VII

SEACOMBE,

_November_.

1

Whilst the train was drawing up at the platform, I noticed the people

moving and looking downwards as if dogs were running wild amongst them.

Then I saw two whitish heads bobbing about in the crowd. It was Jimmy

and another boy come to meet me.

We gave the luggage to the busman, and walked on down.

"Tommy's gone tu Plymouth."

"What for?"

"They'm going to cut his eyes out an' gie 'en spectacles."

"When did he go?"

A rather sulky silence....

Then: "Us thought 'ee was going to ride down. Dad said as yu'd be sure

tu."

"'Tisn't far to walk, Jimmy...."

"Us be tired."

Alack! I had done the wrong thing. Their little festivity, that was to

have made them the envy of 'all they boys tu beach,' had fallen flat.

They had expected to ride down 'like li'l gentry-boys.' However, we

bought oranges, and then I was taken to see yesterday's fire, and was

told how Tony had rushed into the blazing house to rescue a carpet 'an'

didn' get nort for it.'

Tony himself came downstairs from putting away an hour in bed. "I'd ha'

come up to meet 'ee," he said sleepily, "if anybody'd a reminded me

o'it. Us an't done nort to the fishing since you went away."

"An' yu an't chopped up to-morrow morning's wude nuther!" added Mrs

Widger.

Grannie Pinn came in at tea-time. We invited her to sit down and have a

cup. "Do 'ee think I an't got nothing to eat at home?" she asked.

"Well, I have, then!--Ay," she continued, bobbing her head

sententiously, "yu got a mark in Seacombe, else yu wuden't be down yer

again so sune. That's what 'tis--a mark! I knows, sure nuff. Come on!

who be it now? What's her like, eh?"

She cannot understand how any young unmarried man can be without his

sweetheart. Everybody according to her, must have a mark, or be in

search of one. I told her with the brutality which delights her factual

old mind, that if she herself had been a little less antique and

poverty-stricken....

"There! if I don't come round and box yer yers. Yu'm al'ays ready wi'

yer chake."

[Sidenote: _A MARK_]

Then I offered her five _per cent._ of the lady's fortune, if she

would find me a mark with unsettled money. Though she laughed it off,

she was not a little scandalized by my levity. The Tough Old Stick has

not outlived her memory of romance. Indeed, I think she holds to it all

the tighter for her hardheadedness in every-day affairs.

Midway through tea, Straighty crept into the kitchen. "What do _yu_

want?" shouted Grannie Pinn. "Bain't there enough kids yer now?"

Straighty stood in the centre of the kitchen, sucking three fingers

and looking shyly at me from beneath her tousled tow-coloured hair.

"You've not forgotten me, Straighty?" I asked. "You're not frightened

of me, are you?"

"Go an' speak to 'en proper," commanded Grannie Pinn. "Wer's yer

manners, Dora?"

"_Yu_ didn' speak to me proper, Grannie Pinn! Wer's yours?"

"Aw, my dear soul! Now du 'ee shut up wi' yer chake!"

Straighty remained sucking her fingers in the middle of the kitchen.

She seemed about to cry. Quite suddenly, her eyes brightened. She

glided over to me, put her wet fingers round my neck ("Dora!" from Mrs

Widger), and gave me a big kiss on the chin. Then she told me all about

everything, sitting with her head on my shoulder in the old courting

chair.

A tiny little episode, I grant; but very sweet.

"That's your mark?" Grannie Pinn shouted. "You'll hae tu wait for she!"

Straighty is established as my mark, and takes her duties, as she has

learnt to conceive them, with amusing seriousness. She will not let me

go out through the Square without being told where I am off to, nor let

me return in house until I tell her where I have been. At the beginning

of every meal we hear her creeping up the passage; see her yellow hair

against the door-post. By the end of the meal she has summoned up

courage to claim a kiss. "Now be off tu your mother!" says Mrs Widger.

2

Mrs Widger has let the back bedroom to a young married couple possessed

of a saucer-eyed baby that cries lustily whenever its mother is out of

its sight. How they succeed in living, sleeping, baby-tending and doing

their minor cookery in the one pokey little room, already half filled

by the bedstead, is difficult to understand. They do it. We see little

of them, except just when we had rather see nothing at all.

For dinner and the subsequent cup o' tay, Mam Widger allows one hour.

But usually, before even the pudding is out of the oven, first one of

us, then another, glances round to make sure that the kettle is well on

the fire.

[Sidenote: _MRS PERKINS_]

Nowadays, however, when the kettle is beginning to sing, Mrs Perkins,

the baby in her arms, comes downstairs and proceeds to cook for her

husband a couple of small chops or a mess of meat-shreds and bubble and

squeak. She stirs and chatters; she holds forth on the baby's beauty

and goodness, its health, its father's love of it--and, in short, she

talks to us as if we were delighted to see her and her baby. Tony's

good manners triumph comically over his desire to get his cup o' tay

and put away an hour up over. (He likes to take every chance of making

up for wakeful nights at sea.) We all wish she would go quickly.

Meanwhile, we feign an interest in what blousy, skirt-gaping,

slop-slippered, enthusiastic maternity has to say.

And when she does go, it is with a most joyful haste that we move the

kettle to the very hottest part of the fire.

3

The family hubbub over Tommy's stay in the Plymouth Eye Infirmary has

hardly died down yet. Recognizing with uncommon good sense that his

double squint would bar him from the Navy or Army (he shows an

inclination towards the latter), Mrs Widger took him to Plymouth; and

on hearing that an operation would cure him, she did not hesitate, did

not bring him home to think about it; she left him there. Then.... What

a buzz! The child is to return very thin. Mrs Widger's cousin declares

loudly that she would rather lead her boy about blind (he squints

excessively) than let him go to one o' they places. Tony says, "Aye!

they may feed 'en on food of a better quality like, after the rate, but

he won't get done like he is at home." Several times daily he wants to

know how long they will keep Tommy there, and when Mrs Widger replies,

six weeks, he asks in a woe-begone voice: "Do 'ee think 'er'll know his

dad when 'er comes home again?"

All of which is easy to laugh at.

No doubt hospitals are a godsend to the poor, immediately if not

ultimately. At the same time, it cannot be said that the prejudice

against them is wholly unreasonable. Poor people declare that they are

starved in hospital, and it is, in fact, now recognized in dietetics

that comparatively innutritious food, eaten with gusto, is better

assimilated than the most scientifically chosen but unpalatable

nutriment. A man, a poor man especially, can be half starved or at all

events much thinned, on good food, who would do well on the habitual

coarse fare that he enjoys. His life is a long adventure in a land

where every other turning leads to starvation, but his adventurousness

seldom extends to new sorts of food.

[Sidenote: _HOSPITALS_]

No one is so depressed by strange surroundings as the average poor man

or woman. (Children get on much better.) Very likely he has never been

alone, has never slept away from some relative or friend, the whole of

his life. The unfamiliarity and precise routine of hospitals, the faces

and ways all strange, are capable not only of greatly intensifying a

man's sufferings, but even of retarding his recovery.

Hospitals must necessarily be governed by two main conditions:--(1) The

need of doing the greatest good to the greatest number; (2) The

advancement of medical science and experience. Under (1) the

overpressure on medical skill and time is bound to diminish tact and

sympathy. Under (2) the serious or interesting cases are apt--as

everyone who has mixed with hospital staffs knows very well--to receive

attention not disproportionate to the nature of the malady, but

disproportionate to the bodily, and particularly to the mental,

suffering. The poor man can appreciate sympathy better than skill. He

may not know how ill he is, but he knows how much he suffers. He is

quick to detect and to resent preferential treatment. From the point of

view of the independent poor, hospitals are far from what they might

be. They are last straws for drowning men, useful sometimes, but best

avoided.[17]

[17] I trust I make it plain that these statements imply no

general disparagement of hospitals. Whether or no they do the

best possible under the circumstances is not to be discussed

shortly or by the present writer. Since penning the above, it has

fallen to me to take a patient to the out-department of one of

the great London hospitals. We had some time to wait, with very

many others, on long wooden benches. I cannot express the almost

unbearable depression, the sense of ebbing vitality, the feeling

of being jammed in a machine, which took possession of me, who

was quite well. And I wish I could adequately express my

admiration of the visiting surgeon's manipulation of his delicate

instruments and his management of the patient.

[Sidenote: _JACKS THE RIPPER_]

Jacks is a very energetic young country surgeon. He is keen on his work

and will procure admission to the hospital for any operative case. But

he finds it by no means easy to get his patients there; for he is so

keen on his work that he treats their feelings carelessly; hustles them

through an operation; pooh-poohs their fear of anaesthetics and the

knife. Jacks is well disliked by the poor. He has to live, and

therefore he has to cultivate a professional manner and to dance

attendance on wealthy hypochrondriacal patients whom otherwise he would

probably send to the devil. The poor people have told him to his face

that he runs after the rich and cuts about the poor; and they have

nicknamed him _Jacks the Ripper_.

Tony would have to be very far gone before he would willingly go into a

hospital. Just now, between the mackerel and herring seasons, he is fat

and sleepy, very sleek for him. Rheumatic fever in boyhood and

neglected colds have left him rather deaf, and subject to noises in the

head and miscellaneous bodily pains. He is 'a worriter' by nature.

