"The sea, last night."
"Oh...."
"I'm going to make a salvage claim on your insurance company."
"H'm?"
"Happened to be out here and hung on, or else she'd have been swept
down the beach."
"Did you?"
"That's it--while yu were snug."
"Have 'ee got a cigarette on yu?--Match?--Thank yu."
8
[Sidenote: _MRS PINN_]
When I came into the kitchen early last evening, there was an old woman
sitting bolt upright in the courting chair. At least, I came to the
conclusion that she really was old after a moment or two's
watchfulness. Her flowered hat, her shape--though a little angular and
stiff,--her gestures and her bright lively damson-coloured eyes were
all youthful enough. But one could see that her inquiet hands, which
were folded on her lap, had been worn by many a washing-day. Her skin,
though wrinkled, was taut over the outstanding facial bones, as if the
wrinkles might have opened out and have equalized the strain, had age
not hardened them to brown cracks--and the tan of her complexion had
old age's lack of clearness. As so often happens when the teeth remain
good in spite of receding gums, her mouth was tightly stretched
semicircular-wise around them, and the lips had become a long, very
long, expressionless line, shaded into prominence, as in a drawing, by
a multitude of lines up and down, from chin and nose;--a Simian jaw,
remindful of the Descent of Man. All the accumulated hand-to-mouth
wisdom of generations of peasantry seemed to lurk behind the old
woman's quick eyes; to be defying one.
I was introduced to her--Mrs Pinn, Mrs Widger's mother. She was bound
to shake my proffered hand; she did it, half rising, with a comic
mixture of respect and defiance; then sat back in the courting chair as
if to intimate, 'I knows how to keep meself to meself, I du!'
I went outdoors, leaving them to talk; helped Tony haul up the beach
his lumpy fourteen-foot sailing boat, the _Cock Robin_, and returned
with him to supper.
"Hullo, Gran Pinn!" he roared. "Yu here! Didn' know I'd got a new mate
for hauling up, did 'ee? Have her got 'ee yer drop o' stout eet? Us
two'll take 'ee home if yu drinks tu much."
"Oh yu...." screeched Mrs Pinn with facetious rage followed by a swift
collapse into company manners again.
"Thees yer be my mother-in-law, sir."
"Mr Whats-his-name knaws that, an' I knaws yu got he staying with
'ee--there!"
"Well then, gie us some supper then."
Mrs Pinn--'twas to be felt in the air--had been hearing all about me.
Beside her glass of stout and ale, she looked a little less prim and
defiant. But she was still on company manners. She sat delicately, on
the extreme edge of a chair, by the side of, not facing, her plate of
bread, cheese and pickles; approached them; mopped up, so to speak, a
mouthful and a gulp; then receded into mere nodding propinquity. Her
supper was a series of moppings-up. Me she kept much in her eye, and to
my remarks ejaculated "Aw, my dear soul!" or "Did yu ever?" I said with
feeble wit, in order to grease the conversation, that stout and bitter,
being called _mother-in-law_, was just the thing for Mrs Pinn.
"Aw, my dear life!" she exclaimed, taking a mouthy sip. "What chake to
be sure!"
It was Mrs Widger who, with a glint of amusement in her eyes, came
tactfully to my rescue.
[Sidenote: _MY NIGHTCAP_]
About ten o'clock, Mrs Widger took down two glasses and the sugar
basin, and set the conical broad-bottomed kettle further over the fire.
Mrs Pinn glanced at the top shelf of the dresser where my whiskey
bottle stands. Her bright eyes kept on returning to that spot. I should
have liked to ask Mrs Pinn to take a glass, but knew I could not afford
to let it be noised abroad that 'there's a young gen'leman to Tony
Widger's very free with his whiskey.' I dared not make a precedent I
should have to break; the breaking of which would give more
disappointment than its non-creation. Equally well, I knew that it was
no use going to bed without something to make me sleep.... I told Tony
I would go out and look at the weather.
"Yu must 'scuse me 'companying of 'ee 'cause I got me butes off. My
veet _du_ ache!"
On my return, the bright eyes were still travelling to and fro, from
bottle to glasses. I yawned, Tony yawned noisily, Mrs Widger
capaciously. Mrs Pinn was herself infected. "'Tis time I was home....
Oh, Lor'!" she yawned.
She went; and when I asked Tony to share my customary nightcap, it was
with ill-hidden glee that he replied as usual: "Had us better tu?"
His native politeness prevented him from saying anything, however, and
Mrs Widger showed not a sign of having observed the little victory, so
meanly necessary, so galling in every stage to the victor.
Tony declares that he will really and truly start mackerel hooking
to-morrow morning--"if 'tis vitty," and "if the drifters an't catched
nort," and "if 'tis wuth it," and "if he du."
9
A creaking and shaking in the timbers of the old house, very early this
morning, must have half awakened me; then there was a muffled rap on my
door. "Be 'ee goin' to git up?"
"Yes.... 'Course.... What time is it?"
The only answer was a _pad-pad-pad_ down the stairs. I looked out over
the bedclothes. The window, a grey patch barred with darker grey, was
like a dim chilly ghost gazing at me from the opposite wall. By the
saltiness of the damp air which blew across the room and by the grind
of the shingle outside, I could tell that the wind was off sea. The sea
itself was almost invisible--a swaying mistiness through which the
white-horses rose and peeped at one, as if to say, "Come and share our
frolic. Come and ride us."
[Sidenote: _MACKEREL LINES_]
Tony, sleepy and sheepish in the eyes, was pattering about the kitchen
in his stockings (odd ones), his pants and his light check shirt. The
fire was contrary. We scraped out ashes; poked in more wood and paper.
Soon a gush of comfortable steam made the lid of the kettle dance. The
big blue tin teapot was washed out, filled and set on the hob. The
cupboards and front room were searched for cake. Tony went upstairs
with a cup o' tay for the ol' doman and came down with a roll of
biscuits. (Mrs Widger takes the biscuits to bed with her as maiden
ladies take the plate basket, and for much the same reason.)
