THE ALEHOUSE BY THE RIVER.
Three years after I went to learn under Mr. Davies, of Cliff Street, my
father died.
I remember with a kind of terror still, through all these years, when
death of every kind has been so familiar to me, how the news of that
death came upon me. I had no realisation of what death meant till then.
I had heard of people dying, of course; had watched the black
processions creeping, plumed and solemn, along the streets to the
churchyard; had noted how in any circle of friends now one and now
another falls away and returns to earth. I knew that all must die, that
I must die myself, as I knew a lesson got by heart which has little
meaning to the unawakened ear. But now it came on me with such a
stabbing knowledge that for a little while I was almost crazy with the
grief and the fear.
But the sorrow, like all sorrows, lessened with time. There was my
mother to cheer; there was my schooling to keep; there was the shop to
look after.
My father had thriven well enough to lay by a small store, but my mother
kept the shop on, partly for the sake of my father, whose pride it was,
partly because it gave her something to occupy her widowed life, and
partly because, as Mr. Davies pointed out to her, there would be a
business all ready for me when I was old enough to step into it. In the
meantime my life was simple enough. When I was not taking my schooling
with Lancelot I was tending the shop with mother; and when I was doing
neither of these things I was free to wander about the town much as I
pleased.
Our town was of a tidy size, running well back from the sea up a gentle
and uneven acclivity, which made all the streets that stemmed from the
border slightly steep, and some of them exceedingly so. Upon the coast
line, naturally enough, lay the busiest part of the hive; a comely
stretch of ample docks and decent wharves along the frontage of the
town, and, straggling out along the horns of the harbour, a maze of
poorer streets, fringed at the waterside with boozing-kens, low inns,
sailors' lodging-houses, and crimperies of all kinds. There were
ticklish places for decent folk to be found in lying to right and left
of the solemn old town--aye, and within ten minutes' walk of the solemn
old market-square, where the effigy of Sir William Wallet, the goodly
and godly Mayor of many years back, smiled upon the stalls of the
hucksters and the fine front of the town-hall. If you strayed but a
little way from the core of the town you came into narrow, kinkled
streets, where nets were stretched across from window to window drying;
and if you persevered you came, by cobbly declivities, to the bay shore,
and to all the odd places that lay along it, and all the odd people that
dwelt therein.
Of course, with the inevitable perversity of boyhood, it was this
degenerate quarter of the town which delighted me. I cared nothing, I am
sorry to say, for the fine-fronted town-hall, nor for the solemn effigy
of Sir William Wallet. I had not the least desire ever to be a
functionary of importance in the building, ever to earn the smug
immortality of such a statue. I am sorry to say the places I cared for
were those same low-lived, straggling, squalid, dangerous regions which
hung at one end of respectable little Sendennis like dirty lace upon a
demure petticoat. In the early days of my acquaintance with those
regions I must confess that I entered them with a certain degree of
fear and trembling; but after a while that feeling soon wore off, when I
found that no one wanted to do me any harm. Indeed, the dwellers in
those parts were generally too much occupied in drinking themselves
drunk and sleeping themselves sober to note an unremarkable lad like me.
As for their holiday time, they passed it so largely in quarrelling
savagely, and occasionally murderously, amongst themselves that they had
scant leisure to pay any heed to me. For the rest, these Sendennis slums
were not conspicuously evil. You will find just the same places in any
seaport town, great or little, in the kingdom. But there was one spot in
Sendennis which I do not think that it would be easy to match in any
other town, although, perhaps to say this may be but a flash of
provincial pride on my part.
A good way from the town, and yet before the river fairly widens into an
estuary, there stood a certain hostel, or inn, which it was my joy and
my sorrow to haunt. It stood by the water's edge in a kind of little
garden of its own; a dreary place, where a few sickly plants tried to
hold their own against neglect and the splashings of rinsed glasses.
There was a wooden terrace at the back of this place--the back
overlooked the river, while the front was on the by-road--and here the
habitual revellers, the haunters, whose scored crosses lent the creaking
shutters an unnatural whiteness over their weather-beaten surface, dark
with age and dirt, loved to linger of a summer evening, and ply the
noggin and fill the pipe.
There was an old fiddler, a kind of Orpheus of the slums, who would
sometimes creep in there and take his post in a corner and begin to
play, happy if the mad lads threw him halfpence, or thrust a
half-drained tankard under his tearful old nose: happy, too, if they did
not--as they often did--toss the cannikin at him out of mere lightness
of heart and drunkenness of wit. He used to play the quaintest old
tunes, odd border-side ballad airs, that seemed to go apace with blithe
country weddings and decent pastoral merry-makings of all kinds, and to
be strangely out of suits with that brotherhood of rakehells, smugglers,
and desperadoes who gambled and drank, and swore and quarrelled, while
the poor old fellow worked his catgut.
