This is the story of William Tyrwhitt, who went to King's Cobb for rest
and change, and, with the latter, at least, was so far accommodated
as for a time to get beyond himself and into regions foreign to his
experiences or his desires. And for this condition of his I hold myself
something responsible, inasmuch as it was my inquisitiveness was the
means of inducing him to an exploration, of which the result, with its
measure of weirdness, was for him alone. But, it seems, I was appointed
an agent of the unexplainable without my knowledge, and it was simply my
misfortune to find my first unwitting commission in the selling of a
friend.
I was for a few days, about the end of a particular July, lodged in that
little old seaboard town of Dorset that is called King's Cobb. Thither
there came to me one morning a letter from William Tyrwhitt, the
polemical journalist (a queer fish, like the cuttle, with an ink-bag for
the confusion of enemies), complaining that he was fagged and used up,
and desiring me to say that nowhere could complete rest be obtained as in
King's Cobb.
I wrote and assured him on this point. The town, I said, lay wrapped in
the hills as in blankets, its head only, winking a sleepy eye, projecting
from the top of the broad steep gully in which it was stretched at ease.
Thither few came to the droning coast; and such as did, looked up at the
High Street baking in the sun, and, thinking of Jacob's ladder, composed
them to slumber upon the sand and left the climbing to the angels. Here,
I said, the air and the sea were so still that one could hear the oysters
snoring in their beds; and the little frizzle of surf on the beach was
like to the sound to dreaming ears of bacon frying in the kitchens of the
blest.
William Tyrwhitt came, and I met him at the station, six or seven miles
away. He was all strained and springless, like a broken child's toy--"not
like that William who, with lance in rest, shot through the lists in
Fleet Street." A disputative galley-puller could have triumphed over
him morally; a child physically.
The drive in the inn brake, by undulating roads and scented valleys,
shamed his cheek to a little flush of self-assertion.
"I will sleep under the vines," he said, "and the grapes shall drop into
my mouth."
"Beware," I answered, "lest in King's Cobb your repose should be
everlasting. The air of that hamlet has matured like old port in the bin
of its hills, till to drink of it is to swoon."
We alighted at the crown of the High Street, purposing to descend on
foot the remaining distance to the shore.
"Behold," I exclaimed, "how the gulls float in the shimmer, like ashes
tossed aloft by the white draught of a fire! Behold these ancient
buildings nodding to the everlasting lullaby of the bay waters! The
cliffs are black with the heat apoplexy; the lobster is drawn scarlet to
the surface. You shall be like an addled egg put into an incubator."
"So," he said, "I shall rest and not hatch. The very thought is like
sweet oil on a burn."
He stayed with me a week, and his body waxed wondrous round and rosy,
while his eye acquired a foolish and vacant expression. So it was with
me. We rolled together, by shore and by road of this sluggard place, like
spent billiard balls; and if by chance we cannoned, we swerved sleepily
apart, until, perhaps, one would fall into a pocket of the sand, and the
other bring up against a cushion of sea-wall.
Yet, for all its enervating atmosphere, King's Cobb has its fine
traditions of a sturdy independence, and a slashing history withal; and
its aspect is as picturesque as that of an opera bouffe fishing-harbour.
Then, too, its High Street, as well as its meandering rivulets of low
streets, is rich in buildings, venerable and antique.
We took an irresponsible, smiling pleasure in noting these
advantages--particularly after lunch; and sometimes, where an old
house was empty, we would go over it, and stare at beams and
chimneypieces and hear the haunted tale of its fortunes, with a faint
half-memory in our breasts of that one-time bugbear we had known as
"copy." But though more than once a flaccid instinct would move us to
have out our pencils, we would only end by bunging our foolish mouths
with them, as if they were cigarettes, and then vaguely wondering
at them for that, being pencils, they would not draw.
By then we were so sinewless and demoralized that we could hear in the
distant strains of the European Concert nothing but an orchestra of
sweet sounds, and would have given ourselves away in any situation with a
pound of tea. Therefore, perhaps, it was well for us that, a peremptory
summons to town reaching me after seven days of comradeship with William,
I must make shift to collect my faculties with my effects, and return to
the more bracing climate of Fleet Street.
And here, you will note, begins the story of William Tyrwhitt, who would
linger yet a few days in that hanging garden of the south coast, and who
would pull himself together and collect matter for "copy."
He found a very good subject that first evening of his solitude.
I was to leave in the afternoon, and the morning we spent in aimlessly
rambling about the town. Towards mid-day, a slight shower drove us to
shelter under the green verandah of a house, standing up from the lower
fall of the High Street, that we had often observed in our wanderings.
This house--or rather houses, for it was a block of two--was very tall
and odd-looking, being all built of clean squares of a whitish granite;
and the double porch in the middle base--led up to by side-going steps
behind thin iron railings--roofed with green-painted zinc. In some of the
windows were jalousies, but the general aspect of the exterior was gaunt
and rigid; and the whole block bore a dismal, deserted look, as if it had
not been lived in for years.
Now we had taken refuge in the porch of that half that lay uppermost on
the slope; and here we noticed that, at a late date, the building was
seemingly in process of repair, painters' pots and brushes lying on a
window-sill, and a pair of steps showing within through the glass.
"They have gone to dinner," said I. "Supposing we seize the opportunity
to explore?"
We pushed at the door; it yielded. We entered, shut ourselves in, and
paused to the sound of our own footsteps echoing and laughing from
corners and high places. On the ground floor were two or three good-sized
rooms with modern grates, but cornices, chimney-pieces, embrasures finely
Jacobean. There were innumerable under-stair and over-head cupboards,
too, and pantries, and closets, and passages going off darkly into the
unknown.
