PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20448, 30 June 1928, Page 6

PASSING NOTES.

Mr Gutcliffe Hyne, if still extant, is the one and only man to write or rewrite the Jervis Bay story. He would accept the job with alacrity, the ship and her troubles, putting his Captain Kettle on the bridge;—that for certain. For it is the little captain, in pea jacket and flat official cap, the light of battle in his eye, a cigar screwed into the corner of his close-shut lips, that has made the literary fortune o* the Gutcliffe Hvne sea yarn, and incidentally of Mr Gutcliffe Hyne,—Captain Kettle, C. 8., that very fiery particle! In the Jervis Bay story as rewritten, when Captain Kettle learns ■ that his ship is carrying stowaways he merely ordains that they shall not cat the bread of idleness — Six days shait thou work and do all that thou art able. And on the seventh day holystone decks and scrapo chain cable, —that or something like it. But the Bolshevist stowaways, eight by count, are there to light. Blustering and menacing they take charge of the deck, led by a truculent West Indian halfcaste; when, 10, a miracle! With a skip and a jump descends upon them from the bridge the little captain, knocks out the “ buck nigger ” with a sledgehammer punch on the point of the jaw, and holds up the rest with levelled pistol: “Hands up!” Within the twinkling of a capstan bar he has the whole gang in irons and under hatches, set to cool in the forcpeak. This done, he climbs up to the bridge, takes a look into the binnacle, lights a now cigar, and retires to the captain’s cabin opening on to the bridge deck, there resuming the composition of a hymn to the tune “There is a land of pure delight,” a hymn for the Wharfedale Particular Methodists in the chapel where he preaches when ashore. “ The Stowaways,” story by Gutcliffe Hyne. And a best-seller. Less credible is the story told on the cables. We are asked to believe that to quell and quash eight stowaways with never a weapon among them the Jervis Bay needed the assistance of a warship. Toil that to the marines, we say. And indeed the party of marines hurried from Colombo in the naval vessel Slovel and put on board the Jervis Bay may have supposed they were assisting in a practical joke. A joke it was, and a bad joke, when the stowaways, after their treatment as guests, fed as the passengers were fed and complaining of the food, ran amok along the decks, frightening women and children, shouting in at cabin doors, insulting ladies at a dance, bursting into the saloon during a concert, shouting and swearing; and only desisting from these and similar pranks under persuasion from the hose pipe by which “ they were literally sw'ept into the isolation ward.” Meanwhile the ship’s wireless was sending out S.O.S. calls, distress appeals to the British Navy. A wondrous story. What were the crew and passengers doing? A ten-thousand-ton passenger ship carries a crew which may number anything up to a hundred. We are told with emphasis that the crew was “ not mutinous.” But it is pretty clear that the captain was not sure of his crew. With reason for his doubt, remembering the attitude of the Australian labour unions towards the Bay line of ships, wickedly sold away to outsiders by the Government because tired of losing money over them through the whims and caprices of labour. The Jervis Bay crew was “not mutinous.” Yet at Colombo, when the ship was unmooring for the renewal of her voyage, “a delegate from tlie engine room trade unionists told the captain ‘we won’t take the ship to’ sea,’ ” receiving a reply to the effect that he would be attended to by and by. Captain Kettle would have knocked him down the bridge ladder. It would be flattery to accuse Mr Holland of a sense of humour. Irony and humour are near allied; there is nothing of either in his talk of the New Zealand farmer’s freehold as a mort-gage-hold and a strangle-hold, and in his wanting to know what the Government mean by it. Irony forsooth!—on a politician of this typo the exquisite irony of the Rejected Addresses would be thrown away. Try him with the couplet— Who makes the quartern loa£ ami Luddites rise? Who fills the butchers’ shops with large blue files? —he will ask who the Luddites were; will only be the more mystified when you tell him; and will tail off prosaically on the prevalence of flies in butchers’ shops,—who can be responsible but the butcher himself in leaving his meat exposed? Goodman Dull!—not the farmer this time, but the farmer’s advocate. It is useless explaining to Mr Holland that, when a farmer is needing money to develop his farm and takes in a temporary partner who provides the money and will cease to be a partner when the money is repaid, in a transaction of this nature both parties may profit —the men in town has a mortgage but the man on the farm has the money, the thing is equal. Tell this to Mi’ Holland and, fatuously benign, he will ask as before what the Government means by it, and what the Government proposes to do about it. In short, Mr Holland on the political stump is a dullard, and is not able to say with Addison, “ When I am dull I have a particular meaning in it.” He hasn’t the wit. “A bold, hard man was he, girth about the breast with oak and triple brass, who. first committed his frail bark to the wild, rough sea.” Thus a Roman singer when navigation had got no further than the crossing of the Mediterranean and coasting along its shores. “ The gods meant the sea to be a barrier impassable; but man delights in disobedience.” It is not by our ocean liners that we now affront the gods. Aviation has followed upon navigation; we commit our frail bark to the thin and yielding air. With so much of success that there are air lines of transit between city and city. You can embark in London for Paris at the risk of being incinerated within the first ten minutes; — that has happened to persons within my own personal acquaintance; or you may “ hop off ” from the continent itself, possibly into the pit of nothingness. If there is a crossing from continent to continent, how much is gained? What is the profit to humanity? How much further forward are we on the path of civilisation? These are questions that remain to be answered. At this moment airship pilots, a dozen or more, are playing a tragic hide-and-seek within the Arctic Circle. One harebrained (or heroic) adventurer sets out to cross the North Pole and is lost; another sets out to find him, and is also lost; then follows a general hue and cry. Ocean navigation is perilous in regions Arctic or Antarctic. Listen to M'Andrew, “the auld Scotch engineer,” in “ McAndrew’s Hymn”:— An' home again—the Rio run ; it’s no child’s play to go Steamin’ to bell for fourteen days o’ snow an' floe an’ blow. The bergs like kelpies overside that glrn an’ turn and shift ■While, grtndln’ like the Mills o’ God goes by the big South drift. (Hail, Snow, and Ice that praise the Lord. I’ve seen them at their work, An' wished we had another route or they another kirk). How shall wc think of the airship amid snow and floe and blow, neither able to keep aloft nor descend to any solid footing? And, in the last analysis, when an airman proposes to fly over the North Pole, what is the motive? Notoriety, name and fame. Not other than the motive that lends interest to a cockfight, or to the fortunes of the Ail

