[12] On the moral aspect of cleanliness I have not touched. Miss
M. Loane, a Queen's Nurse, in her remarkable book _The Next
Street but One_, observes "Cleanliness has often seemed to me
strangely far from godliness. Where the virtue is highly
developed there is often not merely an actual but an absolute
shrinkage in all sweet neighbourly charities. If an invalid's
bedroom needs scrubbing and there is no money to pay for the
service, or if a chronic sufferer's kitchen is in want of a
'thorough good do-out,' if two or three troublesome children have
to be housed and fed during the critical days after an operation
on father or mother, do I look for assistance from 'the cleanest
woman in the street?' Alas, no; whether she be wife, widow, or
spinster, I pass her by, careful not to tread on her pavement,
much less her doorstep, and seek the happy-go-lucky person whose
own premises would be better for more water and less grease, but
from whose presence neither husband nor child ever hastens away."
16
[Sidenote: _JIMMY COMES HOOKING_]
The dawns are later now. We do not need to get up quite so early, and
usually, just as we are drinking our cup o' tay, we hear a pattering of
naked feet on the staircase. Jimmy, the Dustman still in his eyes,
appears at the door. He has an air of being about to do something
important. He picks out his stockings and old grey suit from the
corners where they were left to dry. He does not ask to have his boots
laced up nor complain of their stiffness. Then with his coat
exceedingly askew on his shoulders, he demands: "Tay! please."
"What do _yu_ want? Git up over to bed again."
"I be comin' hooking wiv yu."
"Be 'ee? Yu'll hae to hurry up then."
When the sea is not too loppy nor the wind too cold, Jimmy goes with
us. The soft-mouthed mackerel need hauling up clear of the gunwale with
a long-armed swing, beyond Jimmy's power to give, and therefore as a
rule he is not at first allowed to have a line; for fish represent
money and mackerel caught now will be eaten as bread and dripping in
the winter. Jimmy sits huddled up on the lee side for'ard. He becomes
paler, looks plaintively, and sighs a big sigh or two.
"What's the matter, Jim-Jim? Do 'er feel leery?"
If Jimmy volunteers a remark, nothing is the matter. But if he
merely answers "No-o-o!" he means _yes_, and in order to stave off
sea-sickness he must be given a line.
[Sidenote: _EDUCATION EVILS_]
Then is Jimmy 'proper all right.' Then does he brighten up. "How many
have us catched?" he asks. The sight of him fishing in the stern-sheets
re-assures me as to his future, about which I am sometimes fearful,
just as some men are depressed by a helpless baby because they foresee,
imaginatively, the poor little creature's life and all possible
troubles before it. When I watch Jimmy in house, rather naughty
perhaps, or when I hear Bessie, fresh from the twaddle that they put
into her head at school, saying, "If Dad'd earn more money, mother, us
could hae a shop an' he could buy me a pi-anno;" or when, as I am out
and about with the boats, a grubby small hand is suddenly slipped into
mine and a joyful chirping voice says, "What be yu 'bout?"--then, and
at a score of other times, I am fearful of what they may be led to do
with Jimmy; fearful lest they may put the little chap to an inland
trade where he is almost bound to become a lesser man than his father,
be removed from the enlarging influence of the sea, and have it given
him as the height of ambition to grow up a dram-drinking or
psalm-smiting, Sunday-top-hatted tradesmen. Then I desire savagely to
have the power of a God, not that I might direct his life--he can sail
his own boat better than I,--but that I might keep the ring clear for
him to fight in, and prevent foul play. What indeed would I not do to
remove some of the guilt of us educated men and women who force our
ideas on people without asking whether they need them, without caring
how maimed, stultified and potent for evil the ideas become in process
of transmission, without seeing that for the age-old wisdom of those
whom we call the uneducated we are substituting a jerry-built
knowledge--got from books--which we only half believe in ourselves? New
lamps for old! The pity of it! The farce!
But when I watch Jimmy fishing, I grow confident that the sea has its
grip on him; that it will drag him to itself as it dragged his father
from the grocery store; that whatever happens, it will always be part
of his life to keep trivialities, meannesses and education from quite
closing in around him.
