PRINCE TOWN,
_August_.
1
When I took leave of the Widgers, there was the question of payment for
my board and lodging. We were just finishing breakfast; the children
had been driven out, Mrs Widger was resting awhile, and the table, the
whole kitchen, was in extreme disorder.
I asked Mrs Widger what I owed, and, as I had expected, she replied
only: "What you'm minded to pay."
"Three and six a day," I suggested.
"Not so much as that," said Mrs Widger. "'Tisn't like as if us could du
for 'ee like a proper lodging house."
"Don' 'ee think, Missis," said Tony, "as we might ask 'en jest to make
hisself welcome."
It was out of the question, of course. The mackerel season has been so
bad. Mrs Widger shot at Tony a look he failed to see. Otherwise, she
did not let herself appear to have heard him.
The discussion hung.
"Say three shillings, then," I suggested again.
"That 'll du," returned Mrs Widger, allowing nothing of the last few
minutes' brain-work to show itself in her voice.
[Sidenote: _HOTEL LIFE_]
Mrs Widger knows what it is to have to keep house and feed several
hungry children on earnings which vary from fairly large sums (sums
whose very largeness calls for immediate spending) to nothing at all
for weeks together.
As I was setting out, Jimmy said to his mother: "Don' 'ee let Mister
Ronals go, Mam 'Idger." He followed me to the end of the Gut; would
have come farther had I not sent him back. That, and Tony's desire to
make me welcome, brightened the bright South Devon sunshine. I kept
within sight of the sea as long as possible. The little sailing boats
on it looked so nimble. I have a leaning to go back, a sort of
hunger....
2
[Sidenote: _DAWDLING v. WALKING_]
I don't think I can remain here. To-morrow I shall move on, and tramp
around the county back to Seacombe. The Moor is as splendid as ever,
but this hotel life, following so soon on the life of Under Town....
Though the good, well-cooked food, neither so greasy nor so starchy as
Mrs Widger's, is an agreeable change, I sit at the table d'hote and
rage within. I am compelled to hear a conversation that irritates me
almost beyond amusement at it. These people here are on holiday. Most
of them, by their talk, were never on anything else. They chirp in
lively or bored fashion, as the case may be, of the things that don't
matter, of the ornamentations, the superfluities and the relaxations of
life. At Tony Widger's they discuss--and much more merrily--the things
that do matter; the means of life itself. Here, they say: "Is the table
d'hote as good as it might be? Is the society what it might be? Is it
not a pity that there is no char-a-banc or a motor service to Cranmere
Pool and Yes Tor?" There, the equivalent question is: "Shall us hae
money to go through the winter? Shall us hae bread and scrape to eat?"
Here, a man wonders if in the strong moorland air some slight
non-incapacitating ailment will leave him: illness is inconvenient and
disappointing, but not ruinous. There, Tony wonders if the exposure and
continual boat-hauling are not taking too much out of him; if he is not
ageing before his time; if he will not be past earning before the
younger children are off his hands. Here, they laugh at trifles,
keeping what is serious behind a veil of conventional manners, lest,
appearing in broad daylight, it should damp their spirits. There, they
laugh too, and at countless trifles; but also courageously, in the face
of fate itself. By daring Nemesis, they partially disarm her. With a
laugh and a jest--no matter if it be a raucous laugh and a coarse
jest--they assert: "What will be, will be; us can't but du our best,
for 'tis the way o'it." Here, they skate over a Dead Sea upon the ice
of convention; but there, they swim in the salted waters, swallow great
gulps, and nevertheless strike out manfully, knowing no more than
anyone else exactly where the shore lies, yet possessing, I think, an
instinct of direction. Here, comfort is at stake: there, existence.
Coming here is like passing from a birth and death chamber into a
theatre, where, if the actors have lives of their own, apart from
mummery, it is their business not to show them. It is like watching a
game from the grand stand, instead of playing it; betting on a race
instead of running it. The transition hither is hard to make. Retired
athletes, we know, suffer from fatty degeneration of the heart; retired
men of affairs decay. I have walked lately at five miles an hour with
the Widgers, and I do not relish dawdling at the rate of two with these
people here. Better risk hell for heaven than lounge about paradise for
ever.
V
UNDER TOWN, SEACOMBE,
_September_.
1
A fine tramp from Totnes--and such a welcome back! Jimmy met me
three-quarters of a mile up the road, very much farther than he usually
strays from the beach. "I thought as yu was coming this way 'bout now,
Mister Ronals. Dad's been out hooking an' catched five dozen mackerel
before breakfast. Mam's sick. I be coming out wiv yu t'morrow morning.
Dad couldn't go out after breakfast, 'cause it come'd on to blow. I've
'schanged my pencil, what yu give'd me, for a knife wi' two blades." So
anxious was he to take me in house that he scarcely allowed me time to
go down to the Front and look at the sea and at the boats lying among a
litter of nets and gear the length of the sunny beach.
Mrs Widger hastened to bring out the familiar big enamelled teapot,
flung the cloth over the table and began to cut bread and butter.
"Coo'h! tay!" exclaimed Jimmy. "That's early, 'cause yu be come, Mister
Ronals."
"Be yu glad Mr Ronals 's come back?" his mother asked.
[Sidenote: _THE CHILDREN_]
"Iss...."
"What for?" I asked jocularly.
