Tony took off his boots and stockings, and wrung out the ends of his
trousers upon the hearth-rug. He pattered to the oven; opened the door;
sniffed.
"Her's got summat for my tay, I can see. What is it, Missis? Fetch it
out----quick, sharp! Mackerel! Won' 'ee hae one, sir? Ther's plenty
here."
Whilst Mrs Widger was helping him to the rest of his food, he ate the
mackerel with his fingers. Finally, he soaked up the vinegar with
bread, licked his finger-tips and turned towards me. "Yu'm in the
courting chair, sir. That's where me an' Missis used to sit when we was
courting, en' it, Annie? Du 'ee see how we've a-broke the arm? When yu
gets a young lady, us'll lend 'ee thic chair. Didn' know as I'd got a
little wife like thees yer, did 'ee? Ay, Annie!"
He turned round and chucked her under the chin.
"G'out, you dirty cat!" cried Mrs Widger, flinging herself back in the
chair--yet not displeased.
It was a pretty playful sight, although Mrs Widger's voice is rather
like a newspaper boy's when she raises it.
2
This morning, when I arrived downstairs, the kitchen was all of a
caddle. Children were bolting their breakfast, seated and afoot; were
washing themselves and being washed; were getting ready and being got
ready for school. Mrs Widger looked up from stitching the seat of a
small boy's breeches _in situ_. "I've a-laid your breakfast in the
front room."
Thither I went with a book and no uncertain feeling of disappointment.
[Sidenote: _BREAKFAST IN THE PARLOUR_]
The front room looks out upon Alexandra Square. It is, at once,
parlour, lumber room, sail and rope store, portrait gallery of
relatives and ships, and larder. It is a veritable museum of the
household treasures not in constant use, and represents pretty
accurately, I imagine, the extent to which Mrs Widger's house-pride is
able to indulge itself. But I have had enough at Salisbury of eating my
meals among best furniture and in the (printed) company of great minds.
The noise in the kitchen sounded jolly. Now or never, I thought. So
after breakfast, I returned to the kitchen and asked for what bad
behaviour I was banished to the front room.
"Lor'! If yu don't mind this. On'y 'tis all up an' down here...."
3
I went yesterday to see my old landlady at Egremont Villas. She asked
me where I was lodging.
"At Tony Widger's, in Alexandra Square."
"Why, that's in Under Town."
"Yes, in Under Town."
"Oh, law! I can't think how you can live in such a horrid place!"
On my assuring her that it was not so very horrid, she rearranged her
silken skirts on the chair (a chair too ornamentally slight for her
weight) and tilted up her nose. "I must get and lay the table," she
said, "for a lady and gentleman that's staying with me. _Very_ nice
people."
[Sidenote: _ALEXANDRA SQUARE_]
Under Town has, in fact, an indifferent reputation among the elect. Not
that it is badly behaved; far from it. The shallow-pated resent its not
having drawn into line with their cheap notions of progress. If Under
Town had put plate-glass windows into antique buildings.... Visitors to
Seacombe, not being told, hardly so much as suspect the existence of
its huddled old houses and thatched cottages. The shingle-paved Gut
runs down unevenly from the Shore Road between a row of tall lodging
houses and the Alexandra Hotel, then opens out suddenly into a little
square which contains an incredible number of recesses and sub-corners,
so to speak, with many more doors in them than one can discover houses
belonging to the doors. Two cottages, I am told, have no ground floors
at all. Cats sun themselves on walls or squat about gnawing fish bones.
A houdan cockerel with bedraggled speckly plumage and a ragged crest
hanging over one eye struts from doorstep to doorstep. The children,
when any one strange walks through the Square, run like rabbits in a
warren to their respective doors; stand there, and stare. Tony Widger's
house is the largest. Once, when Under Town was Seacombe, a lawyer
lived here--hence the front passage. It has a cat-trodden front garden,
in which only wall-flowers and some box edging have survived. Over the
front door is a broken trellis-work porch. Masts and spars lean against
the wall. The house is built of red brick, straight up and down like an
overgrown doll's house, but the whole of the wall is weathered and
toned by the southerly gales which blow down the Gut from the open sea.