Faint light was showing through the north window of the kitchen. "Coom
on!" said Tony. "Time we was to sea." He refilled the kettle, hunted
out an old pair of trousers, rammed himself into a faded guernsey and
picked up three mackerel lines[9] from the dresser. He took some salted
lasks from the brine-pot, blew out the lamp--and forth we went. After
collecting together mast, sails and oars from where they were lying,
strewn haphazard on the beach, we pushed and pulled the _Cock Robin_
down to the water's edge, and filled up the ballast-bags with our
hands, like irritable, hasty children playing at shingle-pies. "A li'l
bit farther down. Look out! Jump in. Get hold the oars," commanded
Tony. With a cussword or two (the oars had a horrid disposition to jump
the thole-pins) we shoved and rowed off, shipping not more than a
couple of buckets of water over the stern.
[9] The fishermen's line is very different from the tackle
makers' arrangements. It varies a little locally. At Seacombe,
the upper part consists of 2-3 fathoms of stoutish conger line,
to take the friction over the gunwale, and 5-6 fathoms of finer
line, to the end of which a conical 'sugarloaf' lead is attached
by a clove hitch, the short end being laid up around the standing
part for an inch or so and then finished off with the strong,
neat difficue (corruption of _difficult_?) knot. A swivel, or
better still simply an eyelet cut from an old boot, runs free,
just above the lead, between the clove hitch and difficue knot.
To the eyelet is attached the 'sid'--_i.e._, two or three fathoms
of fine snooding;--to the sid a length of gut on which half an
inch ofclay pipe-stem is threaded, and to the gut a rather large
hook. The bait is a 'lask,' or long three-cornered strip of skin,
cut from the tail of a mackerel. The older fishermen prefer a
round lead, cast in the egg-shell of a gull, because it runs
sweeter through the water, but with this form the fish's bite is
difficult to feel on account of the jerk having to be transmitted
through the heavy bulky piece of lead.
The lines are trailed astern of the boat as it sails up and down,
where the mackerel are believed to be. When well on the feed they
will bite, even at the pipe clay and bare hook, faster than they
can be hauled inboard. River anglers and even some sea fishers
are disposed to deny the amount of skill, alertness and knowledge
which go to catching the greatest possible number of fish while
they are up. It is often said that the mackerel allows itself to
be caught as easily by a beginner as by an old hand. One or two
mackerel may: mackerel don't. In hooking, as opposed to fishing
fine with a rod, the sporting element is supplied by fish, not
_a_ fish; by numbers in a given time, not bend and break. The
tackle brought to the sea by the superior angler, who thinks he
knows more than those who have hooked mackerel for generations,
is a wonder, delight, and irritation to professional fishermen:
it is constructed in such robust ignorance of the habits, and
manner of biting, of mackerel, and it ignores so obstinately the
conditions of the sport. Likewise the fish ignore _it_.
[Sidenote: _DAWN AT SEA_]
Tony scrambled aboard over the starboard bow, his trousers and boots
dripping. "'Tis al'ays like that, putting off from thees yer damn'd ol'
baych. No won'er us gits the rhuematics." He hung the rudder, loosed
the mizzen. I stepped the mast, hoisted the jib and lug, and made fast
halyards and sheets. Our undignified bobbing, our impatient wallowing
on the water stopped short. The wind's life entered into the craft. She
bowed graciously to the waves. With a motion compounded of air and
water, wings and a heaving, as if she were airily suspended over the
sea, the _Cock Robin_ settled to her course. Spray skatted gleefully
over her bows and the wavelets made a gurgling music along the
clinker-built strakes of her.
Tony put out the lines: tangled two of them, got in a tear, as he calls
it, snapped the sid, bit the rusty hook off, spat out a shred of old
bait, brought the boat's head too far into the wind, cursed the
flapping sail and cursed the tiller, grubbed in his pockets for a new
hook, and made tiny knots with clumsy great fingers and his teeth.
"An't never got no gear like I used tu," he complained, and then,
standing upright, with the tiller between his legs and a line in each
outstretched hand, he unbuttoned his face and broke into the merriest
of smiles. "What du 'ee think o' Tony then, getting in a tear fust
start out? Do 'ee think he's maazed--or obsolete? But we'll catch 'em
if they'm yer. Yu ought to go 'long wi' Uncle Jake. He'd tell 'ee
summut--and the fish tu if they wasn't biting proper!"
By the time the lines were out, the dun sou'westerly clouds all around
had raised themselves like a vast down-hanging fringe, a tremendous
curtain, ragged with inconceivable delicacy at the foot, between which,
and the water-line, the peep o' day stared blankly. The whitish light,
which made the sea look deathly cold, was changed to a silvery sheen
where the hidden cliffs stood. From immaterial shadows, looming over
the surf-line, the cliffs themselves brightened to an insubstantial
fabric, an airy vision, ruddily flushed; till, finally, ever becoming
more earthy, they upreared themselves, high-ribbed and red, bush-crowned
and splashed with green--our familiar, friendly cliffs, for each and
every part of whom we have a name. The sun slid out from a parting of
clouds in the east, warming the dour waves into playfulness.
'Twas all a wonder and a wild delight.
As I looked at Tony, while he glanced around with eyes that were at
once curiously alert and dreamy, I saw that, in spite of use and habit,
in spite of his taking no particular notice of what the sea and sky
were like, except so far as they affected the sailing of the boat,--the
dawn was creeping into him. Many such dawns have crept into him. They
are a part of himself.
[Sidenote: _A TENDERHEART BY NATURE_]
"Look to your lew'ard line!" he cried, "they'm up for it!"
He hauled a mackerel aboard, and, catching hold of the shank of the
hook, flicked the fish into the bottom of the boat with one and the
same motion that flung the sid overboard again; and after it the lead.
