IN the Autumn-time of the year, when the great metropolis is so much
hotter, so much noisier, so much more dusty or so much more water-carted,
so much more crowded, so much more disturbing and distracting in all
respects, than it usually is, a quiet sea-beach becomes indeed a blessed
spot. Half awake and half asleep, this idle morning in our sunny window
on the edge of a chalk-cliff in the old-fashioned watering-place to which
we are a faithful resorter, we feel a lazy inclination to sketch its
picture.
The place seems to respond. Sky, sea, beach, and village, lie as still
before us as if they were sitting for the picture. It is dead low-water.
A ripple plays among the ripening corn upon the cliff, as if it were
faintly trying from recollection to imitate the sea; and the world of
butterflies hovering over the crop of radish-seed are as restless in
their little way as the gulls are in their larger manner when the wind
blows. But the ocean lies winking in the sunlight like a drowsy lion—its
glassy waters scarcely curve upon the shore—the fishing-boats in the tiny
harbour are all stranded in the mud—our two colliers (our watering-place
has a maritime trade employing that amount of shipping) have not an inch
of water within a quarter of a mile of them, and turn, exhausted, on
their sides, like faint fish of an antediluvian species. Rusty cables
and chains, ropes and rings, undermost parts of posts and piles and
confused timber-defences against the waves, lie strewn about, in a brown
litter of tangled sea-weed and fallen cliff which looks as if a family of
giants had been making tea here for ages, and had observed an untidy
custom of throwing their tea-leaves on the shore.
In truth, our watering-place itself has been left somewhat high and dry
by the tide of years. Concerned as we are for its honour, we must
reluctantly admit that the time when this pretty little semicircular
sweep of houses, tapering off at the end of the wooden pier into a point
in the sea, was a gay place, and when the lighthouse overlooking it shone
at daybreak on company dispersing from public balls, is but dimly
traditional now. There is a bleak chamber in our watering-place which is
yet called the Assembly ‘Rooms,’ and understood to be available on hire
for balls or concerts; and, some few seasons since, an ancient little
gentleman came down and stayed at the hotel, who said that he had danced
there, in bygone ages, with the Honourable Miss Peepy, well known to have
been the Beauty of her day and the cruel occasion of innumerable duels.
But he was so old and shrivelled, and so very rheumatic in the legs, that
it demanded more imagination than our watering-place can usually muster,
to believe him; therefore, except the Master of the ‘Rooms’ (who to this
hour wears knee-breeches, and who confirmed the statement with tears in
his eyes), nobody did believe in the little lame old gentleman, or even
in the Honourable Miss Peepy, long deceased.
As to subscription balls in the Assembly Rooms of our watering-place now,
red-hot cannon balls are less improbable. Sometimes, a misguided
wanderer of a Ventriloquist, or an Infant Phenomenon, or a juggler, or
somebody with an Orrery that is several stars behind the time, takes the
place for a night, and issues bills with the name of his last town lined
out, and the name of ours ignominiously written in, but you may be sure
this never happens twice to the same unfortunate person. On such
occasions the discoloured old Billiard Table that is seldom played at
(unless the ghost of the Honourable Miss Peepy plays at pool with other
ghosts) is pushed into a corner, and benches are solemnly constituted
into front seats, back seats, and reserved seats—which are much the same
after you have paid—and a few dull candles are lighted—wind
permitting—and the performer and the scanty audience play out a short
match which shall make the other most low-spirited—which is usually a
drawn game. After that, the performer instantly departs with maledictory
expressions, and is never heard of more.
But the most wonderful feature of our Assembly Rooms, is, that an annual
sale of ‘Fancy and other China,’ is announced here with mysterious
constancy and perseverance. Where the china comes from, where it goes
to, why it is annually put up to auction when nobody ever thinks of
bidding for it, how it comes to pass that it is always the same china,
whether it would not have been cheaper, with the sea at hand, to have
thrown it away, say in eighteen hundred and thirty, are standing enigmas.
Every year the bills come out, every year the Master of the Rooms gets
into a little pulpit on a table, and offers it for sale, every year
nobody buys it, every year it is put away somewhere till next year, when
it appears again as if the whole thing were a new idea. We have a faint
remembrance of an unearthly collection of clocks, purporting to be the
work of Parisian and Genevese artists—chiefly bilious-faced clocks,
supported on sickly white crutches, with their pendulums dangling like
lame legs—to which a similar course of events occurred for several years,
until they seemed to lapse away, of mere imbecility.