"When I gets bothered," he says, "I often feels as if summut be busted

in me head." As the herring season comes round, so will Tony 'hae the

complaints again,' and few will pity a man who always looks so well. A

few years back, Mrs Widger procured for his deafness some quack

treatment--which did do him good;--but he himself had little faith in

it, and did not persevere. Like the mothers who rejoice in delicate

children rather than feed them properly and send them early to bed,

Tony prefers to think his ailments constitutional, a possession of his,

a curse of fate, which flatters him, so to speak, by singling him out

for its attentions. In a couple of years' time, when he comes out of

the Royal Naval Reserve, he will have the option of accepting L50 down

at once, or of waiting till he is sixty for a pension of four shillings

a week. Mrs Widger understands perfectly that unless he wants to buy

boats and gear--unless, in other words, he can make the L50

productive--he had much better wait for the pension and be sure of a

roof over his head when he is past work. Tony, however, will probably

take the lump sum. He fears he may die and get nothing at all. He does

not _feel_ that he will never see sixty, but he is of opinion that

he will not, and sixty to a man of his temperament is such a long way

hence. He thinks as little as possible of old age. "Aye!" he

says--almost chants, so moved is he,--"the likes o' us slaves an'

slaves all our life, an' us never gets no for'arder. Like as us be when

we'm young, so us'll be at the end o'it all. Come the time when yu'm

past work, an' yu be done an' wearied out, then all yer slavin's gone

for nort. Tis true what I says. I dunno what to think--but 'tis the way

o'it. 'Tain't right like. 'Tain't right!"

4

"Go shrimping wi' the setting-nets t'night, I reckon," said Uncle Jake.

"Tide be low 'tween twelve and one o'clock. Jest vitty, that."

It was one of those evenings, wind WSW., when the sea and sky look

stormier than they are, or will be. Uncle Jake stood on the very edge

of the sea wall, his hands in his pockets, his torn jumper askew, and

his old cap cocked over one ear. From time to time he turned half round

to deride a dressy visitor, or for warmth's sake twisted his body about

within his clothing, or shrugged his shoulders humorously with a, "'Tis

a turn-out o'it!" The seine net had just been shot from the beach for

less than a sovereign's worth of fish--to be divided, one third for the

owner of the net and the remainder among the seven men who had lent a

hand.

[Sidenote: _PRAWNING_]

"Coo'h!" Uncle Jake exclaimed. "_'Tis_ a crib here! Nort 't all doing.

Not like 't used tu be. I mind when yu cude haul in a seine so full

as.... Might pick up a shilling or tu t'night shrimping, if they damn

visitors an' bloody tradesmen an't been an' turned the whole o' Broken

Rocks up an' down. _I_ tells 'em o'it!"

"Shrimps or prawns, d'you mean?"

"Why, prawns! Us calls it shrimping hereabout. You knows that. There's

prawns there if yu knows where to look, but not like 't used to be.

On'y they fules don' know where to look. An' they don' see Jake at it,

an' I never tells 'em what I gets nor what I sells at; an' so they says

I don' never du nort. I'd like to see they hae tu work waist-deep in

water every night for a week when they'm sixty-five. An' in the winter

tu!--If yu'm minded to come t'night, yu be up my house 'bout 'leven

o'clock, an' I'll fetch me nets from under cliff if they b----y b----rs

o' boys an't been there disturbin' of 'em."

Uncle Jake's cottage looks outside like a small cellar that has somehow

risen above the ground and then has been thatched with old straw and

whitewashed. Inside, it is a shadowy place, stacked up high with

sailing and fishing gear, flotsam, jetsam, balks of wood and all the

odds and ends that he picks up on his prowlings along the coast. With

tattered paper screens, he has partitioned off, near the fire and

window, a small and very crowded cosy-corner. There he was sitting when

I arrived; bread, butter, onions, sugar and tea--his staple foods--on

the round table beside him, and his prawn-nets on the flagstones at his

feet. Three cats glided about among the legs of the table and chairs,

on the lookout to steal. Using the gentle violence that cats love from

those they trust, Uncle Jake flung them one by one to the other side of

the room. They returned, purring, to snatch at the none too fresh berry

[eggs] of spider-crab with which the nets were being baited.

The shallow small-meshed setting-nets are about two feet in diameter at

the top. Stretched taut from side to side of the rim are two doubled

strings or _thirts_--which cross at right angles directly above the

centre of the net, and into which, near the middle, the four pieces of

bait are ingeniously and simply fixed by little sliders on the thirts

themselves. The whole apparatus hangs level from a yard or more of

stout line, at the upper end of which is a small stick, a stumpy

fishing rod, so to speak, often painted white so that it may be easily

found as it lies on the dark rocks. Uncle Jake's net-sticks, however,

are anything but white. Capable almost of finding them with his eyes

shut, he would sooner lose his nets altogether than let whitened sticks

point out to other people the pools which he alone knows.

We put the nets into a couple of sacks and shouldered them. A long

light pole was placed into my hand. "Don't yu never leave your pole

behind. Yu'll want it, sure 'nuff, afore this night's over."

So we set out. One by one the cats who were following, left us to go

back home. We did not walk towards the sea. On the contrary we went

inland, through some roads with demure sleeping villas on either side.

"If they bloody poachers," Uncle Jake explained, "see'd us going

straight towards the sea, they'd follow. _I_ knows 'em! They takes away

the livelihood o' the likes o' us an' sells it. Sells it--an' says 'tis

sport! I leads 'em a dance sometimes. I goes along a narrow ledge

that's jest under water, wi' ten or twelve feet depth on either side.

On they comes a'ter me. 'Uncle Jake knows where to go,' they says. And

in _they_ goes--not knowing the place like I du--head over heels an' a

swim for it! O Lor'! they don' like it when I tells 'em they better go

home an' tumble into dry clothes. Yu shude hear the language they spits

out o' their mouths 'long wi' the salt water. Horrible, tu be sure!"

[Sidenote: _SETTING-NETS_]

Broken Rocks, a playground for children by day, look wild and strange

on a night when clouds are driving across the moon, when the cliffs

fade into darkness high above the beach, and everything not black is

grey, except where the white surf beats upon the outermost ledge. Then

Broken Rocks have personality. A sinister spirit rises out of them with

the heave of the sea. It is as if some black mood, some great monotony

of strife, were closing in around one. On the sea wall, in the

sunshine, I used to wonder why Uncle Jake calls Broken Rocks a terr'ble

place. Now I do not. He works there by night.

We peered out from the beach underneath the cliffs. Nobody had

forestalled us. Uncle Jake was pleased. He laughed hoarsely, and the

echo of it was not unlike the natural noises of the place. "Us'll make

a start there," he said, pointing to a ledge between which and

ourselves was a wide sheet of water. "Yu follow me an' feel for a

foothold wi' your pole. _Don't_ yu step afore yu've felt."

Into the water he went; seemed, indeed, to run across it. "Be 'ee wet?"

he asked when I stepped out the other side.

"Half way up my thighs!"

"Yu hadn't no need to get wet so far up as your knees. I didn't. An' yu

might ha' gone in there over your head. Yu use your pole, skipper. Feel

afore yu steps. I'll set 'ee your two nets for a beginning."

With his pole he felt the depth of the water around the ledge. Then he

dropped the nets down, edging them carefully under the overhanging

weed, and placed the sticks on the rock above. "Don't yu forget where

yu sets your nets. Yu won't _see_'em. An' when yu hauls up, go gently,

like so, else off goes all they master prawns, d'rec'ly they feels a

jerk.... Leave 'em down a couple o' minutes.... But there, yu knows,

don' 'ee? Us won't catch much till the tide turns. They prawns knows

when 'tis beginning to flow so well as yu an' me. Yu work this yer, an'

along easterly. I be going farther out."

[Sidenote: _PRAWNS_]

When I hauled up my first net I heard the faint clicketty noise--like

paper scratching metal--of three or four prawns jumping about inside.

My hand had to chase them many times round the net. One jumped over;

one fell through. Nothing is more difficult to withdraw from a net than

prawns, except it be a lobster, flipping itself about, hardly visible,

and striking continually with its nippers. There was a lobster in the

second net. It had to go into the same pocket as the prawns. It was

something of an adventure afterwards to put a hand into the pocketful

of lobster claws and prawn spines.

Working eastward and outward, plunging in to the water or sliding with

bumps and bruises off a rock, I must have passed Deadman's Rock, Danger

Gutter, Broken Rock and the Wreckstone. (Things of the sea nearly

always take name from their evil aspects.) Uncle Jake could have told

me at any moment exactly where I was.

At last, near the surf, I saw in front of me a flat table-rock,

standing up alone, and as I descended towards the foot of it, a high

black rocky archway became plain. Broad-leaved oarweed covered it like

giant hair, and hung drooping into the deep black pool beneath. The

moonlight glinted on the oarweed. The pool, though darkly calm, ebbed

and flowed silently with the waves outside. I recognized the place. It

was Hospital Rock--the rock the little boats strike on because it is

smooth on top and the waves do not break over it very much. I half

expected the ugly head of a great conger to look out at me from the

pool. As I lay flat on the rock to drop my nets, the rattle and roar of

the sea beyond, vibrating through the solid stone, the whistle of the

wind through the downhanging oarweed, sounded like an orchestra of the

mad damn'd.

I caught nothing there, and was not sorry. The place was too eerie to

stay in long. "Ah!" said Uncle Jake when we met again on the inner

reef, "I've knowed they amateurs run straight off home when they've

a-found theirselves under Hospital. A terr'ble place! Yu knows now. Did

'ee set your nets there? Eh?"

He took some fresh bait from his prawn bag and fixed it in the thirts

of my nets. "'Tis nearly over," he said, "but jest yu try that, an' if

they'm there that'll hae 'em. There's no bait like that there when yu

can get it, on'y nobody knows o'it."

The nature of that bait I shall not divulge, any more than I shall name

the place where Uncle Jake goes to play with the young ravens in the

spring. Somebody might catch his prawns; somebody would shoot his

ravens. We had caught about two hundred prawns between us, a few

lobsters and some wild-crabs. As we walked homewards, the three cats

came down the lane, one by one, to welcome Uncle Jake.

