The Wooden Horse

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 405, 13 July 1928, Page 14

The Wooden Horse

A.n Occasional Column And with great lies about his wooden horse Set the crew laughing. and forgot his course. — J. E. Flecker. SOMEBODY, they say, recently approached and addressed a London night watchman, sitting in his little shelter with the earphones of a wireless set in place. “Ssh,” he said: "I'm listening to Desmond MacCarthy.’’ And what gives this story its agreeable flavour is the fact that Mr Desmond MacCarthy talks “over the air” on poetry. Mr MacCarthy’s other name is "Affable Hawk,” which has been mentioned here before now. It appears at the bottom of "The New Statesman’s” page, “Books in General,” and nothing trivial or dull ever appears under it. The last page to hand closed with a paragraph about Sir Edmund Gasse, who had just died; and it promised a future and more complete estimate of a critic who never aged into the old man’s want of curiosity and sympathy, never let his mind bed itself comfortably upon prejudice. He became a veteran of a rare kind—the veteran in whom nothing is inveterate. If it was a foible of his, at last, to show that he was “one of our contemporaries” and no slightly pathetic survival —“Affable Hawk” mentions that he liked to be cosily installed inside every little secret and mystery of literary London —it was a foible only, not a ridiculous conceit like that of the unvenerable greybeards who deceive themselves, pursue their juniors, and like “panting Time toil after them in vain”; it was the touch of manner in a valid assertion; for Sir Edmund could and did keep up. The gods loved him, and he died young. It will scarcely be credited that any of his associates should not have known him to be a writer. Yet it is true. The nightwatchman listens to Desmond MacCarthy and converses with the poets by his brazier in a London street: members of the Marlborough Club did not know the author of Swinburne’s “Life” and of other books —the British Museum Catalogue knows how many; they did not know the friend of Stevenson—they knew a humorous, rather satirical old gentleman who “knew the world.” It is probably a lie, but an altogether perfect lie, which reports that when Gosse fils, Philip Gosse. published “The Pirates’ Who's Who” a member hailed Sir Edmund: “Hullo, Goese, I see you’ve taken to writing.” The Marlborough Club is not a literary club—it was founded to give King Edward, as Prince of Wales, a place to meet his friends. Royalty and sportsmen ;«re alike, at times, a little superb in their looking over and overlooking the inky and meek. Royal George, for example, condescending to the fifteenth volume of Gibbepn’s “Decline and Fall”—“Another damned thick, square book, Mr Gibbon—scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Gibbon?”

This piratical dictionary of Philip Gosse’s is a very good Jack Horner sort of book. That is to say, you stick in your thumb. . . . The pirate William White, for instance, was a Newfoundland fish-splitter who, growing weary of splitting fish, in August of 1723 stole a fishing-boat, with John Phillips an<j three others, and sailed away for to be a pirate. But the fellow was what the Americans call dumb. He let the other four appoint themselves officers, while he did obscure service as the whole of the crew. Their buccaneering proved—if I may borrow a friend’s relished phrase—“an absolute fizasco”; and William White “dy’d very penitently, with the Assistance of two grave Divines,” in Boston, June 2, 1724, being hanged. But what is to be expected of a fishsplitter? Another, one Richard Jobson, or Cobson, or Gopson, started badly as a druggist’s hand with theological interests. He was of Dampier’s party which crossed the Isthmus of Darien in 1681, and was left behind with Wafer, the pirate-surgeon, who was pardoned by King James and wrote the story of his adventures. Wafer says Gopson—l prefer Gopson, and so did Wafer—was “an ingenious man and a good scholar”; but how shall it profit a pirate to know Greek? After fearful adventures in the jungle, Gopson and Wafer reached a shore off which stood a buccaneer vessel. They paddled out in a canoe; but Gopson naturally fell into the water (with his gun—and probably his Greek Testament), caught a bad cold, and died. They shot off a volley over his grave °h Ke Sounds Cay. This Gopson was not cut out for a pirate: he should have stuck to pills and divinity, safe in London. Now Captain John Derdrake. the Dane, Jack of the Baltic, was tougher stuff. He regularly drowned all his prisoners, during a long and profitable career, by making them walk the plank—he was one of the few pirates who did so; he caught a ship on which was the sister of General Shevelling, the Governor of St. Petersburg, who had offered 4000 rix-dollars for bis head; having upbraided her for her bad choice of relatives, he stabbed her fn t|ie back; he was discreetly absent on shore when his ship was attacked and sunk and so survived his crew-, who were hung up alive by hooks through their ribs and set adrift down the Volga, by 14 years, lived, in luxury and the memory of well-spent days, on an estate near Stralsund. Only then did his good seiise break down, once and fatally. He followed a thievish, absconding servant to Stockholm, was recognised arrested, tried, and hanged. This robust spirit would have scorned to split fish or roll pills. His first convincing piece of self-expression was his killing an overseer with an axe. J. H. E. S.