Lord, Lord, how the memory of it all comes back upon me while I write! I
have but to close my eyes, and my fancy brings me back to that alehouse
by the river, to a summer's eve with its golden shafts falling on the
dingy woodwork and lending it a pathetic glory, upon the shining space
of dwindled water in the middle of its banks of glistening mud, and
there in the corner the pinched old rogue in his ragged bodygear
scraping away at 'Barbara Allen,' or 'When first I saw thy face,' or
'The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington,' while the leering rascals in the
pilot coats and the flap-eared caps huddled together over their filthy
tables, and swigged their strong drink and thumbed their greasy cards
and swore horribly in all the lingoes of Babel.
One such summer evening surges up before me with a crimson smear across
its sunlight. There was a Low Country fellow there, waist deep in
schnapps, and a Finlander sucking strong beer like a hog. Meinheer and
the Finn came to words and blows, and I, who was sitting astride of the
railing staring, heard a shrill scream from the old man and a rattle as
he dropped his fiddle, and then a flash and a red rain of blood on the
table as my Finn fell with a knife in him, the Hollander's knife,
smartly pegged in between the left breast and the shoulder. I declare
that, even in my excitement at that first sight of blood drawn in feud,
my boyish thought was half divided between the drunken quarrel and the
poor old fiddler, all hunched together on the ground and sobbing
dry-eyed in a kind of ecstasy of fear and horror. I heard afterwards
that he had a son knifed to his death in a seaman's brawl, and never got
over it. As for the Finn, they took him home and kept it dark, and he
recovered, and may be living yet for all I know to the contrary, and a
perfect pattern to the folk in Finland.
That inn had a name, stranger I have never heard; and a sign, stranger I
have never seen; though I have wandered far and seen more than old
Ulysses in the school-book ever dreamt of. It was called the Skull and
Spectacles; and if its name was at once horrible and laughable, its sign
was more devilish still. For instead of any painted board, swinging
pleasantly on fair days and creaking lustily on foul, there stood out
over the inn door a kind of bracket, and on that bracket stood a human
skull, so parched and darkened by wind and weather that it looked more
fearful than even a _caput mortuum_ has a right to look.
On the nose of this grisly reminder of our mortality some wag--or so I
suppose, but perhaps he was a cynic--had stuck a great pair of glassless
barnacles or goggles. It was a loathly conceit, and yet it added vastly
to the favour of the inn in the minds of those wildings that haunted it.
Must I add that it did so in mine too, who should have known better? If
it had not been for the fascination of that sign, perhaps I might have
kept better company, and never done what I did do, and never written
this history.
When first I happened upon the Skull and Spectacles it attracted me at
once. Its situation, in the middle of that wilderness of mouldering
wharves, decaying gardens, and tumble-down cottages, was in itself an
invitation to the eye. Then the devilish mockery of its sign was an
allurement. It looked like some fantastical tavern in a dream, and not a
thing of real timber.
The oddness of the place tickled my adventurous palate, the
loathsomeness of the sign gripped me hardly by the heart and made my
blood run icily for an instant. Who does not recall to mind moments and
places when he seems to have stepped out of the real living world into
some grey, uncanny land of dreams, where the very air is thick and
haunted with some quality of unknown fear and unknown oppression? So it
seemed to me when I first saw the Skull and Spectacles with its
death's-head smirking welcome and the river mud oozing about its
timbers. But the place piqued me while it frightened me, and I pulled my
courage together like a coat, buttoned it metaphorically about me, and
entered.
Like many another enterprise upon which we enter with a beating heart,
the preface was infinitely more alarming than the succeeding matter.
There was no one in the bar-parlour when I entered save a sailor, who
was sleeping a drunken, stertorous sleep in a corner. From the private
parlour beyond, when I entered, a man came out, a burly seafaring man,
who asked me shortly, but not uncivilly, what I wanted. I called for a
jug of ale. He brought it to me without a word, together with a hunch of
bread, set them before me, and left me alone again, going into his
snuggery at the back, and drawing the door after him jealously.
I sat there for some little time, sipping my ale and munching my
bread--and indeed the ale was excellent; I have never tasted better--and
looking at the grimy wall, greasy with the rubbings of many heads and
shoulders, scrawled all over with sums, whose addition seemed to have
mightily perplexed the taproom arithmeticians, and defiled with
inscriptions of a foul, loose-witted, waterside lubricity that made me
blush and feel qualmish. But I found a furtive enjoyment in the odd
place, and the snoring sailor, and the low plashing of the estuary
against the decaying timbers, and the silence of solitude all around.
Presently the door was pushed open; but before anyone could come in I
was made to jump from my seat in a kind of terror, for a voice sang out
sharply just above my head and startled me prodigiously.
'Kiss me--kiss me--kiss me--kiss me!' the strange voice screamed out.