[Sidenote: _EAST WITH A SKIM-NET_]

Next day we sailed east in the _Moondaisy_. Uncle Jake straddled the

pools and lifted the heavy stones. Then in a skim-net,[18] with

marvellous dexterity, he caught the almost invisible prawns as they

darted away. He dragged lobsters out of holes, and cursed the

neighbouring villagers who had been down to the shore after crabs and

had disturbed his favourite stones. He knows how each one ought to lie;

he even keeps the seaweed on some of them trimmed to its proper length.

"But 'tain't like 't used to be," he says.

[18] Like a landing net, but shallower and with a shorter handle.

He has almost given up going to sea for fish; some say because he will

not take the trouble; but I think it is because he loves his rocks and

cliffs so well. No one knows how much by night and day he haunts the

wilder stretches of shore, nor how many miles he trudges in a week. But

the gulls know him well, and will scream back to him when he calls. His

laugh has something of the gulls' cry in it. I have heard it remarked

that when his time comes (no sign of it yet) he will be found one

morning dead among his familiar rocks. He is acquainted with death

there. He has borne home on his shoulder by night the body of a woman

who had fallen from the cliffs above; and again a negro that had washed

ashore. With a little self-control one might have carried the woman all

right, but the drowned nigger.... Imagine his face in the darkness--his

eyes! Only a man with greatness in him, or a very callous man, could

have brought such a corpse home, all along under the crumbling cliffs;

and Uncle Jake is certainly not callous.

5

"Let 'em try any o' their tricks on me! They can turn out the likes o'

us all right, I s'pose. But I can tell 'em what I thinks on 'em, here's

luck. Thank God I don't live in no tradesman's house, an' can deal

where I likes. Not that I shouldn't anyway...."

Grannie Pinn's shrill angry voice pierced the kitchen door. The

occasion was a mothers' gossiping; the subject, a kind of boycott that

is practised in Seacombe. On the table there was a jug of ale and stout

and an hospitably torn-open bag of biscuits. Around it sat Grannie

Pinn--bolt upright in the courting chair, with her hands folded--Mrs

Meer and Mam Widger. The feathers in Grannie Pinn's hat shook like a

bush on the cliff-edge. All of them looked as if they felt a vague

responsibility for the right conduct of the world. In short, they

looked political.

[Sidenote: _POOR MAN v. TRADESMAN_]

The poor people here live in small colonies scattered behind the main

street and among the villas, in little blocks of old neglected

property, some of which has been bought up by tradesmen. So much of the

former village spirit still survives, and so many of the tradesmen have

but recently risen from poorer circumstances, that between some of the

oldest and the youngest of them, and the workmen, there is even yet a

rather mistrustful fellowship. They call each other, Jim, Dick, Harry

and so on--over glasses, at all events. The growth of the class spirit,

as opposed to the old village spirit, can be seen plainly when Bessie

returns from school, saying: "Peuh! Dad's only a fisherman. Why can't

'er catch more fish an' get a little shop an' be a gen'leman?" Seacombe

tradesmen have been withdrawing into a class of their own--the class of

'not real gen'lemen'--and have been showing a tendency to act together

against the rest of the people, and to form rings for the purpose of

keeping shops empty or prices up. Nobody minds their bleeding visitors.

That is what God sends visitors for; and besides, the season is so

short. But when they began to overcharge their fellow townsmen, in

summer because it was the season and in winter because it wasn't the

season, the poor people revolted, and amid tremendous hubbub, thunders

of talk and lightnings of threat, a co-operative store was opened. Then

did the tradesmen remind the poor of old family debts, legacies from

hard times. Then did the poor say: "Very well, us'll hae our own store

and bakery, and pay cash down to ourselves." Unable to obtain the

tenancy of a shop, they bought one. They refused to raise the price of

bread. They laughed at advertisements which professed to point out the

fallacies of all co-operation. They succeeded, but the class difference

was widened and clinched--poor man _versus_ tradesman.

Grannie Pinn, Mrs Meer and Mam Widger were reckoning up the number of

people who have been turned out of their cottages, or are under notice

to quit, for neglecting to deal with their tradesmen landlords.

Their indignation having found vent, they went on to talk of Virgin

Offwill, who has acquired celebrity by living alone in a cottage on no

one knows what, by sleeping in an armchair before the fire (when she

can afford one), and by never washing. Sometime last month, Virgin sent

for Dr Jacks because, so she said, she was wished [bewitched]; and she

would not let him go until he threatened to report the state of her

house to the medical officer of health.

[Sidenote: _GOD SAVE--THE DINNER_]

The tale of Virgin Offwill was capped by another--that of old Mrs

Widworthy. Several years ago (these gossips have long memories) she

received a postal order from her son together with an invitation to

visit him in London. The post arrived after her man had gone to work.

She did not wait; she sent out a neighbour's child to change the order,

packed her few things in a basket, and went off to her son by the

midday train. On the table she left a note:

"Widworthy, I am gone to London. Your dinner is in the saucepan. I

shall be back directly."

There was loud laughter in the kitchen; another round of stout and ale;

then silence. The mothers fidgeted, each after her own manner,

meditatively. In all the world, and Seacombe, there seemed nothing to

talk about--or too much.

"Have 'ee heard ort lately of Ned Corry?" asked Grannie Pinn with a

delightful mixture of gusto and propriety. "Have 'er still got Dina wi'

'en?"

"Yes, I think."

"An' his wife tu?"

Bessie burst into the room. Neither Tony nor Mrs Widger approve of

discussing the intimate humanities before children, so Bessie was

allowed to fling her news to us unchecked. "Mother, Miss Mase says I

can leave school so soon as yu've found me a place. Then I'll hae some

money o' my own earnings, won't I?"

"Yu'll bring it to me, same as I had to what I earned, an' yu'll stay

on to school till I thinks vitty. You'm not fit for a gen'leman's

house."

"Yes, I be. I can work. That's what yu'm paid for, ain't it?"

"How many cups an' saucers have yu smashed this week?"

"Have they learned 'ee all yu wants to know up to school?" inquired

Grannie Pinn quietly, but with a twinkle at the company.

"They an't learned me to play the pi-anno. That's what I wants now. If

Dad 'd get one, _I_'d play."

"Have they learned 'ee to cook a dinner?"

"Anybody can du thic. I've learned to play _God Save the King_ on the

school pi-anno."

"How do 'ee start then?"

"Why, you puts your fingers...."

"Naw! I means how du 'ee start to cook dinner?"

"Peuh!"

"Her an't learned tidiness," said Mam Widger. "Lookse! Her scarf on one

chair, gloves flinged on another, coat slatted on the ground an' her

hat on the dresser--now, since her's come in! Pick 'em up to once, else

thee't hae my hand 'longside o'ee!"

Bessie scrabbled up her clothes and, making sounds of disgust, went

out.

"Her'll steady down, I hope," remarked Mrs Widger. "Her's wild, but a

gude maid to try an' help a body, though her makes so much work as her

does."

"Ay!" said Grannie Pinn grimly. "If work don't steady her, there's

nothing will."

[Sidenote: _NED CORRY_]

When Bessie was gone the conversation reverted to Ned Corry and the

ages of his children. I met him last summer--have never ceased hearing

about him, for his sayings are often repeated and his adventures at sea

recounted. He came down here on holiday with his wife, who appeared to

be very happy and was obviously very proud of her Ned. The morning he

went back, he collected all of his old mates he could find, before

breakfast, into a public-house, treated them to whisky until his

pockets were empty, and then borrowed money to return to London. His

personality seems to have left a deeper impression than any other on

Seacombe. He is a man very alive; big, generous and uncontrollable in

all things; so broad that he seems short; great in voice, great in

strength, greatest in laughter. Very dark, and prominent in feature

where his fierce black beard allows any of his face to be seen, he is a

kind of Hebraic Berserker in general appearance, in the uncompromising

force of him and the squat sloppiness of his clothes. Yet his eyes,

almost bedded in hair, have often the bright peeping humorousness of a

shaggy dog's.

He had the most boats on the beach, and mighty strokes of luck with the

fish; employed more men than anyone before or since; paid them well

when he had the money, and with an irregularity which would have been

tolerated from no other boat-owner. Dina went to lodge at his house. He

made of her, so gossip says, a second wife. He succeeded in running a

household of three; then bought two lodging houses and set a wife to

manage each. "Ned was all right," Tony says, "on'y he didn't know how

to look after hisself--didn't care--nor after his money when he made

it." One evening, Tony found him in his bath in the middle of the

kitchen whilst his womenfolk were cooking him a good hot supper. It was

not his being in his bath which made Tony blush, but the freedom with

which he called, "Come in!"

When the prudent-minded of Seacombe clamoured to Ned for their money,

he sold up his boats and furniture, went to London, took without

apprenticeship a well-paid job at the docks, and now, as he walks home

along the dockside streets, he is given _Good Night_ from London

Bridge to Tilbury. The exerting of strength seems to have been his

leading impulse; pride in Ned Corry his only check. He was too big for

Seacombe. In London he remains entirely himself--'West-country Ned!'

Before Ned Corry's affairs were finished with, Tony came into the

kitchen, saying: "I just been talking out there to Skinny Chubb. Nice

quiet chap, he is. His wife _is_ gone."

"Well, didn't 'ee know that?"

[Sidenote: _SELF-RESTRAINT_]

Then I heard a wonderful tale of self-restraint. Chubb is a good

workman, a man of about fifty with grown up boys and girls. His wife

has been no good to him. She used to have men in the house when he was

away. She provided them with grog and food, but there was never

anything for Chubb to eat, except abuse. She won the daughters over to

her side. Sometimes she would go away to London, taking perhaps one of

the girls with her. Only the eldest son, who was not at home, sided

with his father. Neighbours used to hear the couple quarrelling half

the night, but during the whole of their married life he never once

struck or beat her. All he used to tell other people was:--"'Tis a

wonder how a man can stand all her du say to me, day an' night, early

an' late."