17
[Sidenote: "_THE FISHER FATHER AND CHILD_"]
_The Fisher Father and Child_
As I pulled the boat across a loppy sea--
The bumping and splashing boat,
With the sail flapping round my head,
And the pile of mackerel amidships ever growing larger and lovelier
in the light--
And the sun rose behind the cliffs to eastward, and the sky became
lemon-yellow
(A graciously coloured veil twixt the earth and all mystery beyond),
And the wavelets sparkled and darted like ten thousand fishes at play
in the ambient dawn,--
It seemed that the sky and the sea and the earth gathered themselves
together,
And became one vast kind eye, looking into the stern of the boat,
At the father and boy.
Navy-blue guernsey, and trousers stained by the sea, scarce hiding
the ribbed muscles;
Tan-red face, the fresh blood showing through;
Blue eyes, all of a flash with fishing and the joy of hauling 'em in;
now on the luff of the sail (out of habit, there being hardly a
sail-full of air), now to wind'ard, and again smiling on the
child;
Big pendulous russet hands, white in the palms from salt water, and
splashed with scales--
Hands that seem implements rather, appearing strangely no part of the
man, but something, like the child, that has grown away from
him and has taken a life of its own--
Strong for a sixteen-foot sweep, delicate to handle the silken snood of
a line--
A man that the winds and the spray have blown on, gnarled and bent to
the sea's own liking,
The Father!
And the boy--
Like delicate dawn to the sunset was the child to his father--
A sturdy slight little figure, as straight as the mast,
A grey and more gently coloured figure, glancing round with the
father's self-same gestures softened, and with childish
trustful sea-blue eyes;
Pattering with naked feet on the stern-sheets, and hauling the fish
with a wary cat-like motion....
O splendid and beautiful pair!
O man of the sea! O child growing up to the sea!
You have given yourselves to the waters, and the waters have given
of their spirit to you,
And I know when you speak that the sea is speaking through you,
And I know when I look at the sea, 'tis the likeness of your souls,
And I know that as I love you, I am loving also the sea--
O splendid and beautiful portions of the sea!
18
[Sidenote: _MRS FINN'S PROFESSIONS_]
Mrs Pinn has put aside her respectful defiance, has ceased addressing
me as _sir_, and turns out to be a most jolly old woman, possessed of
any amount of laughing _camaraderie_. She frankly explains the change
thus: "I used to think yu was reeligious. Yu du look a bit like a
passon [parson] sometimes. Do 'ee know 't?--No, not now; be blow'd if
yu du! Yu'm so wicked as the rest of 'em, _I_ believe, but yu ben't
like they ol' passons. I'll 'llow yu'm better'n they." My own
recollection, however, runs back to the evening when she brought her
damped-down washing round, and I turned the mangle for her. It is
hardish work. 'Tis a wonder how she, an old woman, can do it when, if
births are scarce, she is reduced to taking in washing for a week or
two. Tony calls her the Tough Old Stick. Excellent name! I can picture
her in her cottage up on land, bringing up her long family with much
shouting, much hard common sense, some swearing and a deal of useful
prejudice. Now, in her second youth--not second childhood--she is
mainly a lace-worker and midwife. One night, Tony and myself broke into
her cottage, locked the door behind us and helped ourselves to what
supper we could find--which was pickled beetroot and raw eggs. Grannie
Pinn climbed in upon us through the little window, and afterwards, to
gain breath, she sat down to her lace pillow. Her dexterity was
marvellous. She _threw_ the bobbins about. I could not follow them with
my eyes. She makes stock patterns only; refuses to be taught fresh
patterns at her time of life, and cannot read them up for herself
because she has never learned to read. The butterfly is her
masterpiece. Working from early morning till evening's gossip-time, she
can earn no less than nine pennies a day. What the lace-selling shop
makes out of her, the lace-selling shop does not state.
As a midwife, no doubt, she earns more. She must be full of tonic
sayings. I am told that when her patients are dying, she takes away the
pillow 'so that they can die more proper like,' and also in order that
they may get the dying over quicker. What scenes the Tough Old Stick
have must been present at! Yet she is spryer by far than those who keep
clear of tragedy. When I ask her to tell me truly how many patients she
has killed off in her professional career, her eyes glitter and she
bursts out: "Aw, yu! What chake yu got, to be sure!"
She has her share of professional pride, but nevertheless I should like
to know how many corpses she really has laid out for burial--and what
she thought the while.
Usually she comes in just before supper-time:
"Ain't yu gone yet? I know; yu got some mark or other to Seacombe. Come
on! which o' the young ladies is't? Out wi' it! Which on 'em is't?"