Attached to our Assembly Rooms is a library. There is a wheel of fortune
in it, but it is rusty and dusty, and never turns. A large doll, with
moveable eyes, was put up to be raffled for, by five-and-twenty members
at two shillings, seven years ago this autumn, and the list is not full
yet. We are rather sanguine, now, that the raffle will come off next
year. We think so, because we only want nine members, and should only
want eight, but for number two having grown up since her name was
entered, and withdrawn it when she was married. Down the street, there
is a toy-ship of considerable burden, in the same condition. Two of the
boys who were entered for that raffle have gone to India in real ships,
since; and one was shot, and died in the arms of his sister’s lover, by
whom he sent his last words home.
This is the library for the Minerva Press. If you want that kind of
reading, come to our watering-place. The leaves of the romances, reduced
to a condition very like curl-paper, are thickly studded with notes in
pencil: sometimes complimentary, sometimes jocose. Some of these
commentators, like commentators in a more extensive way, quarrel with one
another. One young gentleman who sarcastically writes ‘O!!!’ after every
sentimental passage, is pursued through his literary career by another,
who writes ‘Insulting Beast!’ Miss Julia Mills has read the whole
collection of these books. She has left marginal notes on the pages, as
‘Is not this truly touching? J. M.’ ‘How thrilling! J. M.’ ‘Entranced
here by the Magician’s potent spell. J. M.’ She has also italicised her
favourite traits in the description of the hero, as ‘his hair, which was
_dark_ and _wavy_, clustered in _rich profusion_ around a _marble brow_,
whose lofty paleness bespoke the intellect within.’ It reminds her of
another hero. She adds, ‘How like B. L. Can this be mere coincidence?
J. M.’
You would hardly guess which is the main street of our watering-place,
but you may know it by its being always stopped up with donkey-chaises.
Whenever you come here, and see harnessed donkeys eating clover out of
barrows drawn completely across a narrow thoroughfare, you may be quite
sure you are in our High Street. Our Police you may know by his uniform,
likewise by his never on any account interfering with anybody—especially
the tramps and vagabonds. In our fancy shops we have a capital
collection of damaged goods, among which the flies of countless summers
‘have been roaming.’ We are great in obsolete seals, and in faded
pin-cushions, and in rickety camp-stools, and in exploded cutlery, and in
miniature vessels, and in stunted little telescopes, and in objects made
of shells that pretend not to be shells. Diminutive spades, barrows, and
baskets, are our principal articles of commerce; but even they don’t look
quite new somehow. They always seem to have been offered and refused
somewhere else, before they came down to our watering-place.
Yet, it must not be supposed that our watering-place is an empty place,
deserted by all visitors except a few staunch persons of approved
fidelity. On the contrary, the chances are that if you came down here in
August or September, you wouldn’t find a house to lay your head in. As
to finding either house or lodging of which you could reduce the terms,
you could scarcely engage in a more hopeless pursuit. For all this, you
are to observe that every season is the worst season ever known, and that
the householding population of our watering-place are ruined regularly
every autumn. They are like the farmers, in regard that it is surprising
how much ruin they will bear. We have an excellent hotel—capital baths,
warm, cold, and shower—first-rate bathing-machines—and as good butchers,
bakers, and grocers, as heart could desire. They all do business, it is
to be presumed, from motives of philanthropy—but it is quite certain that
they are all being ruined. Their interest in strangers, and their
politeness under ruin, bespeak their amiable nature. You would say so,
if you only saw the baker helping a new comer to find suitable
apartments.
So far from being at a discount as to company, we are in fact what would
be popularly called rather a nobby place. Some tip-top ‘Nobbs’ come down
occasionally—even Dukes and Duchesses. We have known such carriages to
blaze among the donkey-chaises, as made beholders wink. Attendant on
these equipages come resplendent creatures in plush and powder, who are
sure to be stricken disgusted with the indifferent accommodation of our
watering-place, and who, of an evening (particularly when it rains), may
be seen very much out of drawing, in rooms far too small for their fine
figures, looking discontentedly out of little back windows into
bye-streets. The lords and ladies get on well enough and quite
good-humouredly: but if you want to see the gorgeous phenomena who wait
upon them at a perfect non-plus, you should come and look at the
resplendent creatures with little back parlours for servants’ halls, and
turn-up bedsteads to sleep in, at our watering-place. You have no idea
how they take it to heart.