"'Cause yu gives us bananas--an' pennies sometimes."
"'Sthat all yu'm glad for?" said Mrs Widger. "Pennies an' bananas?"
"No vear!" said Jimmy; and he meant it.
All the while, Tommy (Jimmy's younger brother, about five years old)
was sitting up to table, looking at the jam-jar with one eye and at me
with the other. He squints most comically, and is a more self-contained
young person than Jimmy. Four of the children are at home; Bessie,
Mabel, Jimmy and Tommy; George and the eldest girl are away. Bessie and
Mabel, too, are out the greater part of the day, either at school, or
else helping their aunts, or minding babies (poor little devils!), or
running errands for the many relatives who live hereabout. Both of them
are more featureless, show less of the family likeness, than the boys.
One cannot so easily forecast their grown-up appearance. At times,
during the day, they come in house with a rush, but say little, except
to blurt out some (usually inaccurate) piece of news, or to tell their
step-mother that: "Thic Jimmy's out to baych--I see'd 'en--playin' wi'
some boys, an' he's got his boots an' stockings so wet as...."
"Jest let 'en show his face in here! _He_ shan't hae no tea! He shall
go straight to bed!" shouts Mrs Widger, confident that hunger will
eventually drive Jimmy into her clutches.
The two girls, in fact, do not seem to enter so fully as the boys into
the life of the household, though they are always very ready to take up
the responsibility of keeping the boys in order.
"Jimmy! Tommy--there! Mother, look at thic Jimmy! Mother, Tommy's
fingering they caakes!"
"I'll gie thee such a one in a minute! Let 'lone.... Ther thee a't,
Mabel, doin' jest the same, 's if a gert maid like yu didn't ought to
know better."
"Did 'ee ever hear the like o'it?" asks Tony. "Such a buzz! Shut up,
will 'ee, or _I'll_ gie thee summut to buzz for! Wher's thic stick?"
The children merely laugh at him.
2
[Sidenote: _TONY'S WEDDING_]
At supper to-night, Tony was talking about his second wedding and about
his children, who, dead and alive, number twelve. "Iss, 'tis a round
dozen, though I'd never ha' thought it," he said reckoning them up on
his fingers. "Ther be six living an' four up to the cementry, an' two
missing, like, what nobody didn' know nort about, did they, Annie?
Janie--that's my first wife, afore this one,--her losted three boys
when they was two year an' ten months old, an' one year an' seven
months, an' nine months old. An' her died herself when Mabel here was
six months old, didn' 'er, Annie? An' yu've a-losted Rosie, an' the
ones what never appeared in public. Our last baby, after Tommy, wer two
boys, twinses. One wer like George an' one like Tommy most; one wer my
child an' t'other wer yours, Annie. Six on 'em dead! Aye, Tony've a
see'd some trouble, I can tell 'ee, an' he ain't so old as what some on
'em be for their age, now, thru it all. But it du make a man's head
turn like."
Mrs Widger's gaze at him while he talked about the dead children was
wonderful to see--wide-eyed, soft, unflinching--wifely and motherly at
once.
"John," Tony continued, speaking of his youngest brother who has only
two children, "John du say as a man what's got seven or eight childern
be better off than a man what's got on'y two, like he, 'cause he don't
spend so much on 'em. 'Tis rot, I say! Certainly, he du spend so much
on each o' his as us du on two o' ours p'raps; but I reckon a hundred
pounds has to be wrenched an' hauled out o' these yer ol' rheumaticy
arms o' mine for each child as us rears up."
"Yes--'t has--gude that," said Mrs Widger.
"'Tisn' that I don' du it willingly. I be willing enough. But it du
maake a man du more'n he'd hae to du otherwise, an' it wears 'en out
afore his time. Tony's an ol' man now, almost, after the rate, though
he bain't but forty or thereabout, an' s'pose us has six or a dozen
more come along, Annie...."
"Gude Lord! 'Twon't be so bad as that, for sure. An' if 'tis, can't be
helped. Us must make shift wi' 'em."
Then they went on to talk about their wedding. Best remembered,
apparently, are the _hot_ wedding breakfast (an innovation then in
these parts), the Honiton lace that Mrs Widger's mother made her, and
the late arrival home from the village where they were married--a trick
which procured them quietness, whilst depriving the people in the
Square of an excitement they had stayed up half the night to witness.
"When us come'd home, 'twas all so dark and quiet as a dead plaace, an'
the chil'ern asleep upstairs, an' all," said Tony.
"Yes, 'twer," Mrs Widger broke in, her eyes brightening at the
recollection of the successful trick. "But 'twer queer, like, wi' the
childern asleep upstairs what wer to be mine, an' wasn't. I did wonder
to meself what I wer starting on. Howsbe-ever I wer fair maazed all
thic day. _I_ wasn' ready when Tony drove out to where us lived, not
I."
"No-o-o! Her had her sleeves tucked up like 's if her 'adn't finished
her housework. Her wern't dressed nor nothin' to ree-ceive me."
"I didn' know what I wer doing all thic day."
[Sidenote: _LOVE-PLAY_]
"An' the parson, _I_ had to pay for he, an' he give'd the money back to
she 'cause her wer a nice li'I thing--bit skinny though. 'Twer a maazed
muddle like. _I_ ought to ha' had thic money be rights."