Wedging the mackerel's head between his knees, he bent its body to a
curve, scraped off the scales near its tail, and cut a fresh lask from
the living fish. He is a tenderheart by nature, but now: "That'll hae
'em!" he crowed.
The mackerel bit hotly at our new baits.[10] Before the lines were
properly out, in they had to come again. Flop-flop went the fish on the
bottom-boards as we jerked them carelessly off the hooks. Every moment
or two one of them would dance up and flip its tail wildly; beat on the
bottom-boards a tattoo which spattered us with scales; then sink back
among the glistening mass that was fast losing its beauty of colour,
its opalescent pinks and steely blues, even as it died and stiffened.
[10] Undoubtedly, if the mackerel are only half on the feed, a
fresh lask is better than any other bait, better than an equally
brilliant salted lask. It is the shine of the bait at which the
fish bite, as at a spinner, but probably the fresh lask leaves
behind it in the water an odour or flavour of mackerel oil which
keeps the shoal together and makes them follow the boat.
Suddenly the fish stopped biting, perhaps because the risen sun was
shining down into the water. The wind dropped without warning, as
southerly winds will do in the early morning, if they don't come on to
blow a good deal harder. The _Cock Robin_ wallowed again on the water.
"We'm done!" said Tony. "Let's get in out o'it in time for the early
market. There ain't no other boats out. Thees yer ought to fetch
'leven-pence the dizzen. We've made thees day gude in case nort else
don't turn up."
While I rowed ashore, he struck sail, and threw the ballast overboard.
Most pleasantly does that shingle ballast plop-rattle into the water
when there is a catch of fish aboard. We ran in high upon a sea.
Willing hands hauled the _Cock Robin_ up the beach: we had fish to
give away for help. The mackerel made elevenpence a dozen to Jemima
Caley, the old squat fishwoman who wears a decayed sailor hat with a
sprig of heather in it. "Yu don' mean to say yu've a-catched all they
lovely fish!" she said with a rheumy twinkle, in the hope of getting
them for tenpence.
"'Levenpence a dozen, Jemima!"
"Aw well then, yu must let I pay 'ee when I sold 'em. An't got it now.
Could ha' gived 'ee tenpence down."
With a mackerel stuck by the gills on the tip of each finger, I came in
house. The children were being got ready for school. When I returned
downstairs with some of the fishiness washed off, Mrs Widger was
distributing the school bank-cards and Monday morning pennies. (By the
time the children leave school, they will have saved thus, penny by
penny, enough to provide them with a new rig-out for service--or Sunday
wear.) There was a frizzling in the topsy-turvy little kitchen.
[Sidenote: _A DARING RASCAL_]
"Mam! Vish!"
"Mam! I wants some vish. Mam 'Idger...."
"Yu shall hae some fish another time."
"No-o-o!"
"Go on!"
"Well, jam zide plaate then."
Jimmy's finger was in the jampot.
"Yu daring rascal!" shrieks Mam Widger. "Get 'long to school with 'ee!
Yu'll be late an' I shall hae the 'spector round. Get 'long--and see
what I'll hae for 'ee when yu comes back."
"Coo'h! Bulls' eyes! Ay, mam? Good bye, Dad. Good bye, Mam. Bye, Mister
Ronals. Gimme a penny will 'ee?"
"God damn the child--that ever I should say it--get 'long! _I'll_ hae a
bull's eye for 'ee. Now go on."
A tramp of feet went out through the passage.
Mrs Widger shovelled the crisp mackerel from the frying-pan into our
plates. Tony soused his with vinegar from an old whiskey bottle. We
lingered over our tea till he said: "Must go out an' clean they ther
boats--the popples what they damn visitors' children chucks in for to
amuse theirselves, not troubling to think us got to pick every one on
'em out be hand, an' looking daggers at 'ee when you trys to tell 'em
o'it so polite as yu can. Ay, me--our work be never done."
"No more ain't mine!" snapped Mrs Widger, moving off to her washtub.
10
For the last two or three days there has been a large flat brown-paper
parcel standing against the wall on the far side of my bed. I have
wondered what it was.
This evening, after we had all finished tea, while Tony was puffing
gingerly at a cigarette (he is nothing of a smoker) with his chair
tilted back and a stockinged foot in Mrs Widger's lap, Jimmy said, as
Jimmy usually says: "Gie us another caake, Mam 'Idger." He laid a very
grubby hand on the cakelets.
"Yu li'l devil!" shouted his mother. "Take yer hands off or I'll gie
'ee such a one.... Yu'd eat an eat till yu busted, I believe; an yu'm
that cawdy [finical] over what yu has gie'd 'ee...."
Tony took up the poker and made a feint at Jimmy, who jumped into the
corner laughing loudly. With an amazing contrast in tone, Mrs Widger
said quietly: "Wait a minute an' see what I got to show 'ee, if yu'm
gude."
[Sidenote: _ROSIE'S PHOTOGRAPH_]
She went upstairs with that peculiar tread of hers--as if the feet were
very tired but the rest of the body invincibly energetic,--and returned
with the flat parcel. She undid the string, the children watching with
greedy curiosity. She placed on the best-lighted chair an enlargement
of a baby's photograph, in a cheap frame, all complete. "There!" she
said.
"What is ut?" asked Tony. "Why, 'tis li'l Rosie!"
"Wer did 'ee get 'en?" he continued more softly. "Yu an't had 'en
give'd 'ee?"
"Give'd me? No! Thic cheap-jack.... But 'tisn' bad, is it?"
"What cheap-jack?"
"Why, thic man to the market-house--wer I got the cruet."
"O-oh! I didn' never see he.... What did 'ee pay 'en for thic then?"
"Never yu mind. 'Twasn't none o' yours what I paid. What do 'ee think
o'it?"
"'Tisn' bad--very nice," remarked Tony, bending before the picture,
examining it in all lights. "Iss; 'tisn' bad by no means. Come yer,
Jimmy an' Tommy. Do 'ee know who that ther is?"
"Rosie!" whispered Jimmy.
"What was took up to cementry," added Tommy in a brighter voice.