We have a pier—a queer old wooden pier, fortunately without the slightest
pretensions to architecture, and very picturesque in consequence. Boats
are hauled up upon it, ropes are coiled all over it; lobster-pots, nets,
masts, oars, spars, sails, ballast, and rickety capstans, make a perfect
labyrinth of it. For ever hovering about this pier, with their hands in
their pockets, or leaning over the rough bulwark it opposes to the sea,
gazing through telescopes which they carry about in the same profound
receptacles, are the Boatmen of our watering-place. Looking at them, you
would say that surely these must be the laziest boatmen in the world.
They lounge about, in obstinate and inflexible pantaloons that are
apparently made of wood, the whole season through. Whether talking
together about the shipping in the Channel, or gruffly unbending over
mugs of beer at the public-house, you would consider them the slowest of
men. The chances are a thousand to one that you might stay here for ten
seasons, and never see a boatman in a hurry. A certain expression about
his loose hands, when they are not in his pockets, as if he were carrying
a considerable lump of iron in each, without any inconvenience, suggests
strength, but he never seems to use it. He has the appearance of
perpetually strolling—running is too inappropriate a word to be thought
of—to seed. The only subject on which he seems to feel any approach to
enthusiasm, is pitch. He pitches everything he can lay hold of,—the
pier, the palings, his boat, his house,—when there is nothing else left
he turns to and even pitches his hat, or his rough-weather clothing. Do
not judge him by deceitful appearances. These are among the bravest and
most skilful mariners that exist. Let a gale arise and swell into a
storm, let a sea run that might appal the stoutest heart that ever beat,
let the Light-boat on these dangerous sands throw up a rocket in the
night, or let them hear through the angry roar the signal-guns of a ship
in distress, and these men spring up into activity so dauntless, so
valiant, and heroic, that the world cannot surpass it. Cavillers may
object that they chiefly live upon the salvage of valuable cargoes. So
they do, and God knows it is no great living that they get out of the
deadly risks they run. But put that hope of gain aside. Let these rough
fellows be asked, in any storm, who volunteers for the life-boat to save
some perishing souls, as poor and empty-handed as themselves, whose lives
the perfection of human reason does not rate at the value of a farthing
each; and that boat will be manned, as surely and as cheerfully, as if a
thousand pounds were told down on the weather-beaten pier. For this, and
for the recollection of their comrades whom we have known, whom the
raging sea has engulfed before their children’s eyes in such brave
efforts, whom the secret sand has buried, we hold the boatmen of our
watering-place in our love and honour, and are tender of the fame they
well deserve.
So many children are brought down to our watering-place that, when they
are not out of doors, as they usually are in fine weather, it is
wonderful where they are put: the whole village seeming much too small to
hold them under cover. In the afternoons, you see no end of salt and
sandy little boots drying on upper window-sills. At bathing-time in the
morning, the little bay re-echoes with every shrill variety of shriek and
splash—after which, if the weather be at all fresh, the sands teem with
small blue mottled legs. The sands are the children’s great resort.
They cluster there, like ants: so busy burying their particular friends,
and making castles with infinite labour which the next tide overthrows,
that it is curious to consider how their play, to the music of the sea,
foreshadows the realities of their after lives.
It is curious, too, to observe a natural ease of approach that there
seems to be between the children and the boatmen. They mutually make
acquaintance, and take individual likings, without any help. You will
come upon one of those slow heavy fellows sitting down patiently mending
a little ship for a mite of a boy, whom he could crush to death by
throwing his lightest pair of trousers on him. You will be sensible of
the oddest contrast between the smooth little creature, and the rough man
who seems to be carved out of hard-grained wood—between the delicate hand
expectantly held out, and the immense thumb and finger that can hardly
feel the rigging of thread they mend—between the small voice and the
gruff growl—and yet there is a natural propriety in the companionship:
always to be noted in confidence between a child and a person who has any
merit of reality and genuineness: which is admirably pleasant.