We clomb the stairway--to the first floor--to the second. Here was all
pure Jacobean; but the walls were crumbling, the paper peeling, the
windows dim and foul with dirt.
I have never known a place with such echoes. They shook from a footstep
like nuts rattling out of a bag; a mouse behind the skirting led a whole
camp-following of them; to ask a question was, as in that other House, to
awaken the derisive shouts of an Opposition. Yet, in the intervals of
silence, there fell a deadliness of quiet that was quite appalling by
force of contrast.
"Let us go down," I said. "I am feeling creepy."
"Pooh!" said William Tyrwhitt; "I could take up my abode here with a
feather bed."
We descended, nevertheless. Arrived at the ground floor, "I am going to
the back," said William.
I followed him--a little reluctantly, I confess. Gloom and shadow had
fallen upon the town, and this old deserted hulk of an abode was ghostly
to a degree. There was no film of dust on its every shelf or sill that
did not seem to me to bear the impress of some phantom finger feeling its
way along. A glint of stealthy eyes would look from dark uncertain
corners; a thin evil vapour appear to rise through the cracks of the
boards from the unvisited cellars in the basement.
And here, too, we came suddenly upon an eccentricity of out-building that
wrought upon our souls with wonder. For, penetrating to the rear through
what might have been a cloak-closet or butler's pantry, we found a
supplementary wing, or rather tail of rooms, loosely knocked together, to
proceed from the back, forming a sort of skilling to the main building.
These rooms led direct into one another, and, consisting of little more
than timber and plaster, were in a woeful state of dilapidation.
Everywhere the laths grinned through torn gaps in the ceilings and walls;
everywhere the latter were blotched and mildewed with damp, and the
floor-boards rotting in their tracks. Fallen mortar, rusty tins, yellow
teeth of glass, whitened soot--all the decay and rubbish of a generation
of neglect littered the place and filled it with an acrid odour. From one
of the rooms we looked forth through a little discoloured window upon a
patch of forlorn weedy garden, where the very cats glowered in a
depression that no surfeit of mice could assuage.
We went on, our nervous feet apologetic to the grit they crunched; and,
when we were come to near the end of this dreary annexe, turned off to
the left into a short gloom of passage that led to a closed door.
Pushing this open, we found a drop of some half-dozen steps, and, going
gingerly down these, stopped with a common exclamation of surprise on our
lips.
Perhaps our wonder was justified, for we were in the stern cabin of an
ancient West Indiaman.
Some twenty feet long by twelve wide--there it all was, from the deck
transoms above, to the side lockers and great curved window, sloping
outwards to the floor and glazed with little panes in galleries, that
filled the whole end of the room. Thereout we looked, over the degraded
garden, to the lower quarters of the town--as if, indeed, we were perched
high up on waves--and even to a segment of the broad bay that swept by
them.
But the room itself! What phantasy of old sea-dog or master-mariner had
conceived it? What palsied spirit, condemned to rust in inactivity, had
found solace in this burlesque of shipcraft? To renew the past in such a
fixture, to work oneself up to the old glow of flight and action, and
then, while one stamped and rocked maniacally, to feel the refusal of so
much as a timber to respond to one's fervour of animation! It was a
grotesque picture.
Now, this cherished chamber had shared the fate of the rest. The paint
and gilding were all cracked and blistered away; much of the glass of
the stern-frame was gone or hung loose in its sashes; the elaborately
carved lockers mouldered on the walls.
These were but dummies when we came to examine them--mere slabs attached
to the brickwork, and decaying with it.
"There should be a case-bottle and rummers in one, at least," said
William Tyrwhitt.
"There are, sir, at your service," said a voice behind us.
We started and turned.
It had been such a little strained voice that it was with something
like astonishment I looked upon the speaker. Whence he had issued I could
not guess; but there he stood behind us, nodding and smiling--a squab,
thick-set old fellow with a great bald head, and, for all the hair on his
face, a tuft like a teasel sprouting from his under lip.
He was in his shirt-sleeves, without coat or vest; and I noticed that his
dirty lawn was oddly plaited in front, and that about his ample paunch
was buckled a broad belt of leather. Greased hip-boots encased his lower
limbs, and the heels of these were drawn together as he bowed.
William Tyrwhitt--a master of nervous English--muttered "Great Scott!"
under his breath.
"Permit me," said the stranger--and he held out to us a tin pannikin
(produced from Heaven knows where) that swam with fragrance.
I shook my head. William Tyrwhitt, that fated man, did otherwise. He
accepted the vessel and drained it.
"It smacks of all Castille," he said, handing it back with a sigh of
ecstasy. "Who the devil are you, sir?"
The stranger gave a little crow.
"Peregrine Iron, sir, at your service--Captain Penegrine Iron, of the
_Raven_ sloop amongst others. You are very welcome to the run of my poor
abode."
"Yours?" I murmured in confusion. "We owe you a thousand apologies."
"Not at all," he said, addressing all his courtesy to William. Me, since
my rejection of his beaker, he took pains to ignore.
"Not at all," he said. "Your intrusion was quite natural under the
circumstances. I take a pleasure in being your cicerone. This cabin (he
waved his hand pompously)--a fancy of mine, sir, a fancy of mine. The
actual material of the latest of my commands brought hither and adapted
to the exigencies of shore life. It enables me to live eternally in the
past--a most satisfying illusion. Come to-night and have a pipe and a
glass with me."