"Iss, 'tis our li'l Rosie to the life (mustn' touch), jest like her
was."
A moment's tension; then, "A surprise for 'ee, en' it?" Mrs Widger
enquired.
"My ol' geyser!"
The children's riot began again. "Our Rosie...." they were saying. Mam
'Idger, slipping out of Tony's grasp, carried the picture off to the
front room. She was sometime gone.
Wordsworth's _We are Seven_ came into my mind:
"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
'Twas throwing words away; for still
The little maid would have her will,
And said, "Nay, we are seven!"
I knew, of course, intellectually, that the poem records more than a
child's mere fancy; but never before have I felt its truth, have I been
caught up, so to speak, into the atmosphere of the wise, simple souls
who are able to rob death of the worst of its sting by refusing to let
the dead die altogether, even on earth. Rosie is dead and buried. I
perceive also--I perceived, while Tony and the children stood round
that picture--that Rosie is still here, in this house, hallowing it a
little. The one statement is as much a fact as the other; but how much
more delicately intangible, and perhaps how much truer, the second.
11
[Sidenote: _ROSIE'S DEATH_]
While we waited for Tony to come in to supper, Mrs Widger told me about
Rosie's death. "It must be awful," she said, "to lose a child fo them
as an't got nor more. I know how I felt it when Rosie was took. Nothing
would please me for months after but to go up to the cementry, to her
little grave. 'Most every evening I walked up after tea--didn' feel as
if I could go to bed an' sleep wi'out. Tony had to fend for hisself if
he wanted his supper early. Ther wasn't no reason, but it did ease me,
like, to go up there, an' it heartened me a little for next day's work.
'Twas a sort o' habit, p'raps. What broke me of it was my bad illness.
[When the twins, 'what nobody didn' know nort about,' were born.] At
first, I used to think o' Rosie, when I were lyin' alone upstairs, most
'specially at night time if Tony wer out to sea an' it come'd on to
blow a bit. I used to think, if ort happened to Tony.... Our room to
the top o' the house, sways when it do blow. I don't trouble me head
about Tony when he's to sea ordinary times--expects 'en when I sees
'en--but then I wer weak, like, an' full o' fancies. An' after I got
about again I wer much too weak to go to cementry: I used to faint
every time I come'd downstairs. Howsbe-ever, I did come down again, an'
Tony used to go out and get me quinine wine and three-and-sixpenny port
an' all sorts o' messes, to put me on me legs wi'out fainting. 'Twas
thic illness as broke me o' going up to Rosie's grave."
"You walk up now on Sunday evenings...." I hazarded, recollecting that
then the children run wild for a couple of hours and come in tired and
dirty to cry for their mam.
"Yes...." said Mrs Widger.
I saw that I had trespassed into one of the little solitary tracts of
her life.
"One day," she continued, backing the conversation with an imperfectly
hidden effort, "when Dr Bayliss come to see me, Tony was asleep in the
next bed, snoring under the clothes after a night to sea. Dr Bayliss
didn' say nort, 'cept he said: 'Your husband's a fisherman, isn't he,
Mrs Widger?' But I saw his shoulders a-shaking as he went out the door,
an' that evening he sent me a bottle o' port wine out o' his own
cellar, an' it did me a power o' gude. Tony--he was that ashamed o'
hisself, though I told 'en 'twasn't nothing for a doctor to see
'en...."
[Sidenote: _FRANKNESS AND SMUT_]
At that moment Tony returned. He really was ashamed of the doctor
finding him in bed, whether as a breach of manners or of propriety was
not plain. Possibly the latter. He has an acute sense of decency,
though its rules and regulations are not the same as those of the
people he calls gentry. Our conversation here would hardly suit a
drawing-room. Tony, if he comes in wet, thinks nothing of stripping
down to his shirt. But, curiously enough, one of his chief complaints
about the people who hire boats, is their occasionally unclean
conversation. "The likes o' us 'ould never think of saying what they
du. Me, I didn' know nort about half the things they say till I wer
grow'd up an' learnt it from listening to the likes o' they. Yu'd
hear bad language wi' us an' plain speaking, but never what some o'
they talks about when they got no one to hear 'em 'cept us they hires,
an' they thinks us don't matter." Tony is right, I believe. Most of
the impropriety I used to hear at school, university, and in the
smoking room, though often little but a reaction against silly
conventions, a tilt against whited sepulchres,--was well-named _smut_.
It was furtive, a distortion of life's facts and inimical therefore to
life. Impropriety here, on the other hand, is a recognition of life's
facts, an expression of life, a playful ebullition.
Tony, when he came in, enquired of Mam 'Idger what she had done with
the picture. "Did Rosie die in the summer?" I asked, remembering how
the children will run out to the milkman with a dirty can unless a
sharp eye is kept upon them, and how also the larder is fixed up over
the main drain.
"Her died late in the autumn with convulsions from teething," Mrs
Widger replied. "An' her didn't ought to ha' died then but for Dr
Brown. When her was took ill, proper bad, I sent one of the maidens for
Dr Bayliss, but he was out to the country for they didn' know how long.
So off I sends the maid to Dr Brown, an' he sends back a message as he
cuden' attend Dr Bayliss's patients wi'out Dr Bayliss asked him.
Certainly 'twas late; but my blood jest boiled, an' I took Rosie into
Grannie's an' goes up myself. Rosie didn' belong to no doctor. Her'd
never had one. Howsbe-ever, Dr Brown says to me the same as he'd told
the maid, that he cuden' come. An' then he says, 'My good woman, I
_won't_ come!' Jest like that! My flare was up; I wer jest about to let
fly my mind at 'en--an' I remembered Rosie lying in convulsions to
Grannie's, an' flew out o' his house like a mad thing. Rosie wer all
but dead. Her was gone when Dr Bayliss come'd next morning."
"Aye!" added Tony. "That wer it. Some doctors be kind, an' some don't
trouble nort about the likes o' us when they got visitors to run a'ter.