Those same winds see to it that Alexandra Square does not smell
squalid, however it may look. At its worst it is not so depressing as a
row of discreet semi-detached villas. It is, I should imagine, a pretty
accurate mirror of the lives that are lived in it--poor men's lives
that scarcely anybody fathoms. If one looks for a moment at a house
where people have starved, or are starving.... What a gift of hope they
must possess--and what a sinking in their poor insides!
4
This morning they told me how my little hunchbacked Commodore died. He
had been ailing, they said; had come to look paler and more pinched in
his small sharp face. Then (it was a fisherman who told me this): "He
was in to house one morning, an' I thought as 'e were sleepin', an' I
said, 'Harry, will 'ee hae a cup o' tay; yu been sleeping an't 'ee?'
An' 'e says, 'No, I an't; but I been sort o' dreaming.' An' 'e said as
he'd see'd a green valley wi' a stream o' water, like, running down the
middle o' it, an' 'e thought as 'e see'd Granfer there (that us losted
jest before 'en) walking by the stream. A'terwards 'e sat on 's
mother's lap, like 's if 'e wer a child again, though 'e wer nearly
nineteen all but in size; an' 'e jest took an' died there, suddent an'
quiet like; went away wi'out a word; an' us buried 'en last January up
to the cementry on land."
So the _Moondaisy_'s luckiest fisherman packed up and went.
5
It is astonishing how hungry and merry these children are, especially
the boys. They rush into the kitchen at meal times and immediately make
grabs at whatever they most fancy on the table.
[Sidenote: _MAN AND GEN'LEMAN_]
"Yu little cat!" says their mother, always as if she had never
witnessed such behaviour before. "Yu daring rascal! Put down! I'll gie
thee such a one in a minute. Go an' sit down to once." Then they climb
into chairs, wave their grubby hands over the plates, in a pretence of
grabbing something more, and spite of the whacks which sometimes fall,
they gobble their food to the accompaniment of incessant tricks and
roars of shrill laughter. Never were such disorderly, hilarious meals!
If Tony is here they simply laugh at his threats of weird punishment,
and if he comes in late from sea, they return again with him and make a
second meal as big as the first. Sometimes, unless the food is cleared
away quickly, they will clamour for a third meal, and clamour
successfully. What digestions they must have to gobble so much and so
fast!
To judge by their way of talking, they divide the world into folk and
gentlefolk. "Who gie'd thee thic ha'penny?" Mrs Widger asked Jimmy.
"A man, to beach."
"G'out!" said Mabel. "Twas a gen'leman."
"Well...."
"Well, that ain't a _man_!"
Usually, at breakfast time, the voices of Tony's small nieces may be
heard coming down the passage: "Aun-tieAnn-ie! Aunt-ieAnn-ie!" Their
tousled, tow-coloured little heads peep round the doorway. If we have
not yet finished eating, they are promptly ordered to 'get 'long home
to mother.' Otherwise, they come right in and remain standing in the
middle of the room, apparently to view me. Unable to remember which is
Dora and which Dolly, I have nicknamed them according to their hair,
Straighty and Curley. What they think of things, there is no knowing;
for they blush at direct questions and turn their heads away. So also,
when I have been going in and out of the Square, they have stopped
their play to gaze at me, but have merely smiled shyly, if at all, in
answer to my greetings. Yesterday, however, they had a skipping rope. I
jumped over it. Instantly there was a chorus of laughter and chatter.
The ice was broken. This morning, after a moment or two's consideration
behind her veil of unbrushed hair, Straighty came and clambered upon
the arm of the courting chair--dabbed a clammy little hand down my
neck, whilst Curley plumped her fist on my knee and stayed looking into
my face with very wondering smiling blue eyes. By the simple act of
jumping a rope, I had gained their confidence; had proved I was really
a fellow creature, I suppose. Now, when I pass through the Square, some
small boy is sure to call out, "Where yu going?" And my name is
brandished about among the children as if I were a pet animal. They
have appropriated me. They have tamed that mysterious wild beast, 'the
gen'leman.'
