RETURN TO THE EAST
The East is a much larger slice of the world than Europeans care to
admit. Some say it begins at St. Gothard, where the smells of two
continents meet and fight all through that terrible restaurant-car
dinner in the tunnel. Others have found it at Venice on warm April
mornings. But the East is wherever one sees the lateen sail - that
shark's fin of a rig which for hundreds of years has dogged all white
bathers round the Mediterranean. There is still a suggestion of menace,
a hint of piracy, in the blood whenever the lateen goes by, fishing or
fruiting or coasting.
'This is not my ancestral trade,' she whispers to the accomplice sea.
'If everybody had their rights I should be doing something quite
different; for my father, he was the Junk, and my mother, she was the
Dhow, and between the two of 'em they made Asia.' Then she tacks,
disorderly but deadly quick, and shuffles past the unimaginative
steam-packet with her hat over one eye and a knife, as it were, up her
baggy sleeves.