"G'out! But I did the ol' parson up here. Us didn' hae no banns put up
to Seacombe. I told the clergyman to our home that Tony'd been livin'
there dree days, or dree weeks, or whatever 'twas, an' _he_ didn' know
no better. 'Twon't be the first lie I've told, says I to meself n'eet
[nor yet] the last. I saved thee thic money, Tony."
"Ah, yu'm a saving dear, ben' 'ee. Spends all my money."
"Well for yu! I should like to know what yu'd do wi' it if yu hadn't
had me to lay it out for 'ee."
Tony did not wish to question that. The recollection of the wedding had
put him in high spirits. He got up from his second supper (so long as
food remains on the table he takes successive meals with intervals for
conversation between them), and pirouetted round the table singing,
"Sweet Ev-eli-na, sweet Ev-eli-na!
My lo-ove for yu-u
Shall nev-ver, never die...."
He dragged Mrs Widger out of her chair, whisked her across the room.
"There!" he said, setting her down flop. "'En't her a perty li'I dear!"
Once again, after another little supper, he got up and held Mrs Widger
firmly by the chin, she kicking out at his shins the while. "Did 'ee
ever see the like o'it? Eh? Fancy ol' Tony marryin' thic! Wouldn' 'ee
like a kiss o'it? I du dearly. Don' I, Missis?"
"G'out!" says Mrs Widger, speaking furiously, but smiling affectionately.
"G'out, you fule! Yu'm mazed!"
Tony returned to his third supper quite seriously, only remarking: "I
daresay yu thinks Tony a funny ol' fule, don' 'ee?"
[Sidenote: _BIRTH IN THE SQUARE_]
That, I did not. Indeed, I begin to think them peculiarly wise. There
is the spontaneity of animals about their play, and a good deal of the
unembarassed movements of animals--with something very human
superadded. One reads often enough about the love-light in the eyes of
lovers, and sometimes one catches sight of it. Either frank ridicule,
or else great reverence, is the mood for witnessing so delicate and
strong, so racial a thing. Yet this love-light, seen in the eyes of a
man and wife who have been married ten years, and have settled down
long ago to the humdrum of married life, seems to me a far finer
manifestation of the hither mysteries, a far greater triumph. What
freshness, what perpetual rejuvenation they must possess! The more one
regards such a thing, the more magnificent and far-reaching it appears.
No philosophical bulwark against trouble can compare with it. Such love
ceases to be a matter for novels and selected moments and certain lusty
ages; ceases to be exceptional. It is the greatest of those very great
things, the commonplaces. Tony tells me that when he comes in at night,
cold from fishing, Mrs Widger always turns over to the other side of
the bed, leaving him a warm place to creep into. Mrs Widger says that
no matter what time Tony comes in or gets up, he never fails to make,
and take her up, a cup o' tay. So does their love direct the prosaic
details of living in one house together. I do not think I am wrong in
fancying that it percolates right down through the household, and even
contributes to the restfulness I feel here, spite of unorderly children
and the strident voices. "Yu dang'd ol' fule!" can mean so much. Here
it appears to be an expression of almost limitless confidence.
Mrs Widger has put me this time into the front bedroom, which overlooks
the Square and has, through the Gut, a narrow view of the sea.
Tony's sister, who lives almost next door, is giving birth to a child
this evening. I can see the light in her window--a brighter light than
usual,--and the shadows passing across the yellow blind. Many other
eyes are turned towards the window. There is a subdued chatter in the
Square.
3
Little did I foresee what sleeping in the front bedroom means. Tony's
sister gave birth to a boy about ten o'clock. On hearing that
everything was as it should be, I went to bed, but, alack! not to
sleep. For the subdued chatter grew into an uproar which continued till
fully midnight. All the women in the neighbourhood seemed to have come
this way; and they meg-megged, and they laughed, and when their
children awoke they shouted up at the windows from outside. I heard
snatches of childbearing adventures, astonishing yarns, interspersed
with hard commonsense, not to say cynicism--the cynicism of people who
cannot afford to embroider much the bare facts of existence or to turn
their attention far from the necessities of life. "Her'll be weak," one
woman said, "an' for a long time--never so strong as her was before.
'Tis always worse after each one you has, 'cepting the first, which is
worst of all, I say. But there, her must take it as it comes...."
Sundry other bits of good practical philosophy I perforce listened to;
and at last, when everybody had turned in (I imagined their pleasant
lightheadedness as they snuggled under the bedclothes in the stuffy
cottage rooms--the witticisms and echoes of laughter that were running
through their heads); when, I say, everybody had turned in, an offended
dog in the hotel yard began to howl.
If it were not that the window of the back bedroom is over the
scullery, the ash-heap and the main drain, I would ask to move back
there.
In Under Town a birth makes the stir that is due to such a stupendous
event.
4
[Sidenote: _THE KITCHEN_]
The Widger's kitchen is an extraordinary room--fit shrine for that
household symbol, the big enamelled tin teapot. At the NW. corner is
the door to the scullery and to the small walled-in garden which
contains--in order of importance--flotsam and jetsam for firewood, old
masts, spars and rudders, and some weedy, grub-eaten vegetables. At the
top of the garden is a tumble-down cat-haunted linhay, crammed to its
leaky roof with fishing gear. No doubt it is the presence everywhere of
boat and fishing gear which gives such a singular unity to the whole
place.