When I tell her that she is the best girl in Seacombe and that I won't
give her the chuck until she finds me a mark as youthful as herself and
a hundred times as rich, she says:
"Then yu'm done! her won't hae nort still, 'cause I an't got nort, an'
a hundred times nort be nothing--he-he-he! I knaws thiccy."
The jokes, 'tis true, are poor. But the Tough Old Stick's enjoyment
franks them all. You may fling a stinging fact in her face; tell her,
if you like, that she could find plenty of marks for herself because,
being old, she will have to die soon and then the poor fellow would be
free again. "I know't!" she says, and flings you back another stinging
fact. Admirable Old Stick! She never flinches at a fact, howsoever
grisly it be.
Above all, she revels in a little mild blasphemy; hardly
blasphemy--imaginary details, say, about hell, in the manner of Mark
Twain. "Aw, my dear soul!" she exclaims. "How yu du go on! Aw, my dear
soul! Yu'm going to hell, sure 'nuff yu be!"
[Sidenote: _AGNOSTICISM_]
But her horror is only a pretence. She does not take such matters
seriously. Indeed, few things have surprised me so much as the
thoroughgoing agnosticism that prevails here. Uncle Jake is the
religious member of the Widger family. For the rest, religion is the
business of the clergy who are paid for it and of those who take it up
as a hobby, including the impertinent persons who thrust hell-fire
tracts upon the fisherfolk. "Us can't 'spect to know nort about it,"
says Tony. "'Tain't no business o' ours. May be as they says; may be
not. It don't matter, that I sees. 'Twill be all the same in a hunderd
years' time when we'm a-grinning up at the daisy roots."
Nevertheless, he is not atheistical, nor even wholly fatalistic. When
his first wife was lying dead, he saw her in a dream with one of her
dead babies in her arms, and he is convinced that that meant something
very spiritual, although what it meant he does not care to enquire. The
agnosticism refers not so much to immortality or the existence of a
God, as to the religions, the nature of the God, the divinity of
Christ, and so on.
"Us don' know nort about that, n'eet does anybody else, I believe, an'
all their education on'y muddles 'em when they comes to weigh up thic
sort o' thing."
[Sidenote: _SPARROWISM_]
If the sparrows themselves had been acquainted with 'Are not two
sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the
ground without your Father,' their attitude towards religion might have
resembled Tony's--a mixture of trust and _insouciance_, neither of
them driven to any logical conclusion and both tempered by fatalism.
"When yu got to die, yu got tu," says Tony, and it makes little
difference to him whether the event has been decreed since the
beginning of time, or whether it is to be decreed at some future date
by a being so remote as God. The thing is, to accept the decree
courageously.
The children go to Sunday School, of course; it is convenient to have
them out of the way while Sunday's dinner is being cooked and the
afternoon snooze being taken. Besides, though the Sunday School
teaching is a fearful hotch-potch of heaven, hell and self-interest,
the tea-fights concerts and picnics connected with it are well worth
going to. But the household religion remains a pure _sparrowism_,
and an excellent creed it is for those of sufficient faith and courage.
Of how the Sunday School teaching is translated by the children into
terms of every day life, we had a fine example two or three weeks ago.
Jimmy came home full of an idea that 'if you don' ast God to stop it,
Satant 'll have 'ee,' and Mrs Widger asked him: "What's the difference
then between God an' Satant?"
"Ther ain't nort."
"Yes, there is. What does God du?"
"God don't do nort unless yu asks Him."
"An' what does Satant du?"
"Oh--I know!--Satant gets into yer 'art, an' gives 'ee belly-ache an'
toothache."
Not many days afterwards, Tommy was being sent to bed for getting his
feet wet. "Yu daring rascal! I'll knock yer head off if yu du it again.
Yu'll die, yu will! An' what'll yu du then?"
"Go to heaven, o' course."
"An' what do you think they'll say to 'ee there? Eh?"
Tommy was puzzled.
"You can ask 'em to send us better weather." I suggested.
"Tell 'ee what I'll do," said Tommy with a prodigiously wise squint.
"I'll take up a buckle-strap to thiccy ol' God, if 'er don't send
better weather, an' then yu won't none on 'ee get sent to bed for wet
feet!"
19
At a corner near here, there is a very blank cottage wall, and in
the centre of it a little window. Behind the closed window, all
day and every day, sits an old woman at her lace pillow. Some
portraits--Rembrandt's especially--give one the impression that a
shutter has suddenly been drawn aside; that behind the shutter we are
allowed to watch for a moment or two a face so full of meaning as to
be almost more than human. The same impression is given me by the old
lace-maker in the window when I pass to and fro, and catch sight of
her face so still, her hands so active, her bobbins so swift and,
because of the intervening glass, so silent. How nervously the hands
speed with the bobbins, how very deliberately with the pins that make
the pattern! How hardly human it is!