One boy, Jimmy--a very fair-headed, blue-eyed, chubby little chap,
seven years old--Tony's eldest boy at home--seems to have taken a
particular fancy to me. Whether it began with bananas, or with my
giving him a pick-a-back to the top of the cliffs, I hardly know. At
all events he has decided that I am a desirable friend. He has shown me
his small properties--his pencil, and his boats that he makes out of a
piece of wood with wing-feathers for sails and a piece of tin, stuck
into the bottom, for centre-keel;--has told me what standard he is in
at school; and one of the first things I hear whenever he comes into
the house, is: "Mam! Wher's Mister Ronals?"
[Sidenote: _JIMMY OUT TO TEA_]
To-day, on my way to the Tuckers' to tea, I passed Jimmy's school. The
boys were just let loose. Jimmy left a yelling group of them to come
along with me. Nearby the Tuckers' gate, I told him where I was going,
and said _Good-bye_. Jimmy fell behind. But whilst we were at tea, I
repeatedly saw a white head sneaking round the laurels outside the
window, and blue eyes peeping. Miss Tucker had him in; whereupon,
rather shyly, with hands horribly grubby from the school slates, Jimmy
ate much bread and butter and many cakelets, and ended up by tucking
three apples into his blouse. He came home very pleased indeed with
himself.
Tony was almost angry. "However come'd 'ee, Missis, to let 'em go out
to a gen'leman's to tay in thic mess?"
"Stupid! How cude I help o'it?"
"What did 'ee think o'it, Jimmy?"
"The lady gie'd I dree apples!"
Tony, though shocked, was also pleased; Jimmy delighted. Every now and
then he draws himself up with a "Coo'h! I been out to tay wi' Mister
Ronals!"
They have a strange way, these children, of placing their hands on one,
smiling up into one's face, and saying nothing. It has the effect of
making one feel their separate, distinct personalities, and,
additionally, of making one feel rather proud of the approbation of
those small personages who think so much and divulge so little.
6
There has been no fishing. Either the sea has been too rough to ride to
a slingstone[1] for blinn and conger, or else too calm, so that the
mackerel hookers[2] could not sail out and therefore no fresh bait was
to be had. It is quite useless to fish for conger with stale bait. Tony
tells me that I ought to be here in a month's time, when he will have
fewer pleasure parties to attend to, and will go out for mackerel,
rowing if he cannot sail. He says there will _have_ to be a good
September hooking season, because, though the summer has been fair, the
fisherfolk have not succeeded in putting by enough money to last out
the winter, should the herrings fail to come into the bay, as they have
failed the last few years. I should like to _work_ at the mackerel
hooking with him. Indeed, although I am looking forward to a glorious
tramp across Dartmoor, yet I am more than half sorry that I have a room
bespoken at Prince Town for the day after to-morrow.
[1] A heavy stone used instead of an anchor over rocks, among
which an anchor might get stuck and lost.
[2] After the end of July, the mackerel are mostly caught not in
nets, but by trailing a line behind a sailing boat.
[Sidenote: _AN INOPPORTUNE REMARK_]
Putting aside one or two things that are unpleasant--a few
disagreeables resolutely faced--it is wonderful how rapidly one feels
at home here. The welcome, the goodfellowship, is so satisfying. This
morning, the visitor from the hotel, who has Mrs Widger's front
room, so far presumed on the fact that we were educated men among
uneducated--both gen'lemen, Tony would say--as to remark flippantly
though not ungenially, "The Widgers are not bad sorts, are they? I
say, what a mouth Mrs Widger's got!"
Mrs Widger has a noticeably wide mouth; I know that perfectly well; but
I can hardly say how indignant I felt at his light remark; how
insulted; as if he had spoken slightingly of someone belonging to me.