The kitchen is not a very light room: its low small-paned window is in
the N. wall. Then, going round the room, the courting chair stands in
the NE. corner, below some shelves laden with fancy china and
souvenirs--and tackle. The kitchener, which opens out into quite a
comforting fireplace, is let into the E. wall, and close beside it is
the provision cupboard, so situated that the cockroaches, having ample
food and warmth, shall wax fat and multiply. Next, behind a low dirty
door in the S. wall, is the coalhole, then the high dresser, and then
the door to the narrow front passage, beneath the ceiling of which are
lodged masts, spars and sails. The W. wall of the kitchen is decorated
with Tony's Oddfellow 'cistificate,' with old almanacs and with a
number of small pictures, all more or less askew.
There is an abundance of chairs, most of them with an old cushion on
the seat, all of them more or less broken by the children's racket.
Over the pictures on the warm W. wall--against which, on the other
side, the neighbour's kitchener stands--is a line of clean
underclothing, hung there to air. The dresser is littered with fishing
lines as well as with dry provisions and its proper complement of odd
pieces of china. Beneath the table and each of the larger chairs are
boots and slippers in various stages of polish or decay. Every jug not
in daily use, every pot and vase, and half the many drawers, contain
lines, copper nails, sail-thimbles and needles, spare blocks and
pulleys, rope ends and twine. But most characteristic of the kitchen
(the household teapot excepted) are the navy-blue garments and jerseys,
drying along the line and flung over chairs, together with innumerable
photographs of Tony and all his kin, the greater number of them in
seafaring rig.
Specially do I like the bluejacket photographs; magnificent men, some
of them, though one strong fellow looks more than comical, seated amid
the photographer's rustic properties with a wreath of artificial fern
leaves around him and a broadly smiling Jolly-Jack-Tar face protruding
from the foliage. Some battleships, pitching and tossing in fearful
photographers' gales[3] and one or two framed memorial cards complete
the kitchen picture gallery.
[3] Composite pictures apparently; made from a photograph of a
ship and of a bad painting of a hurricane.
It is a place of many smells which, however, form a not disagreeable
blend.
An untidy room--yes. An undignified room--no. Kitchen; scullery (the
scullery proper is cramped and its damp floor bad for the feet); eating
room; sitting room; reception room; storeroom; treasure-house; and at
times a wash-house,--it is an epitome of the household's activities and
a reflexion of the family's world-wide seafaring. Devonshire is the sea
county--at every port the Devonian dialect. It is probably the pictures
and reminders of the broad world which, by contrast, make Mrs Tony's
kitchen so very homely.
5
[Sidenote: _A DUTCH AUCTION_]
Almost every evening, just now, Mrs Widger goes off to a Dutch auction
of hardware and trinkets at the Market House. She usually brings home
some small purchase, worth about half the money she has paid; but if
she were to go to an entertainment at the Seacombe Hall she would be
not nearly so well amused as by the auctioneer and the other
housewives, and at the end of the evening she would have nothing
whatever to show for her money. Besides, the children would never go
off to bed quietly if they imagined that she was going to a real
entertainment. As she did not return very early last night, Tony and I
got our own supper--bread, cheese, a great deal of Worcester sauce, and
a pint of mother-in-law [stout and bitter] from the Alexandra. Then we
drew up to the fire and smoked. John, healthy and powerful fellow, had
been arguing in the daytime on the beach, that if a youth cannot do a
man's work at seventeen, he never will. Tony disagreed. Twenty-five to
thirty-five, he says, is a man's prime for strength and endurance
together. Nevertheless, he is sure that he often did more than a man's
work long before he was seventeen, which led him to talk about his
boyhood, when Granfer and Gran Widger had frequently not enough food in
the house for their many children to eat. "Us had to rough it when I
wer a boy, I can tell 'ee," says Tony. "'Twer often bread an' a scraape
o' fat an' _Get 'long out o'it_!"
[Sidenote: _TONY'S DUTIES_]
At nine years old, Tony was put with old Cloade, the grocer, now dead;
and by the time he was twelve, he was earning four shillings a week,
not a penny of which he ever saw or had as 'spending money'; for his
mother used to go to the shop every Saturday night and lay out all poor
Tony's wages in groceries. The only pocket-money he ever received was a
copper or two 'thrown back' from what he could earn by going to sea for
mackerel early enough to return to work by half-past six in the
morning. Besides running errands, he had to clean boots and knives and
to scrub out and tidy up the bar, which in those days was attached to
every Devon grocery. Then he could go home to breakfast. And if old
Cloade was going up on land, shooting, Tony had to get up and wake him
at half-past three and to cork bottles or something of that sort before
the master started out for his day's sport. And again, if Tony had
fallen foul of any of the shop assistants during the day, had cheeked
them perhaps, or stayed overlong at meals, then, waiting till closing
time at eight or nine in the evening, they would send him a couple of
miles inland, to the top of the hills, with a late parcel of groceries.
His possible working day was from 3.30 a.m. to 10.0 p.m.
The chief part of his work, when he was not cleaning up or running
errands, was the sorting of fruit and the cracking of sugar. Every nail
of his fingers has come off more than once on account of the damage
done them by the sugar-cracker. Better than any national event, he
recollects the introduction of cube sugar. "When they tubs o'
ready-cracked sugar fust come'd down to Seacombe, 'twer thought a gert
thing--an' so 'twas."