Just before Michaelmas, she decided to leave her husband: to go to

London with a German flunkey. They broke up the home. Chubb packed up

for her the best of the furniture. He wrote out her labels, said

_Good-bye_, paid her cab fare to the station. Now he is living in

lodgings. Rumour has it that the German has left her. In answer to

inquiries, Chubb merely says: "Well, I tell 'ee, _I_ be glad to be out

o'it all at last. _I_'ll never hae her back."

It is a sound old piece of psychology which distinguishes a man's bark

from his bite. The poor man's bark is appalling; I often used to think

there was murder in the air when I heard some quite ordinary

discussion; there would have been murder in the air had I myself been

worked up to speak so furiously. But, comparatively speaking, he seldom

bites; hardly ever without warning; and he can as a rule stay himself

in the very act. The educated man, on the other hand, does not bark

much; one of the most important parts of his education has been the

teaching him not to do so; but when he does bite, it is blindly, and he

makes his teeth meet if he can. We hear, of course, much more of the

poor man in the police courts, and we imagine (spite of Herbert

Spencer's warning) that education is to diminish his crimes. How very

simple and fallacious! In the first place, the poor, the uneducated or

but slightly educated, greatly out-number the educated. Suppose by

means of complete and trustworthy criminal statistics, we could work

out the _percentage criminality_ of the different classes. I fancy

that the poor man would not then show--even judged by our whimsical

legal and moral standards--a greater percentage criminality than the

educated. And if in our statistics we could include degrees of

provocation to the various crimes, such as hunger, poverty, want of the

money to leave exasperating surroundings--it would probably be found

that the poor are, if anything, less criminally disposed than other

sections of the community; that, though they lack something of the

secondary self-restraint which prevents bark and noise, they are, other

things being equal, actually stronger in that primary self-restraint,

the lack of which leads directly to crime. On _a priori_, historical,

grounds one would anticipate such a conclusion.

It is certain that they forgive offence more readily.

I have often wondered how many nice quiet respectable vindictive

murders are yearly done by educated men too clever to be found out. The

poor man is a fool at 'Murder as a Fine Art.' He hacks and bashes.

6.

Sighting, as we thought, some balks of timber, floating away on the ebb

tide over the outside of Broken Rocks, two of us shoved a small boat

down the beach. Our flotsam was a trick of the fading light on the sea,

just where Broken Rocks raised the swell a little; but in the

exquisite, the almost menacing, calm of the evening, we leaned on our

oars and watched for a while. To seaward, the horizon was a peculiar

lowering purple, as if a semi-opaque sheet of glass were placed there.

On land, over the Windgap, the sunset was like many ranks of yellow and

shining black banners--hard, brassy. The sea was a misty blue. One by

one, according to their prominence, the bushes on the face of the

cliffs faded into the general contour. As we landed, a slight lop came

over the water from the dark south-east. "Ah!" said Uncle Jake. "We'm

going to hae it. South-easter's coming!"

[Sidenote: _CALLED OUT BETIMES_]

There was some discussion as to whether or not we should haul the boats

up over the sea-wall. In the end we hauled the smaller ones, leaving

the _Cock Robin_ and the drifter upon the beach.

In the very early morning--it was so dark I could not see the outline

of the window--I half awoke to an indistinct sensation that the house

was rocking and hell unloosed outside. Something solid seemed to be

beating the wall. Than I heard Grandfer's voice roaring at the foot of

the stairs:--"What is it? Why, tell thic Tony he'd better hurry up else

all the boats 'll be washed away. Blowing a hurricane 'tis! Sea's

making. Oughtn't to ha' left they boats...."

"Be quiet! yu'll wake all the kids up."

"Blowing a hurricane 'tis! Nort to me if the boats du wash off. Tony'd

never wake."

"All right, I'll wake him."

In five minutes we were downstairs, with the fire lighted and the

kettle on.

Outside, it was pitch dark. There was nothing there, it seemed, except

a savage wind and stinging splotches of rain and the cry of the low

tide on the sand. I felt my way up the Gut and out, sliding one foot

before the other so as not to fall over the sea-wall. John Widger

bumped into me, and together we crept along to the capstan. A white

shadow of surf was just visible. We dropped gingerly off the wall to

the beach, trusting there was no iron gear there to smash our ankles.

Then for an hour we fumbled our way about; pushed, hauled,

disentangled, slid and swore; grasping sometimes the right rope and

sometimes the wrong one with hands almost too cold and stiff, too

painful, to grasp anything at all.

Out of the blackness came another hurricane squall with rain that

lashed. The rushing air itself shook. We crouched, all humped up, in

the lew of a drifter's bows, whilst the rain water washed around our

boots and coat-tails. "This 'll tell 'ee what 'tis like for us chaps,"

said Tony. "I be only sorry," Uncle Jake added, "for them what's out to

sea now in ships wi' rotten gear."

[Sidenote: _A DISCOLOURED FURY_]

As the dawn broke thick, the sea rose still further, until it was a

discoloured fury battering the shore. With Uncle Jake I watched some

long planks, four inches in thickness and ten broad, swept off the top

of the beach. We saw them hurtled over Broken Rocks, now dashed against

the cliff, now careering, so to speak, on their hind legs. Such were

their mad capers that we laughed aloud. We were far from wishing to

save them. We rejoiced with them.

As the day blew on, the wind moderated inshore and the lop gathered

itself together into a heavy swell. And after dark, at half tide, Uncle

Jake and myself worked hard. We dragged the heavy planks from a surf

that seemed ever advancing on us to drive us towards the cliffs, yet

never did, and we propped up the planks against cliffs whose crumbling

drove us constantly down to the sea. There's a winter's firing there.

We talked--out-howling the noise jerkily--of wrecks and wreckages. Had

we had the chance, we might then conceivably have wrecked a ship. For

there, on the narrow strip of shingle between the wash of the waves and

the unstable cliff, we were primitive men, ready without ruth to wreck

for ourselves the contrivances of civilization.

7.

Tony has received one or two presents this autumn, and now the gales

have put an end to all kinds of fishing, he is beginning to write his

letters of thanks. Or rather, he bothers Mam Widger to write them for

him, and when she has said sufficiently often, "G'out yu mump-head! Du

it yourself!" he sets to work. After long hesitation, pen in hand, and

a laborious commencement, he dashes off a letter, protests that it

ought to be burnt, and sends it to post. He acts, indeed, a comic

version of the groans and travail about which literary men talk so

much.

[Sidenote: _PRESENTS AND TIPS_]

Whether he prefers a present or a tip is doubtful, and depends largely

on the amount of money in the house. Presents are more valued; tips

more useful. He feels that 'there didn't ought to be no need of tips';

knows obscurely that they are one of the effects, and the causes, of

class difference; that they are either a tacit admission that his

labour is underpaid, or else such an expression of good-will as a man

would not presume to give to 'the likes o' himself,' or else an

indirect bribe for some or other undue attention. Usually, however, not

wishing to go into the matter so thoroughly--having come in contact

with outsiders chiefly when they have been on holiday and least

economical--he considers a tip merely as the outflowing of a

gen'leman's abundance. "They can afford it, can't 'em? They lives in

big houses, an' it helps keeps thees yer little lot fed an' booted."

If, however, he has reason to believe that 'a nice quiet gen'leman' is

really hard-up, then he is very sorry, and will reduce the rate of hire

by so much as half. In such cases, it is well that the gen'leman should

add a small tip, for his niceness' sake. Then is Tony more than paid.

The gentleman, as such, seems to be losing prestige. Gentility is being

made to share its glory with education, 'Ignorant' is becoming a worse

insult than 'no class.' Grandfer, in argument will think to prove his

case by saying: "Why, a gen'leman told us so t'other day on the Front.

A gen'leman told me, I tell thee!" Grandfer's sons would like the

gen'leman's reasons. In fact the stuff and nonsense that the chatting

gen'leman, feeling himself safe from contradiction, will try to teach a

so-called ignorant fisherman, is most amazing. If he but knew how

shrewdly he is criticised, afterwards....

Education even is esteemed not so much for the knowledge it provides,

still less for its wisdom, as for the advantage it gives a man in

practical affairs; the additional money it earns him. "No doubt they

educated people knows a lot what I don't," says Tony, "an' can du a lot

what I can't; but there's lots o' things what I puzzles me old head

over, an' them not the smallest, what they ain't no surer of than I be.

Ay! an' not so sure, for there's many on 'em half mazed wi' too much

o'it."

8.

[Sidenote: _BESSIE_]

Bessie has finally left school. The excitement, the chatter, the sudden

air of superiority over the other children, the critical glance round

the room when she returns home.... She has learnt next to nothing of

school-work--which matters little, since she is strong, hopeful, and

has a genuine wish to do her best. What does matter is, that she is

careless, inclined to be slatternly, and has no idea of precision

either in speech or work. (Few girls have.) This is in part, no doubt,

mere whelpishness to be grown out of presently. She picks up some piece

of gossip. "Mother! Mrs Long's been taken to hospital. Her's going to

die, I 'spect."

"No her an't gone to hospital nuther. Dr Bayliss says as her's got to

go if she ain't better to-morrow. Isn't that what you've a-heard now?"

"Yes--but I thought her'd most likely be gone 'fore this," says Bessie

without, apparently, the least sense of shame, or even of inexactitude.

The other day she reached down a cup to get herself a drink of water.

Then she took some pains to see if the cup still _looked_ clean, and

finding it did, she replaced it among the other clean ones on the

dresser.

Her mother sent her out to the larder for some more bread. Bessie

brought in a new loaf.