One evening, however, the window was open, children stood round in a
group, and I heard the small click of the bobbins through the still
air. The children were laughing, delighted with the old woman's
swiftness. She that had been a picture, was become a living being.
No doubt, she is working at her lace pillow now. She has several mouths
to feed. I wonder does she earn as much as Grannie Pinn?
20
[Sidenote: _CONGERING_]
This long time I have wished to go congering all night, but have been
unable to do so for want of a mate. It is more than one man's work to
haul a boat up the beach in daytime, let alone the middle of the night
or at early dawn. If the _Moondaisy_'s old crew was here....
Ah! those were days--when George and the Little Commodore and the Looby
and myself used to row out with a swinging stroke at sundown to
Elm-beech-tree[13] and Conger Pool. The choosing of the mark; the
careful heaving of the sling-stone; the blinn, skate, pollack,
spider-crabs, and conger eels, we used to catch; the fights with the
conger in the dark or by the light of matches or of an old lantern that
blew out when it was most wanted; the absurd way the crew turned up
their noses at my nice tomato sandwiches and gobbled down stringy
corned beef; their quiet slumber round the stern seats and my solitary
watch amidships over all the lines, and at the sea-fire trailing in the
flood-tide; their crustiness when I awoke them to shift our mark and
their jubilation when a whopper was to be gaffed; the utter
peacefulness of the night after they had gone to sleep again; our merry
row home and hearty beaching of the boat; the cup of hot tea.... It is
all clean gone. George is in the Navy and the Little Commodore is under
a glass box of waxen flowers up on land. Did I bring back a catch
alone, perhaps the old boat would be stove in.
[13] A spot found by getting an elm-tree on the cliffs in a line
with a beech-tree up on land.
Tony, however, has been saying that, on the rough ground a mile or so
out, good-sized conger can be caught by day. On Saturday, therefore, I
collected gear from the Widger linhays, borrowed a painter and anchor,
and, the wind being easterly, I luffed the _Moondaisy_ out a mile
and a half south-east. There I dropped anchor.
Tony had given me two mackerel for bait, one fresh and the other
somewhat otherwise; that is to say it was merely fishmonger
fresh--quite good enough for eating but hardly good enough for conger
who, though they have a reputation for feeding on dead men, will only
touch the freshest of bait. With the fresh mackerel I caught one large
conger (it ripped in the sail a hole that took Mam Widger an hour to
mend) and two dog-fish. Nothing at all would bite at the stale
mackerel. The easterly sea was making a little and skatting in over the
bows. Besides which, the _Moondaisy_ began to drag her anchor. My
hand to jaw-and-tail fight with the conger had made me a little
unsteady; had made my muscles feel as if they might string up with
cramp; which is not good for stepping a heavyish mast and sailing a
boat. So I stepped the mast and set sail, to make sure, and ran
homewards with the wind almost abeam.
We decided to save the conger for Sunday's dinner.
Mrs Widger made a most savoury stew of it, and when Tony came in as
usual, asking, "Be dinner ready, Missis?" she placed the stew on the
table.
Tony's face fell.
"Be this my dinner, Annie?"
"Iss, for sure."
"_Thees?_"
[Sidenote: _HOT BAKE_]
"What d'yu think then?"
"_Thees!_ Wer's yer baked spuds?"
"Do' ee gude to hae a change. Ther's some cold taties to the larder if
you likes to get 'em."
"_Thees!_ Why, I wish thees yer conger hadn't never been catched!"
"G'out!--Now then, you childern...."
Tony picked over the fish, going _Tsch!_ for every bone his fingers
came across.
"Thee't look so sulky as an ol' cow," said Mam Widger.
"Well, what do 'ee think? Thees yer.... Did 'ee ever see the like
o'it?"
Presently it occurred to him to peep inside the oven. His face
brightened. "I know'd her 'ouldn't du me out o' me Sunday dinner. Bring
it out, Missis. Sharp! Gie thiccy stuff to the cat. Baked spuds! What's
Sunday wi'out baake? 'Tain't no day at all! I couldn' ha' put away an
hour after thic."
For the remainder of the meal, when Tony was not eating, he was
singing; and several times he chucked Mam Widger under the chin, and
she retorted: "G'out, yu cupboard-loving cat!"