Nearly every year an attack of (sub-acute?) rheumatic fever gave him a
painful holiday, during which he crawled about the crowded cottage at
home on his hands and knees. The one advantage of his irregularly long
hours was that, if work were slack, he could linger over his meals. It
was the assistants who kept a sharp eye on his movements. Them he
hated--and cheeked. "The more I done, the worse they treated me. An' as
I grow'd up an' did often enough more'n a man's work, so I got to know
it. One day I stayed home more'n an hour to breakfast, an' one on 'em
asted me wer I'd a-been, an' I said as I'd had me half-hour to
breakfast, an' he said as I'd had an hour an' a half, an' I told 'en
'twern't no business o' his an' dared 'en to so much as touch me or I'd
knock his head in, which I could easily ha' done--an' there wer the
master standin' by! 'Fore I knowed, he gie'd me one under one yer wi'
one hand, an' one under t'other yer wi' t'other hand; knocked me half
silly; an' said if he had any more o' my chake he'd send me going
thereupon. 'Iss, I said, 'an I _will_ go, an' if I can't pick up a
livin' on the baych wi' fishin' (I 'adn't no boats then, n'eet for
years a'ter), an' if I couldn't pick up a livin' wi' fishin', I'd go to
sea. An' I took an' lef the shop, an' went wi'out me pay due nor nort
further about it.
"Well, I should think as I stayed away two or dree days, saying as, if
I couldn' live _by_ the sea, I'd go off _tu_ sea. By'm-by, ol' Mr
Cloade--I could al'ys get on all right wi' he hisself--'twer they
assistants.... Mr Cloade come'd down to baych an' said as he'd rise me
wages be two shillings, from four shillings to six a week. So I went
back. But 'twern't for long, for I wer turned seventeen then, an'
strong, an' I knowed that six shillin's a week, every penny o' which
mother laid out in groceries--p'raps givin' me dreepence for meself
latterly--that wern't no wage for me doing more'n a man's work, early
an' laate, at everybody's beck an' call. 'Twern't vitty.
[Sidenote: _BRUISED ORANGES AND BRUISES_]
"It come'd soon a'ter.... I wer sorting oranges, an' one o' the
assistants called like they al'ays did: 'Widger, Widger! _Widger!_
Yer, Widger!' 'Twer al'ays, 'Widger! Widger!' in thic show--blarsted
row! 'I wants 'ee to take thees yer parcel to Mr Brindley-Botton's
(what used to live to Southview House) in time for lunch. Hurry up!'"
Tony, in short, put a couple of the bruised oranges into his pocket,
ran off, and delivered his parcel at Southview House. On the way back,
he ate one of the oranges and, boyishly, threw the peel about outside
Mr Brindley-Botton's side gate. He heard someone shouting to him
and--but without turning his head--he shouted "Hell about it!" airily
back. Then, as it was the dinner hour, he loitered on the Green Patch
to play marbles with some other lads, and to share the second bruised
orange. On returning to Cloade's:
"Whu did I see but Mr Brindley-Botton's coachman wi' a little packet in
white paper. 'Twas thic orange peel, all neatly done up, an' a li'I
note saying as I'd a-been cheeky to him, which I hadn't, not knowingly.
Mr Cloade, he called me into his little office, asted me what I'd been
doing, where I went, an' where I got the oranges.
"'Bought 'em,' says I.
"'Twas a lie, an' I hadn't no need for to tell it, seeing I was al'ays
free to take a bruised orange or two when I wer sorting of 'em. On'y I
wer frightened. 'Where did you get them?' he asked.
"'Up to Mrs Ashford's for a penny,' says I.
"'Did you?'
"'Yes, sir,' says I.
"'Are you telling me a lie? I can find out, mind.'
"'No, sir,' I said.
"'Be you sure you ain't telling of a lie?'
"Then I broked down, an' I said they was bruised ones what I'd a-took.
Father, he wer working to Mr Cloade's then, fishing being bad, an' the
master called he. _He_ walloped me--walloped me with a rope's end. An'
I swore as I'd never go back no more, an' I didn't. Every time Father
tried to make me, I up an' said as I'd go to sea.
[Sidenote: _OUT DRIFTING ALL NIGHT_]
"Ay! for all I'm a man now, I 'ouldn't like to work like I did
then--more'n a man's work an' less'n a boy's pay, an' hardly a penny
for meself. I tells John _he_ don't know what 'tis to work like I did
then. _I_'ouldn't du it no more."
But, with his father's boat, Tony did work far harder--hooking mackerel
at dawn, in with a catch and out to sea again, or up on land hawking
them round; out drifting all night; crabbing, lobster-potting,
shrimping,[4] wrinkling,[5] or taking out frights,[6] wet and dry,
rough and calm, day and night. "Aye, an' I be suffering from it now.
Thees yer bellyache what thins me every summer an' wears a fellow out,
don't come from nothing but tearing about then. I wer al'ays on the
tear, day an' night, in from sea to meals an' out again 'fore I'd had
time to bolt down two mouthfuls. Often I wer so tired that Father'd hae
to call me a dozen times afore I cude wake up, an' then I'd cry, _cry_,
if I wer ten minutes laate to work--when I had summut to du on land,
that was. Half the day I wer more asleep than awake, wi' bein' out
fishing all night. But I didn' let 'em see it. Not I! Rather'n that,
I'd go up to the closet an' catch off there for five minutes, before
they shude see I wern't fit to du me work. An' I never had nort o' me
own for years, for all I done. Whether I earned two pound, or thirty
shillings, or nothing at all, I never had so much as a penny for
pocket-money, to call me own. I had to take it all in house--aye! an'
tips too, when I got 'em. Father, he wern't doing much then, an' ther
were seven younger'n me. That's where my earnings went. An' me, as did
the work, was wearing Mother's boots an' Father's jacket."