"That ain't it," said Mrs Widger. "There's a stale one there."

"No, there ain't."

"Yes, there is."

"I've looked, an't I?"

"Yu go an' look again, my lady."

"Well, 'tis dark, an' I an't got no light to see with."

Protesting vehemently, Bessie found the stale loaf. Were I her

mistress, she would irritate me into a very bad temper, and then, by

her muddle-headed willingness, would make me sorry. She is untrained.

School has in no way disciplined her mind. From early childhood, of

course, she has had to do many odd jobs for her mother, but a woman

with the whole burden of a house on her shoulders, who has never found

the two ends more than just meet, cannot spare time or thought to train

her girls systematically. It is so much easier to do the whole of the

work herself. Bessie's usefulness, such as it is, speaks a deal for her

disposition. After all, how many women in any station of life, have

precision and forethought enough to lay a fire so that it will burn up

at once? Bessie is only thirteen. It is, indeed, her ability for her

age that tempts one to judge her by a standard which elsewhere--except

among women discussing their servants--would only be applied to a girl

of twenty.

Suppose fathers judged their daughters as mothers judge their

servants....

[Sidenote: _GOING INTO SERVICE_]

For the present, Bessie is in daily service at a lodging-house. For a

'gen'leman's residence,' which would be better for her, she is

over-young and would, besides, need an outfit of dresses, caps and

aprons which she is not yet old enough to take care of, nor will be

until she is ready to fall in love. She can go to Mrs Butler's in a

torn dress and dirty pinafore. She is not expected to appear before the

visitors; only to do the dirty, rough, and heavy work behind the

scenes. It was a condition of her leaving school so young, that she

should go into service and sleep there. Very naturally, Mrs Widger and

Mrs Butler soon arranged that the 'education lady,' when she came to

inspect, should be shown Bessie's bedroom at the lodging-house--and

that Bessie should sleep at home. It was better for all three; for Mrs

Butler who is short of room, for Mrs Widger who wants Bessie's help,

and for Bessie who still requires her mother's authority and oversight.

Educationalists don't seem to understand.

In return for two shillings a week and her food, Bessie is supposed to

work twelve hours a day, from eight till eight. All she does might

possibly be crammed into three hours a day; that is all she is paid

for. She brings home her supper in a piece of newspaper. One evening

she brought some chicken bones which had been in turn the foundation of

roast chicken, cold chicken, stewed chicken, and soup. Bessie rather

enjoyed them. Another evening, she unwrapped a whole cake. It fell on

the floor, whack! neither bouncing, nor breaking. It was full of dough.

A basin of soup-dregs which she brought home two days ago was found to

contain a length of stewed string. Stewed to rags, it was, like badly

boiled meat. Bessie says that Mrs Butler did miss a bell-rope.

9

There was a rush and a banging up the passage. The kitchen door burst

violently open. A girl (though she wore long skirts her figure was

unformed and her waist had a stiff youthful curve) ran quickly into the

room.

Her eager bright-coloured young face--that also not yet fully

formed--was overshadowed by a flapping decorated hat obviously

constructed less for a woman's head--less still for a maiden's--than

for a cash draper's window. Her chest was plastered with a motley

collection of cheap jewellery and lace. Her boots had not been cleaned.

She dropped her cardboard boxes on the floor. Regardless of her womanly

attire, like nothing so much as a hasty child, she flung her arms round

Tony's neck.

"Hallo, Dad! How be 'ee? Eh? How's everybody? Lord, I'm hungry. Look

what I got for 'ee. An't forgot nobody this time, though 'tisn't

everybody as remembers me. Look, Dad!"

"What is it?" asked Tony, looking blankly, as if he could hardly

realise so much clatter.

"Lookse, Dad! What do 'ee think o'it?"

A box was torn open. From it came a couple of glass ornaments, and

various sorts of 'coloured rock' and sticky toffee for the children.

[Sidenote: _BACK FROM SERVICE_]

It was Tony's eldest daughter, Jenny, come home from service. She

walked round the room picking up things to examine, things to eat,

things that she claimed were hers, and things that she desired given

her. She talked without, so far as I could see, any connection between

the sentences. Mouthfuls of food reduced her babbling shriek to a

burr-burr.

"Be 'ee glad to see your daughter, Dad?"

"Iss...." said Tony, looking at her very fondly, but still puzzled.

"Don't believe yu be. Why didn't 'ee write then if yu loves me so?"

"Thic's Mam 'Idger's job."

"G'out!" said Mrs Widger,--"Jenny, you an't see'd our addition, have

'ee."

I held out my hand. Jenny blushed; then she said: "Good evening, sir";

then she giggled; and finally she turned her back on me. It took a

minute or two for her happy carelessness to return.

Domestic servants on holiday, more than any other class of people,

strain one's tact and rouse one's ingrained snobbery. They tend to be

over-respectful--the sort of respectfulness that presupposes

reward,--and to brandish _sirs_, or to be shy and silly, or else

to treat one with a more airy familiarity than the acquaintanceship

warrants. In the matter of manners, they sit between two chairs, the

class they serve has one code; the class they spring from has another,

equally good perhaps, certainly in some respects more delicate, but

different. In imitating the one code, unsuccessfully, they lose their

hold on the other. Their very speech--a mixture of dialect and standard

English with false intonations--betrays them. They are like a man

living abroad, who has lost grip on his native customs, and has

acquired ill the customs of his adopted country. It is not their fault.

Circumstances sin against them.

Mrs Widger tells me that, when she left her mother's for service, she

felt nothing so keenly as the loneliness, the isolation, of being in a

house where no one could be in any full sense of the word her

confidant, where she was at the beck and call of strangers from the

time she got up till the time she went to bed, where her irregular

hours of leisure were passed quite alone in a kitchen. It seems, as

might be anticipated, that _mental_ comfort or discomfort is at the

bottom of the servant question, and that class differences, class

misunderstandings, are ultimately the cause of it. Often enough the

mistress wishes to be kind, but she fails to understand that what she

values most differs from what is most valued by her servants. Often

enough the servants wish to do their best, but little irritations,

unsalved by sympathy and not to be discussed on terms of equality, lead

to sulky, don't-care moods which exasperate the mistress into positive,

instead of negative, unkindness. So a vicious circle is formed. The

covert enmity between one woman and another simply calls for give and

take where both are of the same class, but when one of them is, for

payment and all day, at the disposal of the other.... How many homes

there are where the menfolk can get anything done willingly, and the

mistress nothing whatever! The girls go out so early. They miss the

rough and tumble of their homes. They have their own little ambitions,

hardly comprehensible to anyone else. Whether or no they desire to be

satisfactory, they do want their own little flutters.

10

[Sidenote: _LITTLE SERVANT GIRLS_]

Poor brave small servant girls, earning your living while you are yet

but children! I see your faces at the doors, rosy from the country or

yellowish-white from anaemia and strong tea; see how your young breasts

hardly fill out your clinging bodices, all askew, and how your hips are

not yet grown to support your skirts properly--draggle-tails! I see you

taking the morning's milk from the hearty milkman, or going an errand

in your apron and a coat too small for you, or in your mistress's or

mother's cast-off jacket, out at the seams, puffy-sleeved, years behind

the fashion and awry at the shoulders because it is too big. I see your

floppety hat which you cannot pin down tightly to your hair, because

there isn't enough of it;--your courageous attempts to be prettier than

you are, or else your carelessness from overmuch drudgery; your

coquettish and ugly gestures mixed.

I picture your life. Are you thinking of your work, or are you dreaming

of the finery you will buy with your month's wages; the ribbons, the

lace, or the lovely grown-up hat? Are you thinking of what he said, and

she said, and you said, you answered, you did? Are you dreaming of

_your_ young man? Are you building queer castles in the air? Are

you lonely in your dingy kitchen? Have you time and leisure to be

lonely?

I follow you into your kitchen, with its faint odour of burnt grease

(your carelessness) and of cockroaches, and its whiffs from the

scullery sink, and a love-story that scents your life, hidden away in a

drawer. I hear your mistress's bell jingle under the stairs. You must

go to bed, and sleep, and be up early, before it is either light or

warm, to work for her; you must be kept in good condition like a cart

horse or a donkey; you must earn, earn well, your so many silver pounds

a year.

In mind, I follow you also into your little bedroom under the roof,

with its cracked water-jug that matches neither the basin or the

soap-dish, and its boards with a ragged scrap of carpet on them, and

your tin box in the corner; and the light of the moon or street lamp

coming in at the window and casting shadows on the sloping whitewashed

ceiling; and your guttered candle. What will you try on to-night? A

hat, or a dress, or the two-and-eleven-three-farthing blouse? Shift the

candle. Show yourself to the looking-glass. A poke here and a pull

there--and now put everything away carefully in the box under the bed,

and go to sleep.

Though I say that I follow you up to your attic, and watch you and see

you go to sleep, you need not blush or giggle or snap. I would not do

you any harm; your eyes would plague me. And besides, I do not entirely

fancy you. You are not fresh. You are boxed up too much. But I trust

that some lusty careless fellow, regardless of consequences, looking

not too far ahead, and following the will of his race--I trust that he

will get hold of you and whirl you heavenwards, and will fill your

being full to the brim; and will kiss you and surround you with

himself, and will make you forget yourself and your mistress and all

the world, the leaves and birds of the Lover's Lane, the shadowy cattle

munching in the field and the footsteps approaching.

I wish you luck--that your young man may stick to you. It is after all

a glimpse of God I wish you, perhaps your only one.

You've got a longish time before you.