We have a preventive station at our watering-place, and much the same
thing may be observed—in a lesser degree, because of their official
character—of the coast blockade; a steady, trusty, well-conditioned,
well-conducted set of men, with no misgiving about looking you full in
the face, and with a quiet thorough-going way of passing along to their
duty at night, carrying huge sou’-wester clothing in reserve, that is
fraught with all good prepossession. They are handy fellows—neat about
their houses—industrious at gardening—would get on with their wives, one
thinks, in a desert island—and people it, too, soon.
As to the naval officer of the station, with his hearty fresh face, and
his blue eye that has pierced all kinds of weather, it warms our hearts
when he comes into church on a Sunday, with that bright mixture of blue
coat, buff waistcoat, black neck-kerchief, and gold epaulette, that is
associated in the minds of all Englishmen with brave, unpretending,
cordial, national service. We like to look at him in his Sunday state;
and if we were First Lord (really possessing the indispensable
qualification for the office of knowing nothing whatever about the sea),
we would give him a ship to-morrow.
We have a church, by-the-by, of course—a hideous temple of flint, like a
great petrified haystack. Our chief clerical dignitary, who, to his
honour, has done much for education both in time and money, and has
established excellent schools, is a sound, shrewd, healthy gentleman, who
has got into little occasional difficulties with the neighbouring
farmers, but has had a pestilent trick of being right. Under a new
regulation, he has yielded the church of our watering-place to another
clergyman. Upon the whole we get on in church well. We are a little
bilious sometimes, about these days of fraternisation, and about nations
arriving at a new and more unprejudiced knowledge of each other (which
our Christianity don’t quite approve), but it soon goes off, and then we
get on very well.
There are two dissenting chapels, besides, in our small watering-place;
being in about the proportion of a hundred and twenty guns to a yacht.
But the dissension that has torn us lately, has not been a religious one.
It has arisen on the novel question of Gas. Our watering-place has been
convulsed by the agitation, Gas or No Gas. It was never reasoned why No
Gas, but there was a great No Gas party. Broadsides were printed and
stuck about—a startling circumstance in our watering-place. The No Gas
party rested content with chalking ‘No Gas!’ and ‘Down with Gas!’ and
other such angry war-whoops, on the few back gates and scraps of wall
which the limits of our watering-place afford; but the Gas party printed
and posted bills, wherein they took the high ground of proclaiming
against the No Gas party, that it was said Let there be light and there
was light; and that not to have light (that is gas-light) in our
watering-place, was to contravene the great decree. Whether by these
thunderbolts or not, the No Gas party were defeated; and in this present
season we have had our handful of shops illuminated for the first time.
Such of the No Gas party, however, as have got shops, remain in
opposition and burn tallow—exhibiting in their windows the very picture
of the sulkiness that punishes itself, and a new illustration of the old
adage about cutting off your nose to be revenged on your face, in cutting
off their gas to be revenged on their business.
Other population than we have indicated, our watering-place has none.
There are a few old used-up boatmen who creep about in the sunlight with
the help of sticks, and there is a poor imbecile shoemaker who wanders
his lonely life away among the rocks, as if he were looking for his
reason—which he will never find. Sojourners in neighbouring
watering-places come occasionally in flys to stare at us, and drive away
again as if they thought us very dull; Italian boys come, Punch comes,
the Fantoccini come, the Tumblers come, the Ethiopians come; Glee-singers
come at night, and hum and vibrate (not always melodiously) under our
windows. But they all go soon, and leave us to ourselves again. We once
had a travelling Circus and Wombwell’s Menagerie at the same time. They
both know better than ever to try it again; and the Menagerie had nearly
razed us from the face of the earth in getting the elephant away—his
caravan was so large, and the watering-place so small. We have a fine
sea, wholesome for all people; profitable for the body, profitable for
the mind. The poet’s words are sometimes on its awful lips:
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand.
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
Yet it is not always so, for the speech of the sea is various, and wants
not abundant resource of cheerfulness, hope, and lusty encouragement.
And since I have been idling at the window here, the tide has risen. The
boats are dancing on the bubbling water; the colliers are afloat again;
the white-bordered waves rush in; the children
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back;
the radiant sails are gliding past the shore, and shining on the far
horizon; all the sea is sparkling, heaving, swelling up with life and
beauty, this bright morning.