[4] Prawning.
[5] Periwinkle gathering.
[6] Freights, _i.e._ pleasure parties.
When Tony was indisputably grown up, one half of what he earned went,
according to custom, to the boat-owner, in this case his father,
frequently had be thu to pay for repairs and new gear. That went on for
years after he was married--'hauling an' rowing an' slaving an' pulling
me guts out wi't!'--until, in fact, the present Mrs Widger insisted on
his buying boats of his own.
[Sidenote: _THE DEAD NOT WHOLLY SO_]
Our talk shifted to Tony's first wife, who died (and Tony almost died
too) as the result of the landlord's taking up the drains, and leaving
them open, in the height of a hot summer. Tony told me about her people
and her native place, a fishing village along the coast. He showed me
photographs of her, and a framed, pathetically ugly, imitation cameo
memorial, which is getting very dirty now. I knew he loved her very
much. He nearly went out of his mind when she died, leaving him with
four young children. The untidy little kitchen, with its bright fire,
its deep shadows and its white clothes hung along the line; Tony's
drooping figure, bent over the hearth in an old blue guernsey: the
contrasting redness of his face, and the beam of light from a cracked
lamp-shade falling across his wet, memory-stuck blue eyes.... The
kitchen seemed full of the presence of the long-dead woman whom Tony
was still grieving for in some underpart of his mind. "Iss, her was a
nice woman," he said, "a gude wife to me; a gude wife: I hadn't no
complaint to make against she."
The one shabby sentence hit into me all his sorrow, that which remains
and that which has sunk into time.
* * * * *
The Mrs Widger that is, returned from the Dutch auction with an
elaborate badly-plated cruet. "Al'ays using up my saxpinces what I has
to slave for," said Tony.
"G'out! 'Tis jest what us wants."
"You won't never use it."
"We'll hae it out on thy birthday--there! Will that zatisfy thee?"
"Not afore then? I wer born at the end o' the year, an' that's why I
al'ays gets lef' behind."
"Not a day before thy birthday! What'll yu be saying if I buys sauces
to put in all they bottles?"
"Cut glass, is it?"
"No! What d'yu think?"
"What a woman 'tis! Gie yer Tony a kiss then."
"G'out yu fule!"
The wise fool took a kiss. We had a second supper and hot grog. We were
merry. But when I said _Good night_, I saw in Tony's eyes a recognition
that I had understood (so he felt, I think) some part of what he
seldom, if ever, brings up now to talk about.
Only a yarn about a man's first wife.... If so, why did I go to bed
feeling I had been privileged beyond the ordinary? Wives die every day;
worn out, most of them. There came into my mind's eye with these
thoughts a picture of the open sea; yet hardly a picture, for I was
there in the midst of it. On the waves and low-lying clouds, and
through the murk, was the glimmer of a light which, I felt, would make
everything plain, did it but increase. For a moment it flickered
up--and there, over the stormy sea, I saw death as a kindly illusion. I
do not understand the wherefore of my little vision, nor why it made my
heart give one curious great thump....
A cats' courtship beneath my window broke it off.
6
[Sidenote: _THE "MOONDAISY"_]
Five or six years ago, when I was ill and left Seacombe, as I thought,
for good, I did not relish selling the _Moondaisy_. I was too fond
of her. So I gave her to the two men who had asked for the first and
second refusals of her, and neither of whom possessed a small sailing
boat. But I reckoned without those superficial beach jealousies which
overlie the essential solidarity of the fishermen. Neither man used her
much. Neither man looked after her. She was a bone of contention that
each feared to gnaw. While the poor little craft lay on the beach, or
in the gutter above the sea-wall, the mice ate holes into her old sail
and her gear was distributed half-way over Under Town.
Granfer, however, had in his cottage an old dinghy sail that fits the
_Moondaisy_. Her yard and boom were in his linhay, the sheet and
downhaul in Tony's. One oar, the tholepins, and the ballast bags have
not yet been found. I bent on the sail, spliced the sheet to the boom;
borrowed tholepins from Uncle Jake,[7] ballast bags and a mackerel line
with a very rusty hook from Tony, an oar from John--and, at last, put
to sea.
[7] Granfer's brother, Tony's uncle.
The wind--westerly, off land--was too puffy for making the sheet fast.
I held it with one hand and tried to fish with the other. In order not
to stop the way of the boat and risk losing the lead on the sea-bottom,
I wore her round to lew'ard, instead of tacking to wind'ard. A squall
came down, the sail gybed quickly, and the boom slewed over with a
jerk, just grazing the top of my head. Had that boom been a couple of
inches lower, or my head an inch or two higher.... I should have been
prevented from sailing the _Moondaisy_ home, pending recovery from
a bashed skull. Everything aboard that was loose, myself included,
scuttled down to lew'ard with a horrid rattle. A malicious little gush
of clear green water, just flecked with foam, spurted in over the gun'l
amidships. I wondered whether I could have swum far with a cracked
skull: the _Moondaisy_'s iron drop-keel would have sunk her, of
course. Why I was fool enough to wear the boat round so carelessly, I
don't know.