11

[Sidenote: _MRS YARTY_]

Mrs Yarty, up Back Lane, is reduced to that last extremity of poor

women: she is cleaning her cottage and preparing as well as she can 'to

go up over' on credit, without either doctor or midwife--unless she

becomes so ill that someone sends for the parish doctor. She will not

wish that done, and probably when her time comes, some neighbour will

look in to see if she is going on as well as can be expected. Were

Yarty and his wife sufficiently servile to attend church or chapel,

prayer-meetings or revivals, all sorts of amateur parsons, male and

female, would flock round; but in any case, Mrs Yarty has no time for

such goings-on, and if Yarty found anyone sniffing about his house, he

would certainly tell them that it _was_ his house.

A while ago one of the 'district ladies' came here, to Tony's. We were

a little short with her, and as a last resource, she remarked

superciliously, in a tone of pleasant surprise: "You are really _very_

clean here." 'Twas an untruth. We are not _very_ clean: we are as

cleanly as is practicable. I should have liked to show her the door.

"'Tis only the way of 'em!" said Mrs Widger. "They'm stupid, but they

means all right."

[Sidenote: _THE YARTY CHILDREN_]

Mrs Yarty is not low-spirited at all, and though her voice sounds

rather hysterical, it is merely her manner of speaking, slightly

accentuated perhaps by more trouble than usual. She is fairly well used

to such events by now. Yarty himself is angry. His ordinary habits are

bound to be upset for a few days; for ever, if Mrs Yarty dies. He is

what successful and conceited people call a waster. "There ain't no

harm in him," Tony says. "He wuden't hurt a fly. The only thing is, 'er

don't du much." I have never seen him actually drunk. He keeps very

nearly all his irregular earnings for his own use in a strong locked

box upstairs. His house is a sort of hotel to him, where he expects to

find a bed and food, and it is apparently not his business to inquire

how the food is obtained. If there is none, he makes a fuss, and will

not take for an answer that he has failed to bring the money. Bobby

Yarty, thin, pale, big-eyed, the eldest son but one--a nice intelligent

boy though he swears badly at his mother--is ill of a disease which

only plenty of good food can cure. If, however, food is scarce, it is

first Mrs Yarty who goes short, then the children. Whether they do, or

don't, have as much as a couple of chunks each of bread and dripping,

Yarty must have his stew or fry. The wage-earner has first claim on the

food, and even when the wage-earner does not earn, the custom is still

kept up. It is possible also that Mrs Yarty has still an underlying

affection for her man, a real desire, become instinctive, to feed him.

She does not say so. Far from it. She says that she is sorry she ever

left a good place to marry Yarty. She would, she declares, go back into

service but for her children. Washing-day, she swears, is her jolliest

time, and she boasts, with what pride is left her, of there being

places at twelve or fourteen shillings a week still open to her. She

did take a place once--was allowed to take her baby with her--but at

the end of a fortnight she arrived home to find that her husband,

impatient for his tea, had thrown all the crockery on the floor. She

saw then that she must be content with things as they are.

Her present worry is, what will become of the children while she is up

over, and who will feed them? Mam Widger will do her share, I don't

doubt. Very often now she puts aside something for them. There is a

sort of pleasantness in watching them take it: they run off with the

dish or baking tin like very polite and very hungry dogs, and bring it

back faithfully with exceeding great respectfulness towards a household

where there is food to spare.

Mrs Yarty is one of those people who work better for others than for

themselves. She is no manager. "They says," she remarked the other day,

"as He do take care of the sparrows." She is a sparrow herself; she

grubs up sustenance, rubs along without getting any forwarder, where

others would go under altogether. Years ago she must have been

good-looking. Her patchily grey hair is crisp; she still has a few

pretty gestures. But trouble and too much child-bearing have done next

to their worst with her. Sensible when she grasps a thing, she is often

a bit mazed. She has the figure of an old woman--bent, screwed--and the

toughness of a young one. Her words, spoken pell-mell in a high

strained voice which oscillates between laughter and tears, seem to be

tumbling down a hill one after another. Spite of all her household

difficulties, she retains the usual table of ornaments just inside the

front door. Last summer she reclaimed from the roadway a tiny

triangular garden, about five inches long in the sides, by wedging a

piece of slate between the doorstep and the wall. There she kept three

stunted little wall-flowers--no room for more--which she attended to

every morning after breakfast. Cats destroyed them in the end. She

laughed, as it were gleefully. Her laugh is her own; derisive,

open-mouthed, shapeless, hardly sane--but she has a smile--a smile at

nothing in particular, at her own thoughts--which is singularly sweet

and pathetic. I cannot but think that the spirit which enables her to

live on without despair, to love her little garden and to smile so

sweetly, is better worth than much material comfort. Hers, after all,

is a life that has its fragrance.

12

[Sidenote: _TONY AS NURSEMAID_]

Mrs Widger went off after tea to look at Rosie's grave. She likes to go

alone, without the children, and she also likes to stop and have a chat

with someone she knows up on land. In consequence, Tony, taking his

Sunday evening promenade, found the children on the Front just in that

state when they want, and do not wish, to go to bed. They followed him

in.

"Wer's thic Mam 'Idger?"

"Don' know!"

"Her's gone to cementry."

"Didn' ought to leave 'ee like thees yer."

"Her's gone to see Rosie."

Tony felt himself rather helpless. "Now then," he cried with a vain

nourish, "off to bed wi' 'ee!"

"No!--No!--Shan't!--Us an't had no supper."

"Wer is yer supper? What be going to hae?"

"Don' know.--Mam! Mam 'Idger!"

One started crying, then the other.

"Casn' thee put 'em to bed thyself?" I asked.

"I don' know! Better wait.... Her's biding away a long time. I'll hae

to talk to she."

Tony sat down in the courting chair. The two boys climbed one on each

of his knees. They wriggled themselves comfortable, and fell asleep. He

woke them. "Won' 'ee go to bed now? I wants to go out."

"No! No!" they cried peevishly. "Wer's thiccy Mam?"

Their white heads, turned downwards in sleep on either side of Tony's

red weathered face, looked very patient and bud-like. Tony's eyes

twinkled over them with a humorous helplessness, crossed occasionally

by a shade of impatience. So the three of them waited for the

household's source of energy to return. Tony had been wanting a glass

of beer. He nearly slept too.

Mam Widger said, when she did come, that they were 'all so big a fule

as one another.' "Casn' thee even get thy children off to bed?" she

asked.

"I can't help o'it," was Tony's reply.

[Sidenote: _LOSS OF TEMPER_]

She has taken the household affairs so completely on her shoulders that

he is almost helpless without her. In many ways, and in the better, the

biblical, sense of the word, he is still so childlike that he often

gets done for him what it would be useless for other people who have

little of the child in them, to expect. For the same reason, bullies

choose him out for attack. If I should happen to lose my temper with

him, it is a fault on my part, quickly repented of and quicker

forgiven, but a fault nevertheless. If he, on the other hand, loses his

temper with me, he merely says afterwards: "Ah! I be al'ays like

that--irritable like; I al'ays was an' I al'ays shall be to the end o'

the chapter." He assumes that there was no fault on his part, that his

loss of temper was simply the outcome of the nature of things and of

himself, and consequently that there was nothing to call for

forgiveness. The curious thing is that one feels his view to be right.

One does not _forgive_ children; nor the childlike spirit either.

Returning from sea one evening, more lazy than tired, he said: "You

wash me face, Mam, an' I'll wash me hands myself." His face was washed

amid shouts of laughter, and I tugged off his boots. We were all quite

pleased. Happy is the man for whom one can do that sort of thing!

Mrs Widger explained the other day at dinner that for a time after they

were married, Tony used to help a great deal with the housework, until

once, when he was doing something clumsily, she said: "Git 'long out

wi' 'ee, I can du that!"

"Iss," added Tony, "I used to scrub, and help her wi' the washing (an'

kiss her tu), but I ain't done nort to it since her spoke to me rough,

like that, an' now I be got out the way o'it, an' that's the reason

o'it--thic Mam 'Idger there!"

"G'out! 'tis thy...."

"Oh well, I du cuddle 'ee sometimes, when yu'm willing!"

13

Against the beach the listless sea made a sound like a rattle, very

gently and continuously shaken by a very tired baby. Nothing was doing.

The air was a little too chilly for pleasure boating. Tony had gone to

'put away up over' the after-dinner hour. I lay down to read, and fell

asleep to the meg-meg of Mam Widger's voice chatting in a neighbour's

doorway.

Two or three small pebbles jumped through the open window. Uncle Jake

was below. When he says, on the Front, that he is going somewhere, he

may set off this week, next week, or never; but when he wakes one

up.... I hastened down.

[Sidenote: _PRAWNING WITH BOAT-NETS_]

"Going shrimpin' wi' the boat-nets," he said, flavouring, as it were, a

tit-bit in his mouth. "Must try and earn summut if I bean't going to

feel the pinch o' _thees_ winter." Then he added as if it were an

afterthought: "Be 'ee coming?"

"When?"

"Now--so sune as I can get enough bait. I've a-got a beautiful cod's

head towards it. Back about midnight, I daresay."

"All right."

"Put some clothes on your back. I'll bring a bottle o'tay--better than

brewers' tack--an' go'n get the boat ready. Take the _Moondaisy_.... Eh?"

Tony, just downstairs and still rubbing his eyes (when he snoozes he

goes right to bed), asked what was up. "Shrimping wi' Uncle Jake," I

replied. "That'll gie thee a doing!" he said. "Yu ask George. George

used to be Uncle Jake's mate. 'Tis, 'Back oar-for'ard--back wi'

inside--steady--steady--damn yer eyes!' George couldn't put up wi' it.

Jake don' never sleep hisself, and wuden' let he sleep."