I don' say they treats the likes o' us worse'n other people; I don'
know: oftentimes they'm so kind as can be; but when they don't behave
like they ought to, other people has the means to make 'em sorry for
it, an' us an't. They knows that. Us can't do nort an' that's the way
o'it. Rosie didn' never ought to ha' died."
"No-o-o!" said Mrs Widger.
One can see the tigress in most women, in every mother, if one waits
long enough. I saw it in Mrs Widger then. If she ever has the whip-hand
of Dr Brown....
12
This mackerel hooking, which is a two-man job though Tony could and
would do it by himself were I not here, has most fortunately raised me
out of the position of a mere lodger, a household excrescence,
tolerated only for the sake of certain shillings a week. It has
provided me with a niche of my own, which I occupy--at sea the mate on
a mackerel hooker, on shore a loafer 'ready to lend a hand,' and in the
house a sort of male Cinderella. It is far pleasanter, I find, to be a
small wheel in the machine than to remain seated on a mound of pounds,
shillings and pence--beflunkeyed, as if in a soulless hotel!
[Sidenote: _THE EARLY CUP O' TAY_]
Tony cannot fill his spare time by reading: it makes his long-sighted
eyes smart. On account of that, and of nights at sea, with rest taken
when and where possible, he has developed an amazing talent for
'putting it away'; that is, for sleeping. He can turn out perfectly
well at any hour, if need be, but at ordinary times he is most content
to follow somebody else's first. I on my part, sleeping indifferently
well, wake usually before dawn, and greatly dislike waiting for an
early cup o' tay.
About half-past four I jump out of bed, creep downstairs and chop wood.
That warms me. Then with a barbaric glee, I scrape out the ashes,
sending clouds of dust over the guernseys and boots that have been set
near the fire to dry. No matter; being light and fire-dry, it will
brush off the one and shake out of the other. People who never light
fires at dawn can have no idea of the exhilaration to be obtained from
a well-laid, crackling, flaming fire.
Tony appears at the door, half-dressed, yawning and stretching his arms
on high. "Yu an't been an' made tay, have 'ee?" he says with delighted
certainty. The cups are filled. He takes up Mam 'Idger's cup and
returns with the paper roll of 'Family Biscuits.' We forage for
tit-bits, feed standing, yawn again, and go out to 'see what to make
o'it.'
Unless the sea is broken by the wind, there is about it just before
dawn a peculiar creeping clamminess. It seems but half awake, like
ourselves. It has no welcome for us. "Can't you wait," it seems to say,
"till I begin to sparkle?"
Tony looks out over. "Had us better tu?" he asks with a shiver.
"Why not?"
"Shove her down then. There's macker out there!"
By the time the sun is rising (it never rises twice the same) south of
the easternmost headland, Tony has worked himself into a tear over
self-tangling lines, and has been laughed out of it again. We are
perhaps a mile or two out, and if the mackerel are biting well, we are
hauling them in, swiftly, silently, grimly; banging them off the hook;
going _Tsch!_ if they fall back into the sea; cutting baits from fish
not dead. If, however, they are not on the feed, we sing blatant or
romantic or sentimental songs (it is all one out there), and laugh with
a hearty sea-loudness. And if the mackerel will not bite at all we
invent a score of reasons and blame a dozen people and things. But
there we are--ourselves, the sea, and the heavenly dawn--the sea
heaving up to us, and ourselves ever heaving higher, up and over the
lop. It exalts us with it. We hardly need to talk. A straight look in
the face, a smile.... We are in the more immediate presence of one
another. Did we lie to each other with our tongues, the greater part of
our communications would yet be truth.
[Sidenote: _THE PRICE OF FISH_]
We sail or row home, turn the mackerel out on the beach, count them
back into the box, wash the blood off them, and stoop low, turning them
over and over, whilst we haggle for our price. The other day, with the
exuberance of the sea still upon me, I slapped old Jemima Caley's rusty
shoulder and lo! she rose her price one penny.
"Damme!" she said, "I'll gie 'ee ninepence a dozen if I has to go wi'
out me dinner for't! They _be_ fine fish."
"_Sweet_ fish, Jemima!"
"Lor' bless 'ee, yes!"
But she hawked them at twopence-halfpenny or threepence a pair
according to the customer. And now, her wry sly smile, peeping from
underneath her battered hat-brim, meets me at every back-street corner.
Soap and water, the buzz of the children, their mother's loud voice,
and mackerel for breakfast.... It is all quite prosaic and perfectly
commonplace, it is far from idyllic; yet it would need the touch of a
poet to bring out the wonder, the mystery, of it all: to light up the
door of the soul-house through which we pass to and fro, scarce
knowing.
Tony comes in early to dinner after a morning's frighting. His object
is to get an hour or so for sleep before the visitors come out from
their later lunch. Mam 'Idger says we are lazy; that she 'don't gie way
to it, she don't!' (She did a couple of days ago.) When the
after-dinner tea is finished, Tony makes a start for 'up over!' Mrs
Widger enquires if I have some writing to do--and asks also if I would
like to be awakened before tea-time!
Never does sleep at night come so graciously as that afternoon snooze,
while the sound of the sea and the busy noises of the square float
gently in at the windows; float higher and higher; float right away.
About half-past two, Tony goes down to take somebody out for a sail or
to paint his boats. I frequently do not hear him.
13
Is there not more than one signification to the words "And I, if I be
lifted up, will draw all men unto Me?" There are times when the mind is
lifted up by a master-emotion, arising one hardly knows how, nor
whither leading; a feeling that takes charge of one, as a big wave is
said to take charge of a boat when it destroys steerageway; an emotion
so powerful that it does but batten on all which might be expected to
clash with it. These are the periods when day and night are enveloped
in one large state of mind, and life ceases to be a collection of
discrete, semi-related moods. These are the dawns of the soul, the
spring seasons of the spirit. The world is created afresh.