21
This is the recipe for baked dinner:
Turn out the children and turn on the oven. Into the middle of a large
baking tin place a saucer piled up with a mixture of herbs (mainly
parsley), one sliced onion and breadcrumbs, the whole made sticky with
a morsel of dripping. Round about the saucer put a layer of large
peeled potatoes, and on top of all, the joint. Set the baking tin on
the hob and into it pour just enough warm water to run over the rim of
the saucer. Soon after the water boils, transfer the whole to a fairly
quick oven. When the meat is brown outside, slow the oven down. Serve
piping hot from the oven, placing the tin on a folded newspaper and the
joint, if large, on a hot plate.
To dish up hot bake in the ordinary way would be to let the nature out
of it. The smell is a wonderful blend, most hunger-provoking. True, the
joint, unless pork or veal, is apt to be a little tough, but the taties
are a delicious shiny brown, their soft insides soaked through and
through with gravy. Bake is a meal in itself. Pudding thereafter is a
work of supererogation--almost an impertinence.
Mrs Widger's cookery, though sometimes a little greasy for one who does
no great amount of manual labour and undergoes no excessive exposure,
is far from bad.
[Sidenote: _FOOD_]
Food reformers; patrons of cookery schools where they try, happily in
vain, to teach the pupils to prepare dishes no working man would
adventure on; physical degenerates who fear that unless the working man
imitates them, he will become as degenerate as they are, and quite
unfit to do the world's rough work--forget that whereas they have only
one staple food, if that, namely bread, the poor man has several staple
dishes which he likes so well that he is loth to touch any other.
One day we did have at my suggestion a rather fanciful supper. Tony
tasted, ate, and cleared the dish. Then he asked: "An't 'ee got nort to
make a meal on, Missis? no cold meat nor spuds?" He believes in the
theory that good digestion waits on appetite rather than on digestible
or pre-digested foods; that the meal which makes a man's mouth water is
the best to eat; and that solid foods give solid strength. And if the
same dish can make his mouth water nearly every day in the week, how
much more fortunate is he than fickle gourmets!
When I first came here, I used periodically to run after the
flesh-pots. I used to sneak off to tea at a confectioner's. Now I
seldom feed out of house--simply because I don't want to. We start the
day about sunrise with biscuits and a cup of tea which I make and take
up myself. (Mam Widger and Tony look so jolly in bed, her indoor
complexion and white nightgown beside his blue-check shirt and
magnificently tanned face, that I've dubbed them 'The Babes in the
Wood.') For breakfast, we have fried mackerel or herrings, when they
are in season; otherwise various mixtures of tough bacon and perhaps
eggs (children half an egg each) and bubble and squeak.[14] Sometimes
the children prefer kettle-broth,[15] but they never fail to clamour for
'jam zide plaate.' Bake, hot or cold, and occasionally (mainly for me,
I think) a plain pudding, or on highdays a pie, make up the dinner that
is partaken of by all. But before the pudding is eaten, Tony and myself
are already looking round to see that the kettle is on a hot part of
the fire, and when the children are gone off to school, Mam Widger
throws us out a cup o' tay each, with now and then a newly baked
gentry-cake. Tony, who would like meat or a fry of fish for tea, has
usually to content himself with bread and butter. The children go off
to bed with a biscuit or a small chunk of cheese, and we may eat the
same with pickles, or else fried or boiled fish if there is any in the
house.... Supper, in fact, is the meal of many inventions, including
all sorts of crabs, little lobsters, and such unsaleable fish as
dun-cow [dog-fish], conger, skate or weever, together with
dree-hap'orth, or a pint, of stout and bitter from the Alexandra. Just
before turning in, Tony and myself have a glass of hot grog.
[14] Fried mixed vegetables.
[15] Bread broth with butter, or dripping, and water instead of
milk. A dash of skim milk is sometimes added.
[Sidenote: _DRINK_]
From such a list of our fare, it would seem as if we over-ate ourselves
as consistently as the _en pension_ visitors at the hotels. (Mrs
Widger, who has done a good deal of waiting, frequently tells us how
manfully the visitors endeavour to eat their money's worth at the
_tables d'hote_). Tony's appetite--his habit of pecking at the food
after a meal is over and the way he, and the children too if they have
the chance, mop up pickles and Worcester sauce--is a continual joy to
me. We do not drink much alcohol. On the other hand, the children are
curiously discouraged from drinking cold water. Skim milk, tea, stout,
ale, or even very dilute spirit is considered better for them--a
prejudice which dates probably from the days before a pure water
supply. Since, however, I who am known to possess a contemptible
digestion, have been seen to drink down several glasses of cold water
daily, and to take no hurt, the ban on it has been more or less
removed.
