Dar'st Thou, Cassius?
There are men who cannot whistle; men who cannot distinguish red from green; men who cannot carry a tune. These limitations we accept as facts, recognizing reasonable demonstration. There is a finality about the proofs. But about certain other limitations, men are incurably sanguine. I, for instance, cannot learn to swim . For years I have been called upon periodically to demonstrate this incapacity to a curious and skeptical sea-side public. Now I am going to stop demonstrating, for it is no use. People will not grasp the fact that I constitutionally cannot swim. They always assume that I am learning. The incompetent person trying to swim is never regarded as a defective: he is regarded as a beginner. The optimistic salt-water mind is incapable of absorbing tragedy; it cannot accept the fact that a being may appear once or twice in history who is unable to begin. I cannot begin to swim, and the person whom I have tried the hardest to convince of this final fact is my brother, a youth of heavy hand and towering ambitions, whose will to power is weakened by no base alloy of pity.
He suddenly decided one summer that it was a family oversight not to have brought me to the swimmingpoint. I must learn at once.
To the emancipated woman I shall not attempt to explain the power of a tyrannical younger brother. Adoration tempered by awe is, I suppose, my driving force; long discipline has made me his creature. From my pleasant perch upon the beach, my swimming teacher, accordingly, plucks me forth, leads me to a bath-house, and bids me make ready.
I should explain at this point that I am not myself in a bathing-suit. By preference I spend the bathing-hour sitting high upon the beach, fully clad in muslin, acting as curator of wristwatches, bath-house keys, and children’s water-wings. This occupation suits well my genius, but I leave it at the despot’s call. Autocracy is by no means at its dying gasp.
A typical morning of water-sports goes somewhat as follows with me. Tricked out at last in black serge suit and gay cap, I shrink behind the bath-house door, dreading my debut. Through the crescent-shaped window that looks out upon the sand, I can see my sister swinging off alone carelessly through the beach-grass, with that thoughtless confidence that is my envy. I, with one tragic eye glued to the crescent moon, watch her as she dives lightly from the pier, and listen as my brother roars for her to race him to the raft. I wait until all the family and all the friends of the family are well under water, and finally, when further delay would mean a search-party, I emerge from my sandy cell. I start off down the board-walk bravely, trying to swagger along with assurance, watching a distant sail. But in spite of all, I shamble. This is not from embarrassment: my suit is neatly skirted, of conventional cut; I present no more shocking aspect than hundreds of my kind; but I quail at that which is to come.
I think that I could endure it all better if I could manage once to go into the water unattended. But no. The crowd hails me with cordial cries. A helpful brother comes tramping out toward me through the surf with mighty stride, dripping arms outstretched. The touch of a water-soaked sea-monster is a horror to the flesh. I evade the clammy arms hysterically, and fling myself desperately into the sea. Then, standing rigidly up to my chin in freezing brine, I turn one fearful eye upon my approaching tutor. With such a glance a mink in a trap watches the approaching canoe of the hunter; you may see the same bright look of questioning terror in the eyes of a w ild kitten cornered in a loft.
My brother is not sensitive to dramatic atmosphere. He approaches, threshing the surface as he comes. I shall not describe what happens next. I cannot answer for the subtleties of the process of teaching a non-teachable, non-aquatic animal to swim. But to any incredulous critic who suggests that I have not been trained by the proper method, I reply: I have been trained by all the methods. There is no device given under heaven among men that has not been tried upon me. Consultations have been held over me. Experts have been called in from distant parts to look me over. Possibly not all the devices were tried quite long enough, but that was not the fault of my tutor. My case is still to him an academic problem, complex in technicalities, tantalizing, exasperating, and, because insoluble, fascinating. I can see him now in my uneasy dreams as he pauses for a moment, balancing me on one careful hand, while he reflects upon the details of his next experiment.
I try to help him all I can. At his word I obediently forsake father and mother and dry land each morning for weeks and weeks on end. I swallow great swathes of Long Island Sound. I follow orders with touching intelligence, writhing along upon the water in all the prescribed angles. But one thing I cannot control. I cannot help sinking. Out of my great love for my trainer I have learned to sink without struggling. I can go down with perfect repose of manner, like a sinking star.
He will never understand this. ‘Have a little confidence,’ he implores, ‘and you can’t sink!’
Obediently, I have confidence. My soul rises to confidence, as an oriental worshiper lifts his heart in spiritual sublimity before his hopeless gods. Yet with all my confidence thick upon me, I sink; sink with the moderation and firmness of a submarine submerging with all on board. I sink not convulsively, not head-first, not feet-first, but horizontally and as a whole. It seems that I am not to be permitted to drown. Just as I grow resigned to the calmness of the lower deeps, I am fished up again into the sharpness of the upper air, and arranged carefully once more along the waves, like a needle on the surface of a glass of water, and bidden yet another time to ‘Strike out.’
Strike out! Oh, attitudes most orthodox and frog-like! I have learned to strike them all. Not, however, on the surface. The great combers close over me, and I go down; then rhythmically I am drawn back to the surface by loving hands, my dizzy brain faintly repeating a lovely line of poetry with new meaning: —
The very cadence is soothing.
This is the way it always happens — not one time or twenty times, or ninety-nine times out of a hundred, but always. It always will happen this way, because I cannot swim. Yet my brother is blind to proof. He still believes that it is some omission of his that keeps me helpless. No doubt, when he comes back from across the water he will want to try new methods, learned perhaps from Turks. At all events, no swimming hour goes by without a new variation of technique, guaranteed by friends. At these times I question the advantages of a wide circle of acquaintance, technical and ingenious. Too drugged with sea-water by this time to suffer much, however, I struggle on, only mind enough left to wonder what great faith supports this good brother of mine, that he should spend the whole bathing-hour alternately launching me and dredging for me, with the morose persistence of a secretary of the navy.
Usually, just as the last glimmer of human intelligence is about to be drowned out, my respite comes. My sister, surging along from her revels by the raft, comes paddling by. ‘Make her go in,’ she advises my master. ‘She ought not to overdo when she is learning. Hi! Hurry! Fish her up! Now make her go in.’
Make her go in! With a miserable cackle I laugh terribly between chattering teeth, and wade out, stiffly flapping.
In the Egoist, George Meredith in an admiring mood describes Clara Middleton’s graceful way of walking from the garden to the house as ‘swimming’ across the grassy lawn. Meredith has been criticized for that figure of speech. Many readers condemn it as far-fetched and artificial. But I support Meredith. If one must swim, the best place for it, in my opinion, is the lawn.