The poor little _Moondaisy_, lying on ways at the water's edge, looked

as if she had a small deckhouse aft. Sixteen boat-nets,[19] with their

lines and corks, were piled up on the stern seats. In the stern-sheets

were two baskets, one of them very smelly, and a newspaper parcel that

reeked. Piled up in the bows were bits of old rope, sacks and bags

(very catty), chips of wood, empty tea-bottles, and all the litter that

collects in a boat used by Uncle Jake.

[19] Boat-nets are the same in construction as setting-nets (see

p. 192), but upwards of a yard in diameter. Instead of a cord and

stick, they have attached to them four or five fathoms of grass

line. A few small flat oval corks are spliced at short intervals

into the end of the line remote from the net, and at the

extremity is a cork buoy about half as large as a man's head.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"_I_ knows; but if anybody asks yu where we'm going, or where we've

been, don't yu tell 'em. Don't want none o' they treble-X-ers on our

ground. You say like ol' Pussey Pengelly used to: 'Down to Longo.' I

don't hae nobody 'long wi' me what can't keep a quiet tongue.--I can

see some o' they hellers down there now, but they ain't so far west as

we'm going, not by a long way. An' yu wuden' see 'em where they be if

they didn't think 'twas going to be a quiet night with not much pulling

attached to it. But _I_ shuden' be surprised to see a breeze down

easterly 'fore morning. Don't du to get caught down to Longo be an

easterly breeze. Lord, the pulls I've a-had to get home 'fore now!"

[Sidenote: _THE HIGH-TIDE WAVES_]

A very old-fashioned figure Uncle Jake looked, standing up in the

stern-sheets and bending rhythmically, sweep and jerk, sweep and jerk,

to his long oar, as if there were wires inside him. His grey

picture-frame beard seems to have the effect of concentrating the

expressiveness of his face, the satiric glint of his eyes, the dry

smile, the straightness of his shaven upper lip, and the kindly

lighting-up of the whole visage when he calls to the sea-gulls and they

answer him back, and he says with the delight of a child, "There! Did

'ee hear thic?" Keeping close along shore in order to avoid the

strength of the flood tide against us, we rode with a perfection of

motion on the heave of the breaking swell. As we were passing over the

inside of Broken Rocks, three waves ran far up the beach. "Did 'ee hear

thic rattle?" Uncle Jake exclaimed. "That was the high-tide wave, then,

whatever the tide-tables say. Yu'll hear the low tide t'night if yu

listens."

Once I backed the boat ashore for Uncle Jake to go and look at one of

the numerous holes under the cliffs, in every one of which he has

wreckage stored up for firewood against the winter. He can at least

depend on having warmth. When he is nowhere to be found, he is a as a

rule down-shore carrying jetsam into caves. Much of it he gives away

for no other payment than the privilege of talking sarcastically at

those who don't trouble to go and of blazing forth at them when they

do.

The November sun went down while we rowed, an almost imperceptible

fading of daylight into delicate thin colours and finally into a shiny

grey half-light. More and more the cliffs lowered above us. They lost

their redness except where a glint of the sun burned splendidly upon

them; coloured shadows, as it were, came to life in the high earthern

flanks, lifted themselves off, and floated away into the sunset, until

the land stood against and above the sea, black and naked, crowned with

distorted thorn bushes. Very serene was the sky, but a little hard.

"Wind down east t'morrow," Uncle Jake repeated. We passed Refuge Cove,

over Dog Tooth Ledge, and along Landlock Bay. We tossed over the Brandy

Mull, a great round pit in a reef, where even in calm weather the tide

boils always. No further were there any beaches. The sea washed to the

sheer cliffs through tumbled heaps of rocks. "_'Tis_ an ironbound

shop!" said Uncle Jake. "Poor fellows, that gets wrecked hereabout! I

knows for some copper bolts when they rots out o' the wreck where they

be."

We had rowed down to Longo on the calm sea; we were on the sea, almost

in it, in so small a boat; and shorewards were the tide-swirls, the

jagged rocks, the high black cliffs. The relation of sea and land was

become reversed for us. The sea was no longer a thirsty menace, an

unknown waste. It was the land, the rocks and the cliffs, which

threatened hungrily. Night-fears, had there been any, would surely have

sprung out from the land.

[Sidenote: _A COD'S HEAD_]

We rowed into a bay whose wide-spreading arms were like an amphitheatre

of shadows.

"Take thees yer oar," said Uncle Jake. "Wer's thic cod's head?"

Everywhere in the boat, to judge by one's nose. He found it, hacked it,

then beat it with a pebble, and hacked again, and tore. From it came

two awful separate smells--one like that of a dissecting room, the

other like bad crab's inside, or like fearfully perverted cocoa, just

wetted--a sort of granulated stink that stopped one's breath. Beautiful

bait!

"Now then, while I fixes the bait between the thirts," said Uncle Jake,

"yu paddle westward. Keep 'en straight, else if a bit of a breeze

comes, us'll never find the buoys." While I rowed very slowly, he flung

overboard first a buoy and then its net, a buoy and its net, till he

had hove the whole sixteen with about four boat's lengths between each.

The _plop_ was echoed from the cliff, and as the nets sank the sea-fire

glittered green upon them. He drew on a ragged pair of oilskin

trousers, stationed himself on the starboard side of the stern-sheets,

and grasped the longer tiller. On account of the ebb tide and

consequent lay of the corks, we worked back, in reverse order,

eastwards. It was for me to row the boat up until the bow was just

inside the large buoy. Then Uncle Jake's directions, more or less

abbreviated, came fast one after another:

_Back outside oar_ (or _Pull inside oar_), to bring the bows round

towards the buoy.

_Pull both oars_, to bring the boat up to the buoy.

_Pull outside oar_, to bring the stern of the boat a nice striking

distance from the line between the buoy and the small corks. (Uncle

Jake strikes under and up with the tiller.)

_Pull both oars_, while he hauls in the loose line.

_Back both_, to stop the boat's way.

_Back outside oar_, to keep the line just clear of the gunwale.

_Stop_, while he hauls very slowly and stealthily at first, lest prawns

and lobsters jump out, then swiftly, raising his arms high above his

head, until the net is aboard.

So, in single and even half strokes, with variations according to

current and wind, for all the sixteen buoys and nets. Whilst Uncle

Jake, on his part, dropped the prawns into a bag which hung from his

neck, flung the wild-crabs amidships, and the lobsters under the stern

seat, and hove out the net again a few yards from where it was at

first--I, on my part, had to spy the next buoy, a mere rocking blot on

the water, to find out how the line lay from it, and then to hold the

boat steady till he was ready with the tiller. After a time, one became

a little mazed, one's head ached with screwing it round to sight the

buoys, and his directions ceased so long as everything was going right.

[Sidenote: _MAKING THE ROUNDS_]

Very wonderful, even exhilarating was the silence and loneliness, the

feeling that ourselves only, of all the world, were in that beautiful

mysterious place. Had I had prayers to say, I should have said them,

sure that some sort of a God was brooding on the waters and suspicious

perhaps, at the back of my mind, that where the black cliffs upreared

themselves, there the devil was.

After we had hauled and shot again the sixteenth net, Uncle Jake

counted one hundred and seventy odd prawns from his bag into the

basket. "Do 'ee see how whitish they be?" he asked. "They'm al'ays like

that in the dirty water after a gale. Lord, what a battering they poor

things must get when it blows on thees yer coast!" He picked over the

lobsters to see if any were saleable, but found only small

ones--cockroaches--that, as he said, "it don't do to let the bogie-man

[fishery inspector] glimpse.--An' I've a-catched," he added, "more than

five shill'orth o' fine lobsters in one round of the prawn-nets 'fore

they bloody men from the west'ard came up hereabout wi' their pots. Ah,

shrimpin' ain't what 't used to be!"

We made three more rounds in that bay, then hauled all our nets into

the boat, rowed further west, and shot our nets round a submarine

ledge, the whereabouts of which Uncle Jake knew to a yard. A couple of

rounds there, and we brought up to the buoy of a lobster pot (for the

ebb tide, washing round the headland, kept on hurtling us out to sea),

had our supper, and waited. Prawns take longer to go into the nets

after a second round in the same water.

A haziness that had been in the sky, strengthened into a lurry of

little cloudlets between us and the stars. "That's where 'tis going to

be," said Uncle Jake. "Easterly! Do 'ee feel this bit of a swell? Us

won't be here to-morrow night.--There! Did 'ee hear that? Eh?"

Two waves gave forth a peculiar confidential chuckle, long drawn out

and very gentle, very fatigued--as if the sea were making some signal

to us; as if it wished to say that it was tired of ebbing and flowing.

The cliff shadow listened, I thought, immovable and pitiless, but I

fancy that I heard the cry of a bird a quarter of a mile to the

eastward. Sea life wakes up with the flow of the tide. I had forgotten

the gulls and the ravens; had forgotten the existence of all living

things except prawns, lobsters and wild-crabs. No more waves

chuckled.... "That's the low tide waves sure 'nuff--thic chuckle.

There's mostly three on 'em. An' I can al'ays hear the rattle of the

high tide waves tu--iss, even in a gale o' wind. What a rattle they

makes on the beach, to be sure! They fules o' visitors 'ould laugh at

'ee if yu was to tell 'em that--they've a-laughed at me--but 'tis true.

Yu've heard, an't 'ee?"

The end buoy was troublesome to find. And in the middle of the round, I

rowed up to a shadow thinking to find a buoy, and there close beside

the boat, revealed as the swell sank, was a reef of rock, humped and

covered with seaweed which stood up on end as the water flowed

shallowly over the ledge. It was like a grisly great head, ages old,

immense, and of terrible aspect, heaving itself up through the sea at

us.

[Sidenote: _UNCLE JAKE'S MATES_]

With much careful working of the boat, we picked up the middle buoys

from the ledge, and hove them further to sea. Uncle Jake swore at the

reef, at the nets, at himself, at his luck. "_'Tis_ a bloody crib!