Everything, and nothing, is prosaic. 'Tis _all according_. But it is
startling indeed how suddenly sometimes the earth takes on a new
wonderfulness, and Saint Prosaic a new halo. What, to put it in the
plainest manner possible, am I doing here? Merely fishing and sailing
on the cheap (not so very cheaply); roughing it--pigging it, as one
would say--with people who are not my people and do not live as I have
been accustomed to do. Yet, as I know well _all_ the time, this change
from one prosaic life to another has brought about a revelation which,
like great music, sanctifies things, makes one thankful, and in a sense
very humble; incapable of fitting speech, incapable of silence.
14
[Sidenote: _UNDER TOWN_]
Astonishment at, and zest in, these Under Town lives; the discovery of
so much beauty hitherto unsuspected and, indeed, not to be caught sight
of without exceptional opportunity, sets one watching and waiting in
order to find out the real difference of their minds from the minds of
us who have been through the educational mill; also to find out where
and how they have the advantage of us. For I can feel rather than see,
here, the presence of a wisdom that I know nothing about, not even by
hearsay, and that I suspect to be largely the traditional wisdom of the
folk, gained from contact with hard fact, slowly accumulated and handed
on through centuries--the wisdom from which education cuts us off,
which education teaches us to pooh-pooh.
Such wisdom is difficult to grasp; very shy. My chance of observing it
lies precisely in this: that I am neither a sky-pilot, nor a district
visitor, nor a reformer, nor a philanthropist, nor any sort of
'worker,' useful or impertinent; but simply a sponge to absorb and, so
far as can be, an understander to sympathize. It is hard entirely to
share another people's life, to give oneself up to it, to be received
into it. They know intuitively (their intuitions are extraordinarily
acute) that one is thinking more than one gives voice to; putting two
and two together; which keeps alive a lingering involuntary distrust
and a certain amount, however little, of ill-grounded respectfulness.
(Respectfulness is less a tribute to real or fancied superiority, than
an armour to defend the poor man's private life.) Besides which, these
people are necessary to, or at least their intimacy is greatly desired
by, myself, whereas their own life is complete and rounded without me.
I am tangential merely. They owe me nothing; I owe them much. It is I
who am the client, they the patrons.
[Sidenote: _CLASS DISTINCTIONS_]
We are told often enough nowadays that capital fattens on labour,
naturally, instinctively, without much sense of wrong-doing, and has
so fattened since the days when Laban tried to overreach Jacob. What
we are not so often told is that the poor man not less instinctively
looks upon the gen'leman as legitimate sport. 'An 'orrible lie'
between two poor people is fair play from a poor man to a wealthier,
just as, for instance, the wealthy man considers himself at liberty to
make speeches full of hypocritical untruth when he is seeking the
suffrage of the free and independent electors or is trying to teach
the poor man how to make himself more profitable to his employer. It
is stupid, at present, to ignore the existence of class distinctions;
though they do not perhaps operate over so large a segment of life as
formerly, they still exist in ancient strength, notwithstanding the
fashionable cant--lip-service only to democratic ideals--about the
whole world kin. There is not one high wall, but two high walls
between the classes and the masses, so-called, and that erected in
self-defence by the exploited is the higher and more difficult to
climb. On the one side is a disciplined, fortified Gibraltar, held by
the gentry; then comes a singularly barren and unstable neutral zone;
and on the other side is the vast chaotic mass. In Under Town, I
notice, a gentleman is always _gen'leman_, a workman or tramp is
_man_, but the fringers, the inhabitants of the neutral zone, are
called _persons_. For example: "That _man_ what used to work for the
council is driving about the _gen'leman_ as stays with Mrs Smith--the
_person_ what used to keep the greengrocery shop to the top of High
Street afore her took the lodging house on East Cliff." It is, in
fact, strange how undemocratic the poor man is. (Not so strange when
one realises that far from having everything to gain and nothing to
lose by a levelling process, he has a deal to lose and his gains are
problematical.) I am not sure that he doesn't prefer to regard the
gen'leman as another species of animal. Jimmy and Tommy have a name of
their own for the little rock-cakes their mother cooks. They call them
_gentry-cakes_ because such morsels are fitted for the--as Jimmy and
Tommy imagine--smaller mouths of ladies and gentlemen. The other
afternoon Mabel told me that a boat she had found belonged not to a
boy but to a _gentry-boy_. Some time ago I begged Tony not to _sir_
me; threatened to punch his head if he did. It discomforted me to be
belaboured with a title of respect which I could not reasonably claim
from him. Rather I should _sir_ him, for he is older and at least my
equal in character; he has begotten healthy children for his country
and he works hard 'to raise 'em vitty.' Against my book-knowledge he
can set a whole stock of information and experience more directly
derived from and bearing upon life. I don't consider myself unfit to
survive, but he is fitter, and up to the present has done more to
justify his survival--which after all is the ultimate test of a man's
position in the race. At all events, he did cease _sir-ing_ me except
on ceremonial occasions. At ordinary times the detested word is
unheard, but it is still: "Gude morning, sir!" "Gude night, sir!" And
sometimes: "Your health, sir!" At that the matter must rest, I
suppose, though the _sir_ is a symbol of class difference, and to do
away with the symbol is to weaken the difference.
[Sidenote: _THE WORD "LIKE"_]
But at the same time, I am lucky enough to possess certain advantages.
I have, for instance, managed to preserve the ability to speak dialect
in spite of all the efforts of my pastors and masters to make me talk
the stereotyped, comparatively inexpressive compromise which goes by
the name of King's English. Tony is hard of hearing, catches the
meaning of dialect far quicker than that of standard English, and I
notice that the damn'd spot _sir_ seldom blots our conversation when
it is carried on in dialect. Finally there is the great problem of
self-expression. There, at any rate, I am well to windward.
The cause of the uneducated man's use of the word _like_ is
interesting. He makes a statement, uses an adjective, and--especially
if the statement relates to his own feelings or to something
unfamiliar--he tacks on the word _like_, spoken in a peculiarly
explanatory tone of voice. What does the word mean there? Is it merely
a habit, a 'gyte,' as Tony would say? And why the word _like_?