Anyhow, I wound up the mackerel line; my catch, nil. Such an occurrence
makes one very respectful towards the fisherman who singlehanded can
sail his boat and manage five mackerel lines at once--one on the thwart
to lew'ard and one to wind'ard; a bobber on the mizzen halyard and two
bobbers on poles projecting from the boat. He must keep his hands on
five lines, the tiller and the sheet; his eyes on the boat's course,
the sea, the weather and the luff of the sail. Probably I know rather
more of the theory of sailing than he does; but, when a squall blackens
the sea to wind'ard, whilst I am thinking whether to run into the wind
or ease off the sheet; whilst by doing neither or both, I very nearly
capsize, or else stop the boat's way and lose my mackerel leads on the
bottom--he, almost without thinking, does precisely what is needful,
and another mackerel is hooked long before I should have brought the
boat up into the wind again.
[Sidenote: _FISHERMEN'S SKILL_]
The greatest charm of sailing lies in this: that it is the art of
making a boat move by dodging, by taking advantage of, a score of
possible dangers. Except when running before the wind, it is the
capsizing-power of the wind which propels the boat. The fisherman is an
artist none the less because his skill seems partly inborn; because he
sails his boat airily and carelessly, yet grimly--for life and the
bread and cheese of it. The 'poor fisherman' for whom appeals to
charity are made, as if he were a hardworking, chance-fed, picturesque
but ignorant and helpless creature, is more than a trader, more than a
skilled labourer in a factory. To a peculiar extent he sells himself as
well as his skill and his goods. He lives contingently on his own life.
7
All that day the wind out in the Channel was blowing fresh from the
sou'west, as we could see by the blackness of the horizon and the
saw-edged sea-line beyond the outer headlands. During the afternoon, a
ground-sea crept into the bay, silently rolling in like an unbidden
unannounced guest who will not name his business. And when, at the turn
of the tide, the breeze in-shore also backed to the sou'west, a busy
lop was superposed on the long heaving swell.[8] About half-past seven,
the Widgers were gathered together near their boats.
[8] A _lop_ is a short choppy sea raised by the immediate action
of a breeze. A _swell_ consists of the long heaving waves which
follow, and sometimes precede, a storm. The diverse action of
different sorts of waves on a shingle beach is interesting. Short
seas (_i.e._ short from crest to crest), even when they are very
high, have not nearly the force or _run_ of a long, though much
lower ground-swell; that is they neither run so far up the beach
nor so greatly endanger the boats. All kinds of waves possess
more run at spring than at neap tides. A lop on a swell at spring
tide is therefore the most troublesome of all to the fishermen.
"What time be it high tide?" asked Granfer. "'Bout ten, en' it?"
"Had us better haul the boats up over?" said Tony. "Tides be dead, en't
they?"
"No-o-o," replied Uncle Jake. "They 'en making."
"'Tis goin' to blow, I tell 'ee," said Granfer. "See how brassy the
sun's going down. Swell coming in too. Boats up be boats safe."
"Hould yer bloody row," said John. "What be talking 'bout? Plenty o'
time to haul up if the sea makes."
"All very well for yu," Tony protested, "living right up to Saltmeadow.
If the sea urns up to the boats in the night yu won't be down to lend a
hand, no, not wi' yer own boats. 'Tis us as lives to the beach what has
to strain ourselves to bits hauling your boats up over so well as our
own."
"Let 'em bide, then!"
"Looks dirty, I say," said Granfer. "Might jest so well haul up as bide
here talking about it. _I_ shan't sleep till I knows the boats be all
right."
"Thee't better lie awake then. An't got no patience wi' making such a
buzz afore you wants tu." With that, John shouldered his coat and
strode homewards.
[Sidenote: _JOHN WIDGER_]
The rest of us pulled the boats up, John's included, till their stems
touched the sea-wall, and we placed the two sailing boats, John's and
Tony's, close beside the steps, handy for hauling up over if need
should be.
Tony and Granfer went in house. Uncle Jake watched them go with an
ironical smile on his wrinkled old face. "Don't like the looks o' this
yer lop on a ground-swell," he said. "There! Did 'ee see how thic sea
licked the baych? Let one o' they lift yer boat.... My zenses! 'Tis all
up wi' it, an' I should pick it up in bits, up 'long, for
firewood.--Well, John's gone home along...."
John is the youngest, handsomest and most powerfully built of the
Widgers; the most independent, most brutal-tongued and most logical,
though not, I fancy, the most perceptive. The inborn toughness, the
family tendency to health and strength, which made fine men of the
elder Widgers in spite of their youthful exposure and privations, has,
in the case of John who underwent fewer hardships, resulted in the
development, unimpeded, of a wonderful physique. "Never heard o' John
being tired," says Uncle Jake.