Blacks. There are people in New Zealand who will hot be able to sleep tonight till they know the result of a football match in South Africa. In what is their interest? The game 3 They don’t care a pin’s-head about the game; nor do the thousands that will witness it. All they care for is the result—who wins? It is the gambler’s interest; and we arc all gamblers at heart. Dear “ Civis.”—A small controversy has been raging around the word “finalize” (? “ise”), and one side points to the fact that it frequently appears in the Times. We have agreed to accept your decision as to whether there is such a word in the English language.— Reach Finality. It is told of Alfred de Musset, novelist and journalist, that once he was accused of having used an expression that was “ not French.” He made answer: “It wasn’t yesterday, but it is to-day ”; —he had made it French 1 y using it, bad French perhaps, but still French. An earlier writer than do Musset, one Quintus Horatius Flaccus, of the century n.c., has a remark which time has not antiquated;—“lt has been and always will be permitted to give to the world words that bear the mintmark of the day,” Licuit sempernuo licobit Slgnatum praesentc nota producero notuon. But “mintmark” is ambiguous. Coinages may be English or bad English, both bearing the mintmark of the day. “ Finalise ” is bad English; the dictionaries know it not; it meets no crying want. There are many ways ot saying that you bring a thing to an end. Nothing but a general vote for “ finalise ” would make it standard English. The endings “-ise” and “-ize ” —which?— don’t trouble. If it is a question of “ finalise ” you don’t need either. Greetings from Dunedin folk to their old townsman. Sir Frederick Chapman, though only a visitor. It has been the lot of Otago, of Dunedin in particular, to supply the North with—with brains, to put it bluntly,—with men of parts, we will say, specially in support of the judicial bench. Sir Frederick Chapman is an illustrious example. In the lecture he came from Wellington to deliver—a lecture on a subject he has made peculiarly his own, the Early History of New Zealand—Otago came for notice in its turn, and the founding of Scottish Dunedin, in its early days, a community of many virtues, albeit somewhat “ sombre." Yes, sombre was his word. It is true that we observed the Sabbath Day, gave due attendance at the diets of worship, sang Tate and Brady without the help of any “ kist o’whistles ”; and four times in the year closed down business religiously for the Quarterly Fast. But none the less did wo cherish in memory the land of brown heath and shaggy wood, the romance of its legends, the appeal of its songs,—Bobby Burns least of all to be forgotten. So also today. This column has always shown a tenderness to Scottish susceptibilities on questions of song and 'story. Anent which (to talk Scottishly!) I cheerfully make room for a correspondent:— Dear Civis, —I am proud of the songs, music, and dances of my country: when of good quality there is nothing like them to cheer the heart or put life and metal in one’s heels. “ Maggie Lauder ” is not a high-class song; nut I do not think the author made a mull of it. I have not set eyes on it this sixty years, but the following is about right (finding no faults with your indispensable notes): Bonny Maggie, pretty Maggie, bonny Maggie Lauder; A piper met her gaun to Fife, he spler’d her what they ca’d her. Right scornfully she answered him, Begone ye Htelan’ skauder. Jog on yer gate ye bletherskate, my name Is Maggie Lauder. Let us hope we have got it right. But what is a “Hielan’ skauder”? Civis.