When a poet wishes to utter thoughts that are too unformulated, that
lie too deep, for words--
Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me--
he has recourse to simile and metaphor. Take, for example, the
transience of human life, a subject on which at times we most of us
have keen vague thoughts that, we imagine, would be so profound could
our tongues but utter them.
Blake's Thel is a symbol of the transience of life.
O life of this our Spring! why fades the lotus of the water?
Why fade these children of the Spring, born but to smile and fall?
"Thel, the transient maiden, is.... What is Thel?" says Blake, in
effect. Thel cannot be described straightforwardly. "What then is Thel
_like_?"
Ah! Thel is like a watery bow, and like a parting cloud,
Like a reflection in a glass, like shadows on the water,
Like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant's face,
Like the dove's voice, like transient day, like music in the air.
[Sidenote: _DIALECT_]
Shakespeare, in a corresponding difficulty, uses one convincing simile:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Drummond of Hawthornden exclaims:
This Life, which seems so fair,
Is like a bubble blown up in the air
By sporting children's breath....
Bacon speaks more boldly and concisely. He forsakes simile for
metaphor, leaving the word _like_ to be understood.
The World's a bubble, and the Life of Man
Less than a span....
Were Tony to try and express himself by the same means, he would say:
"The world's a bubble, like, and the life of man less than a span,
like."
_Like_, in fact, with the poor man as with the poet, connotes simile
and metaphor. The poor man's vocabulary, like the poet's, is quite
inadequate to express his thoughts. Both, in their several ways, are
driven to the use of unhackneyed words and simile and metaphor; both
use a language of great flexibility;[11] for which reason we find that
after the poet himself, the poor man speaks most poetically. Witness
the beautiful description: "All to once the nor'easter springed out
from the land, an' afore us could down-haul the mainsail, the sea wer
feather-white an' skatting in over the bows." New words are eagerly
seized; hence the malapropisms and solecisms so frequently made fun of,
without appreciation of their cause. _Obsolete_ has come hereto from
the Navy, through sons who are bluejackets. Now, when Tony wishes to
sum up in one word the two facts that he is older and also less
vigorous than formerly, he says: "Tony's getting obsolete, like." A
soulless word, borrowed from official papers, has acquired for us a
poetic wealth of meaning in which the pathos of the old ship, of
declining years, and of Tony's own ageing, are all present with one
knows not what other suggestions besides. And when _obsolete_ is fully
domesticated here, the _like_ will be struck off.
[11] The flexibility and expressiveness of dialect lies largely
in its ability to change its verbal form and pronunciation from a
speech very broad indeed to something approaching standard
English. For example, "You'm a fool," is playful; "You'm a fule,"
less so. "You're a fool," asserts the fact without blame; while
"Thee't a fule," or "Thee a't a fule!" would be spoken in temper,
and the second is the more emphatic. The real differences between
"I an't got nothing," "I an't got ort," and "I an't got
nort,"--"Oo't?" "Casn'?" "Will 'ee?" and "Will you?"--"You'm
not," "You ain't," "You bain't," and "Thee a'tn't,"--are hardly
to be appreciated by those who speak only standard English.
_Thee_ and _thou_ are used between intimates, as in French.
_Thee_ is usual from a mother to her children, but is
disrespectful from children to their mother.
[Sidenote: _THOUGHTS AND MIND PICTURES_]
In short, every time Tony uses _like_, he is admitting, and explaining,
that he has expressed himself as best he could, but inadequately
notwithstanding. He has felt something more delicately, thought upon
something more accurately, than he can possibly say. He is always
pathetically eager to make himself plain, to be understood. One knows
well that touching look in the eyes of a dog when, as we say, it all
but speaks. Often have I seen that same look, still more intense, in
Tony's eyes, when he has become mazed with efforts to express himself,
and I have wished that as with the dog, a pat, a small caress, could
change the look into a joyfulness. But it is just because I am fond of
him that I am able to feel with him and to a certain extent to divine
his half-uttered thoughts; to take them up and return them to him
clothed in more or less current English which, he knows, would convey
them to a stranger, and which shows him more clearly than before what
he really was thinking. That seems to be one of my chief functions
here--thought-publisher. Evidently grateful, he talks and talks,
usually while the remains of a meal lie scattered on the table. "Aye!"
he says, at the end of a debauch of _likes_. "I don' know what I du
know. Tony's a silly ol' fule!"
He does not believe it; nor do I; for I am often struck with wonder at
the thoughts and mind-pictures which we so curiously arrive at
together.
15
The old feudal class-distinctions are fast breaking down. But are we
arriving any nearer the democratic ideal of _Liberte_, _Egalite_,
_Fraternite_? In place of the old distinctions, are we not setting up
new distinctions, still more powerful to divide? There is to-day a
greater social gulf fixed between the man who takes his morning tub and
him who does not, than between the man of wealth or family and him who
has neither. New-made and pink, the 'gentleman' arises daily from his
circle of splashes, a masculine Venus from a foam of soap-suds. (About
womenfolk we are neither so enquiring nor so particular.) For the cults
of religion and pedigree we have substituted the cult of soap and
water, and 'the prominent physician of Harley Street' is its high
priest. Are you a reputed atheist? Poor man! doubtless God will
enlighten you in His good time. Are you wicked? Well, well.... Have you
made a fortune by forsaking the official Christian morality in favour
of the commercial code? You can redeem all by endowing a hospital or
university. But can they say of you that somehow or other you don't
look quite clean? Then you are damn'd!
The cottage where the heroine of the 'nice' book lives is always
spotlessly clean. A foreigner who adopts the bath-habit, is said to be
just like an Englishman. It is the highest praise he can earn, and will
go further in English society than the best introductions.