'Kiss me on the lips and eyes and throat! kiss me on the breast! kiss
me--kiss me--kiss me!'
I turned up my eyes and noted above my head what I had not seen
before--a cage swinging from the rafters, and in it a small green
parrot, with fiery eyes that glowed like blazing rubies.
It went rattling on at an amazing rate, adjuring its hearers to kiss it
on all parts of the body with a verbal frankness that was appalling, and
with a distinctness which even pricked the misty senses of the
slumberer, who peevishly turned in his sleep and stuttered out a curse
at me to keep still.
As the human voice called me back from my contemplation of that infernal
old bird my lowered eyes looked on the doorway. The door was wide open,
and a girl stood framed in the gap, gazing at me. Lord, how the blood
rushed into my face with wonder and delight, for I thought then that I
had never seen anything before so beautiful! Indeed, I think now that
of that kind of beauty she was as perfect as a woman could wish to be,
or a man could wish to have her. She smiled a little into my crimson,
spell-bound face, wished me good-morning pleasantly, gave a kind of
little whistle of recognition to the bird, who never left off screaming
and yelling his vociferous desire for kisses, and then, swinging the
door behind her, crossed the floor, and, passing into the parlour,
disappeared from my gaze.
Immediately the parrot's clamour came to a dead pause. The semi-wakened
sailor dropped into his sodden snooze again, and all was quiet. I waited
for some little time with my eyes on the parlour door, but it did not
open again; and as no one came in from outside, and I needed no more
either of drink or victual, I felt that I must needs be trudging. So I
drained my can to the black eyes of my beauty, clucked at the parrot,
who merely swung one crimson eye round as if he were taking aim and
glared ferociously, signed a farewell to the parlour door, and passed
out into the world again. The Skull and Spectacles had gained a devoted
customer.
Ah, me! I went there a world of times after that. I am afraid my poor
mother thought me a sad rogue, for I would slip away from the shop for a
whole afternoon together, on the plea of needing a walk; but my walk
always led me to that terrible inn. I soon became a familiar figure to
its ill-favoured master and his beautiful niece. The landlord of the
Skull and Spectacles had been a seaman in his youth, and told tales of
the sea to guests who paid their score. He had a cadet brother who was a
seaman still, and who drifted out of longshore knowledge for great gaps
of time, and came back again liker to mahogany than he had been before,
a thought more abundant in blasphemy, and a great deal richer in gold
pieces with the heads of every king in Christendom stamped upon them.
It was this wanderer's daughter who made the place my paradise. She was
a tall, largely made girl, of a dark favour, with eyes of black fire,
and with a warm, Spanish kind of skin, olive-toned with rich reds under,
and the whitest, wonderfullest teeth, and a bush of black hair that was
a marvel. She would let it down often enough, and it hung about her body
till it reached the back of her knees. Lord knows who her mother was. I
never knew, and she said she never knew. Her father brought her home
much as he had brought the parrot home, but I could never think other
than that she was the child of some Spanish woman he had wooed, and, it
is to be hoped, wedded, though I doubt if he were of that temper, on his
travels in the South Americas.
A very curious thing it was to watch that girl go in and out among the
scoundrelly patrons of the Skull and Spectacles, listening to their
devil's chatter in all the lingoes of earth, and yet in a kind of
fashion keeping them at a distance. She would bandy jokes with them of
the coarsest kind, and yet there was not a man of all the following who
would dare to lay a rude hand on her or even to force a kiss from her
against her will. Every man who clinked his can at that hostelry knew
well enough that her father, when he was ashore, or her uncle, when the
other was afloat, would think nothing of knifing any man who insulted
her.
I need hardly say that my association with the Skull and Spectacles
greatly increased in me my longing for the adventurous life. The men who
frequented the inn had one and all the most marvellous tales to tell.
Their tales were not always commendable; they were tales of pirates, of
buccaneers, of fortunes made in evil wise and spent in evil fashion. But
it was not so much the particulars as the generalities of their talk
that delighted me. I loved to hear of islands where the cocoa trees
grew, and where parrots of every hue under heaven squealed and screamed
in the tropic heat; where girls as graceful as goddesses and as yellow
as guineas wore robes of flaming feathers and sang lullabies in soft,
impossible tongues; lands of coral and ivory and all the glories of the
earth, where life was full of golden possibilities and a world away from
the drab respectability of a mercer's life in grey Sendennis.
I grew hungrier and thirstier for travel day after day. I had heard of
seamen in a shipwrecked craft suffering agonies of thirst and being
taunted by the fields of water all about them, to drink of which was
madness and death. I felt somewhat as if I were in like case, for there
I lived always in the neighbourhood, always in the companionship of the
sea and of seafaring folk, and yet I was doomed to dwell at home and
dance attendance upon the tinkling of the shop bell. But my word was my
word all the same, and my love for my mother, I am glad to think, was
greater after all than my longing to see far lands.