Yet the point has to be made. If any men had reason to curse their luck, to rail against fate, surely these men had, who for months had worked day and night in those wild seas for less than their keep—nay, for years, and would work for years more, while markets were rigged against them and men in safe shore jobs made money out of them. To think of the sure salary I myself had got for mere Revenue accountancy was enough to make me blush.

The more I see of life the more I am convinced there is a primordial goodness in man, a natural generosity. Out of consciousness of this grows the idealism that inspires all political extremism, for it realises, with a sort of wild and maddened anguish, how acquisitiveness and greed and colossal egoism born of power have contorted or crushed the goodness and the generosity.

And of all elements for quickening the free primordial spirit of man, what can surpass the sea, with its thrill of life over the near presence of death?

XXI

Liberty and Property

There is a good anchorage in Loch Lochy round the first point to port just after entering. The Canal chart would not have suffered if the important detail had been made more striking, and even if some extra detail, not strictly useful for navigation, had been added. One hesitates to suggest that it might have said the fishing is free on Loch Lochy but privately preserved on Loch Oich, though if it had, honest folk might be saved unnecessary thought or precaution. Of course, a good angler should row with quiet oars at any time. But in Loch Lochy the stillness of the heron and the cunning of the eel would have had little effect in luring the large trout from their lairs. We heard afterwards that the bottom feeding is exceptionally good here. And we can at least assert that the quality of the half-pound brown trout is high—and pink. But the loch itself is very deep, running to well over seventy fathoms opposite Invergloy. There seemed to be a fair stretch of fishing water from where we rounded the point along towards Achnacarry, and I mention this because it happens to coincide with shelter from the winds which blow up the Great Glen at this season.

It may seem absurd to suggest that a yacht could be storm-bound in Loch Lochy, a fresh-water loch no more than ten miles long, but as we fished along the shore and saw the white-caps racing up mid loch, we decided that stranger things could happen. The downpour had now got broken up into squall showers, and if the trout had been biting in the water like the midges on shore, we might have been there a long time. The ground feeding here must be very good for midges, for they were unusually large in size and fastidious in palate. They are very fond of eyelids, and, like perverts generally, are relentless in pursuit. If you vulgarly swipe them, they will, of course, bite common parts like the wrists and the neck and the inside of the nostrils, but it’s the eyelids they are after.