[Sidenote: _CLEANLINESS_]
Cleanliness is our greatest class-symbol. In living with people who
have been brought up to different ways of life, a consideration
of cleanliness is forced upon one; for nothing else rouses so
instantaneously and violently the latent snobbery that one would fain
be rid of. Religiously, politically, we are men and brothers all. Yet
still--there _are_ men we simply cannot treat as brothers. By what term
of contempt (in order to justify our unbrotherliness) can we call them?
Not _poor men_; for we have _Poor but honest_ too firmly fixed in our
minds, and we would all like a colonial rich rough diamond of an uncle
to appear suddenly in our family circle. Hardly _men of no family_; for
men of no family are received at court. Not _workmen_; for behold the
Carlylese and Smilesian dignity of labour! Not _the masses_; for the
masses are supposed to be our rulers. What then can we call these
people with whom we really cannot associate on equal terms? Why,
call them THE GREAT UNWASHED. O felicitous phrase! O salve of the
conscience! That is the unpardonable social sin. At the bottom of our
social ladder is a dirty shirt; at the top is fixed not laurels, but a
tub! The bathroom is the inmost, the strongest fortress of our English
snobbery.
Cleanliness as a subject of discussion is, curiously enough, considered
rather more improper than disease. Yet it has to be faced, and that
resolutely, if we would approach, and approaching, understand, the
majority of our fellow-creatures.
Chemically all dirt is clean. Just as the foods and drinks of a good
dinner, if mixed up together on a dish, would produce a filthy mess, so
conversely, if we could separate any form of dirt into the pure solid,
liquid and volatile chemical compounds of which it is composed, into
pretty crystals, liquids and gases, exhibited in the scientific manner
on spotless watch-glasses and in thrice-washed test-tubes,--we might
indeed say that some of these chemicals had an evil odour, but we could
not pronounce them unclean. Prepared in a laboratory, the sulphuretted
hydrogen gas which makes the addled egg our national political weapon,
is a quite cleanly preparation. Dirt is merely an unhappy mixture of
clean substances. The housewife is nearest a scientific view of the
matter when she distinguishes between 'clean dirt' and 'dirty dirt,'
and does not mind handling coal, for instance, because, being clean
dirt, it will not harm her. Cleanliness is a process by which we keep
noxious microbes and certain poisons outside our systems or in their
proper places within. (It has been shown that we cannot live without
microbes, and that there exist normally in some parts of the body
substances which are powerfully poisonous to other parts.) Rational
cleanliness makes for health, for survival. It is, ultimately, an
expression of the Will to Live.
[Sidenote: _DIRT_]
Far, however, from being rational, our notions on cleanliness are in
the highest degree superficial. We make a great fuss over a flea;
hardly mention it in polite company; but we tolerate the dirty housefly
on all our food. We eat high game which our cook's more natural taste
calls muck. We are only just beginning to realise the indescribable
filthiness of carious teeth, than which anything more unclean, a few
diseases excepted, can scarcely be found in slums. Even in this great
age of pseudo-scientific enlightenment, we do not have a carious tooth
extracted until it aches, though we have a front tooth cleaned and
stopped on the first appearance of decay. What the eye doth not see....
Yet we presume to judge men by their deviation from our conventional
standards of cleanliness.
My lady goes to the doctor for her headaches and _crises de nerfs_.
"Dyspepsia and autotoxaemia," says the doctor. "Try such-and-such a diet
for a month, then go to Aix-les-Bains." But how would my lady be
ashamed did he tell her plainly: "Madam, though I observe that you
bathe frequently, your cleanliness, like your beauty, is only
skin-deep. You are fair without and foul within. Your alimentary canal
is overloaded and your blood is so unclean that it has poisoned your
nervous system. Eat less, take more exercise and drink plenty--of
water. Try to be as clean as your gardener." It has been remarked that
the labourer who sweats at his work is, in reality, far cleaner than
the bathing sedentary man, for the labourer has a daily sweat-bath,
whereas the other only washes the outside of him: the cleanliness of
the latter is skin-deep, and of the former blood-deep. Once stated, the
fact is obvious. Moreover, the labourer has the additional advantage of
being self-cleansing, whereas the sedentary man, for his inferior kind
of cleanliness, requires a bath and all sorts of apparatus. No doubt,
in time we shall learn to value both kinds of cleanliness, each at its
worth. The Martians of fiction, when in a fair way to conquer the
earth, succumbed before earthly microbes to which they were
unaccustomed, against which they had not acquired immunity. If by
antiseptics they could have kept these microbes at bay, they would have
done well, but if, like mankind, they had possessed self-resistance
against them (that is, if they had been self-cleansing) it would have
been still better. There is no paradox in saying that, practically, it
is very difficult for a healthy person to be genuinely unclean; and
that ideally, in the surgeon's eyes, we are, all, rich man and tramp,
so unclean that there is little to choose between us, and every one of
us requires a comprehensive scrubbing in an antiseptic tub.
[Sidenote: _DISADVANTAGES_]
But just as the habit of aiding nature by eating predigested food is
bad, so too rigid a habit, too great a need of cleanliness is a
positive disadvantage in the struggle for existence. Harry Stidston
says fleas are loveable little creatures. I have had to learn to put up
with one or two sometimes. Tommy makes his mother undress him in the
middle of dinner to find one. In other words, Harry Stidston can do his
work and live under conditions which would put me to flight, and I have
a like advantage over Tommy. Again, Tony can do with an occasional bath
and can eat his food with fishy hands, while I am a worm and no man
without my daily bath, or at least a wash-over, and, except at sea,
turn against the best of food if I can smell fish on my fingers. The
advantage is Tony's. It is good to be clean, but it is better to be
able to be dirty.
The upshot is half-a-dozen--maybe unpleasant--truths, without
recognition of which the latter-day citadel of snobbery cannot be
stormed, nor the poor man and his house appreciated at their worth;
namely:--
1. _Ideally_: We are all so unclean that there is little to
choose between us.
2. _Scientifically_: Cleanliness, as practised, is
conventional and irrational.