The above-mentioned goodies are distributed, it is true, over a good
many days in the year, and I fancy that my being here drives up the
scale of living somewhat. At all events, we do not go short. Waste on
the one side, mainly arising from small eyes being bigger than small
stomachs, is more than counterbalanced by a wonderful ability to
swallow down gristle, rinds and hard bits without apparent harm.
Granfer, indeed, says that he 'wouldn't gie a penny a pound for tender
meat that don't give 'ee summut to bite at.' The children clamour
always for 'jam zide plaate.' Without that or the promise of it, they
often refuse to eat anything. They do not believe me when I tell them
that they have more food than ever I did at their age; that I had to
eat a piece of bread and a potato for each slice of meat; that jam and
butter together was not thought good for me except on birthdays and
Sundays. "G'out!" they say. "Ye lie!" Sometimes their mother is
irritated into calling them 'cawdy li'l devils.' It does seem almost a
pity that they have not had any of the discipline of starvation. The
Yarty children who go half the day, and only too often whole days, on
empty stomachs, are certainly as happy as ours: they never cry because
dinner is not so good as they expect, and if we give them half a pie
their earth is straightway heavenly. Tony thinks now and then how hard
it will go with his children if the money runs short, as it has done
and may easily do again. "I mind the time," he says, "when I used to
come in hungry and kneel down beside me mother wi' me head across her
lap, crying! Her crying too; mother 'cause her hadn't got nort to eat
in house, and me 'cause her didn't get nort, and 'cause her cuden't get
nort, not even half an ounce o' tay, not havin' no money in house to
get it with. An' then I used to go out an' try an' earn something,
twopence maybe, just to stay us on."
And that it is which has helped to make Tony the man he is.
22
[Sidenote: _A SUDDEN STORM_]
Seldom does one catch the exact moment of an abrupt change in nature.
Yesterday, however, I watched a wonderful thing--the oncoming of a
sudden storm.
Uncle Jake had been holding forth on the beach. "Us ain't had no
equinoctial gales thees year, not proper like us used to. This season's
going to break up sudden and wi' thunder, an' when it du, look out! I'd
rather be here now than out in the offing, for all the sea's so calm.
Ah!" pointing to a dinghy that was shoving off the beach, "they bwoys
'ould laugh in me faace if I was to go an' say, 'Don' go. 'Tisn't fit.'
But _I_ knows."
I left him gazing seaward over the stern of his drifter, and walked up
to the Western Cliffs. The air, scarcely a breath from the north-east,
was oppressive in the extreme; very warm, too, for autumn. The sea was
almost unruffled; the sky to westward magnificently heaped up with what
Uncle Jake calls wool-packs. A fog crept over all the southern horizon,
dimming with its misty approach the eastern headlands and making the
sea like a dulled mirror. I felt, rather than heard, distant thunder.
The fog lifted. It hung low in the sky, a sulky blue cloud. Beneath it,
the sea, still unruffled, was of a dense blue that, so it seemed, would
have been black altogether but for its transparency and the refracted
light within it.
Going on, I walked for some distance beneath a semi-arch of the
wind-bowed lichenous thorns that grow upon the cliff-edge.
Without any warning--maybe there was a little hum in the air--a
leafless bough, like a withered arm with its sinews ragged out, bent
over across my path. The sea gulls screamed and screeched; they flocked
out from the cliff-ledges, and with still wings they towered up into
the sky. Every twig and leaf began to play a diabolic symphony. Where
the hedge ended I was blown back upon my heels.--It was more than half
a gale of wind from the south-east.
The horizon was become clear; jagged like a saw. Divergent strings,
marvellously interlaced on the water, streamed in with the wind,
broadened into ribands fluttering over green-grey patches. The whole
sea trembled, as if life were being breathed into it. White spots,
curling wavelets, dotted it; then broke abroad as white-horses in full
mad landward career. The whistle in the grass rose louder and shriller;
the boughs bent further and let fly their autumn foliage horizontally
into the wind; the gulls screeched wildly and more wildly; the chafing
of the surf below took possession of the air....
[Sidenote: _UNCLE JAKE ON FOOLS_]