Premature toil did not bend him; what he is the others had it in them
to be, and by their labour helped to make him. Because his spirit has
never been so buffeted, let alone broken, by hard times, he is also the
most self-reliant. And like the majority of lucky men, he takes fate's
forbearance as his due and adds it to his own credit. Fair-haired,
blue-eyed, his clean-shaven face deeply and clearly coloured; a
combination of the Saxon bulldog type with the seafaring man's
alertness; his heavy yet lissome frame admirably half-revealed by the
simplicity of navy-blue guernsey and trousers,--it is one of the sights
of Seacombe to see him walk the length of the Front with his two small
boys. He lacks, however, the gift of expressing himself, except when he
is angry--and then in a torrent of thrashing words. He communicates his
good-will by smiling all over his face with a tinge of mockery in his
eyes and the bend of his long neck; whether mockery at oneself or at
things in general is not evident. (It is mainly, I think, by smiling at
one another that we remain the very good friends we are.) In any
discussion, his "Do as yu'm minded then!" is his signal for making
others do as _he_ is minded. The advantages possessed by him--health,
strength, clear-headedness, and good looks--he knows how to use, and
that without scruple. He is never hustled by man or circumstance;
seldom gives himself away; and seldom acknowledges an obligation. What
one might reasonably expect him to do in return for help or even
payment, he carelessly, deliberately, leaves undone, and performs
instead some particularly nice action when it is least of all
anticipated. His opinion is respected less because it is known, than
because it isn't known, and by playing in the outer world with a crack
football team he adds to his prestige here. "What du John say?" is
often asked when it doesn't matter even what John thinks. Without
gratitude for it, unconsciously perhaps, he exacts from others a sort
of homage, which is certainly not rendered without protest. "There's
more'n one real lady as John could ha' married if he'd a-been liked," I
heard Granfer say over his beer one day. "The way they used to get he
to take 'em out bathing in a boat.... Put 'en under the starn-sheets, I
s'pose--he-he-he-he-he! But they real ladies du tire o' gen'lemen
sometimes. Some on 'em had rather have a strong fellow like John. He
married out o' the likes o' us, as 'twas. Her what he married used to
eat wi' the gen'leman's family what her come'd yer with; sort o'
companion-nurse her was."
[Sidenote: _A NICE DISTINCTION_]
Once, when the _Moondaisy_ was mine, John charged me sixpence for
putting me ashore from the steamer, after he had been earning money
with my boat that very same day. There is no meanness in his face, and
I wondered who had taught him so to distinguish between the borrowing
of a private boat and the use of a craft that was on the beach for
hire--a perfectly sound distinction. Probably it was some
commercial-minded lodger or beach-chatterer, from whom he picked up the
opinion that nowadays, to get on, you must run with the hare and hunt
with the hounds--a precept which he quotes with cynical gusto but
carries out only so far as suits his feelings. He aims at being
businesslike, but the businesslike side of his character is the more
superficial. Pride will not allow him to boggle over bargains. "Take
it, or leave it," is his way. Most up-to-date in what he does do, he is
no pioneer, and follows a lead grudgingly when innovations are in
question. Most progressive outwardly, he is the most conservative at
heart. A reader of his daily paper, he speaks the broadest Devon of
them all; scrupulously groomed after the modern way, and a smoker of
cigarettes (he was laughed out of a pipe I've heard say), he still
wears the old-fashioned seaman's high-heeled shoes. Tobacco is his
obvious, his humane, weakness. What his other weaknesses are, I don't
know. He strikes one as master of his fate, never yet wrecked, nor
contemplating it. Did such a misfortune occur ... who knows what would
happen? He is now, in his youth, so full of strength.
* * * * *
About ten o'clock, Tony, who was snoozing in the courting chair (Mrs
Widger had gone on to bed) woke up with a "How about they boats?" I
went out to look.
[Sidenote: _THE HIGH TIDE WAVES_]
The sea was covered with that pallid darkness which comes over it when
the moon is hidden behind low rain-clouds. Out of the darkness, the
waves seemed to spring suddenly, without warning at one's very feet.
Every now and then, when a swell and a lop came in together, their
combined steady force and quick energy swept right up the beach,
rattling the pebbles round the sterns of the boats. For the better part
of an hour I waited. Then, after a sea had thrown some shingle right
into a boat, I called Tony.
"'Tis past high water, en' it?" he said sleepily.
"Thee't better come out an' see for thyself!"
He dragged himself up and out. "'Tis al'ys like thees yer wi' the likes
o' us. 'Tis a life o'it!"
"Aye," he said, "the say's goin' down now sure 'nuff. Better git in
house again. Raining is it?"
"God! Look out!"
A sea lifted Tony's and John's sailing boats; was sweeping them down
the beach. We rushed, one to each boat, and hung on. Another sea swept
the pebbles from under our feet--it felt as if the solid earth were
giving way.
"Those was the high tide waves," said Tony. "If us hadn' a-come out
both they boats 'ould ha' been losted. Yu've a-saved John his--all by
chance. Aye! that's like 'tis wi' us, I tell thee. Yu never knows.--Be
'ee going to bed now?"
I stayed out a little while longer: the loss of boats means so much to
men whose only capital they are. Just after Tony had gone in, the
clouds parted and the moonlight burst with a sudden glory over the sea.
In the moonglade, which reached from my feet to the far horizon, the
waters heaved and curled, most silvery, as if they were alive. That was
the wistful gentle sea from which, but a moment or two before, we had
wrested back our property--that sea of little strivings within a large
peace. I thought at the time that there was surely a God, and that as
surely He was there. For which reason, I was glad, when I came in
house, that Tony had gone on to bed.
* * * * *