Didn't think the tide was going to fall so far. This same happened the

very last time I was down yer wi' old Blimie--old Sublime, us calls

'en. 'Let's get out o' this!' he said. 'Leave the blasted nets an'

let's get out o' it quick!' But I 'ouldn't let 'en, not I--us had three

thousand shrimps thic night; an' he very nearly cried, he did. '_Tis_

some mates I've had for thees yer job. Most of 'em won't come when they

can pay the brewer any other way. _I'll_ never come out again wi' the

last three on 'em, not if I starves for it. One of 'em went to sleep;

t'other cuden' see the buoys; an' old Blimie was blind and not willing

neither. 'Wer be the cursed things?' he'd say. 'Back!' I'd say. 'Back

oars! You'm on top o' it!' 'Well, I be backing, bain't I?' he'd say,

an' go on pulling jest the same. Then 'er said 'er was ill and wanted

to go home. _He_ won't come no more, not if he starves, an' me too.

I won't hae 'en!"

A ripple came down from the east. The sound of its _lap-lap-lap_ under

the boat stole on one's ears sleepily, but it roused Uncle Jake to

quick action. "Do 'ee see thees little cockle on the water?" he said.

"Do 'ee feel the life o'it in the boat? Must get out of thees yer, else

we shan't never find the buoys."

We picked up the buoys--those we had shifted out of line were hard to

find, for the stars were now all hidden by cloud--and a little breeze

followed the ripple from the east. Rowing along under the cliffs, even

inside some of the rocks, through passages that only Uncle Jake is sure

of, we caught the young flood tide. The north-easter, that blew out

freshly from the Seacombe valley, chilled us to the bone.

Seacombe was asleep. No one was on the Front. We had to carry the nets

up from the water's edge to the seawall before our utmost straining

could drag the _Moondaisy_ up the bank of shingle. For more than an

hour we hauled.

When at last it was over, I brought Uncle Jake in house and made him a

cup of cocoa. We had been nine hours' rowing. Though he could have done

the same again, without food or rest, he looked a little haggard. It

seemed impossible to believe that the grey old man with disordered hair

and beard, clothed in rags and patches, sipping cocoa in a windsor

chair, was that same alert shadow who had been reckoning up life, so

humorously and wisely, in the darkness under the cliffs. He referred

again to the winter's pinch. It must mean that he has not enough money

put by from summer for the days coming, when even he will not be able

to find some odd job. Yet, as I know very well, when the pinch does

come he will go short and say nothing whatever to anybody. He will be

merely a shade more sarcastic. One of the children may come home saying

that 'thic Uncle Jake an't had half a pound of butter all this week,'

or that he has been in one of his passions with Aunt Jake for taking in

a loaf of bread without paying cash for it. He will bring out a

ha'penny from a little screw of newspaper to buy milk for his cats, and

he will take some crumbs to leave on dry rocks under the cliffs for the

robins that flutter after him there. "Poor things!" he'll say. And to

people he will still be saying what he thinks, fair or foul, gentle or

hard. To understand his sternness and his kindness, it needs to go with

him wrinkling in the sunshine and prawning in the dark. He is become

very like his beloved rocks and cliffs. He is, as one might say, a

voice for them, and his words and deeds are what one would expect their

words and deeds to be, did they not stand there, warm, sunny and

graciously coloured, or dark and stern, fronting the sea immovably, as

Uncle Jake fronts life. "Du _I_ want to die?" he says when asked his

age. "Why, I'd like to live a thousand years!"

14

[Sidenote: _NARCOTICS AND STIMULANTS_]

Tony is singularly free from any craving either for narcotics or

stimulants. Most people I know, especially those who do brain work or

live in cities, are satisfied if they can strike a working balance

between the two. Granfer must have his glass of beer regularly, but

neither smokes nor drinks much tea; Uncle Jake snuffs and loves his

tea, but drinks no alcohol whatever; John Widger smokes heavily; and I

have never known Mrs Widger get up in the morning without her cup o'

tay. Tony, on the other hand, smokes, for politeness' sake, an

occasional cigarette when it is offered him, does not hanker after his

tea, and scarcely ever drinks alone. He gets drunk now and then, not

because he greatly wants to, but socially; because, when half-a-dozen

of them are drinking in rounds, 'What can a fellow du?' Even then he

often leaves untouched a glassful that has been ordered for him, though

all the while after his third or fourth glass, he may be asking other

men to 'drink up and hae another.' Drinking with him is an expression

of jollity, not the means of it.

The Perkinses went at the end of last week into a jerry-built villa up

on land. To escape the brunt of moving in, probably, Perkins took Tony

to a football match at Plymouth. It was not so much that they drank a

great deal, as that they came home, singing, in a very overcrowded and

smoky railway carriage. "I s'pose I got exzited like," Tony says. He

was all right until they got out into the fresh air, and then ...

Perkins brought him in house and laid him along the passage. "Here's

your husband, Mrs Widger." Being rather afraid of Mrs Widger, because

she always speaks her mind, Perkins disappeared quickly.

[Sidenote: _TONY ON DRINK_]

_In vino veritas_, no doubt. When Tony is drunk he becomes most

affectionate, and begins 'slatting things about'--not violently or

maliciously, but simply out of joyous devilment and a desire to feel

that he is doing something. Mrs Widger neither wept nor upbraided him.

"Yu silly gert fule!" she said. "Yu silly gert fule! Shut up, or yu'll

wake they chil'ern."

"Be glad tu see yer Tony?"

"G'out! Git yer butes off."

Tony made the chairs skip round the room and thought he'd like to see

the table (with the lamp) upside down. The window curtains annoyed him.

Mrs Widger took steps.

Luckily, she is not with child, or otherwise delicate, and can

therefore stand a deal of rough and tumble. She pushed him headlong

into a chair and took off his boots. (Those two, there alone, for Under

Town was asleep.) Then she shouldered him upstairs, like a heavy piece

of luggage, and laid him on their bed. Poor Tony was more than leery.

He swam. He moaned. He was sick. He could neither lie down nor get up.

"Sarve thee damn well right!" said Mam Widger.

"_I_ can't help o'it...."

"_Yu can't help o'it!_"

Between three and four in the morning, she went downstairs, relighted

the fire and made him and herself a cup o' tay. After that, not so very

long before daylight, they slept.

To-day Tony is ill and subdued, if not repentant. He reckons he will do

the same again ("What chap don't, 'cept they mump-headed long-faced

beggars?"), but at present he turns from liquor; he always does for a

day and a half after 'going on the bust.' "Didn' ought never to drink

more'n one glass," he says; "no, n'eet none at all!" Seeing what it

would mean for the family if Tony took to drink, Mrs Widger is, and was

at the time, wonderfully calm and cheerful--how far from reliance in

herself, or from trust in Tony, is not plain. I asked her what she

would do if he became a drunkard and brought no money home.

"Oh," she said carelessly, "I s'pose I should turn tu and get some work

to du and keep things going somehow."

"Would you let him have any pocket-money?"

"Ay, I 'spect I should--enough for his pint."

There's not a shadow of doubt but she would do both.

15

Tony has always been a man for the girls; so much so, and so naively,

that whatever he might do would seem quite innocent; as innocent as the

love-play of animals. Along the Front, of an evening, he calls out,

"How be 'ee, my dear?" to any girl he chooses, and perhaps takes her

arm for a few steps. Given half a chance, he snatches a playful kiss.

They never seem to turn rusty with him. He has the primitive quality of

knocking their conventionality to bits at one blow.

[Sidenote: _FLIRTATIONS_]

Just before the Perkinses left, he turned out at five in the morning to

see if the high long tide was flowing up to the boats. At six he made

tea and went with it to bed again. When he came downstairs at eight

o'clock (in his pants, darning the seat of his trousers), Mrs Widger

and Mrs Perkins both had breakfasts frying on the fire. Mrs Widger,

very loud-voiced that morning, was packing the children off to school;

Mrs Perkins was bent over the pan, browning sausages. Tony crept up

behind her, seized her by the waist, and kissed her.

"Oh, you naughty man!" said Mrs Perkins, who was married out of a

drapery establishment and has the drapery style of talking to

perfection. "If my dear hubby knew...."

"Tell him!" retorted Tony. "I be ready for 'en. I feels lively this

morning. I'll gie 'ee another if yu'll darn thees yer trousers for me.

Thic Mam 'Idger there won't du nort. You wuden' think I'd had two

nights o'it, wude 'ee? I went to bed last night, an' then I got up,

five o'clock, and 'cause there weren't nort doing I went to bed again

an' had an hour or an hour an' a half's more sleep."

"Oh, you sleepy man!"

"I didn' want to sleep. I wanted the missis here to cuddle me, on'y her

'ouldn't. Her turned away from me that cold.... I went off to sleep.

An' when I woke up again, thinkin' her'd cuddle me then, her gave me a

kick an' got out bed. I never see'd ort like it. Her ain't what her

used to be, for all her ain't a bad li'l thing, thee's know."

"G'out!" said Mrs Widger. "I be older--and wiser."

"Don' know about that. I shall go into Plymouth an' git a nice li'l

girl there.... Oh, I've know'd plenty on 'em. All the li'l girls likes

ol' Tony."

"I know they do," remarked Mrs Perkins sententiously, while Mrs Widger

laughed rather proudly.

"Iss; us was to Plymouth once, an' a nice li'l girl wi' a white bow

roun' her neck came up an' spoke to me when I was a-looking into a shop

window, an' her said, 'I lives jest here,' an' I said, 'Do 'ee, my

dear? I'll be 'long in a minute....'"

"Where was Mrs Widger then?"

"Oh, her was 'bout ten yards in front."

"Well?"

"Iss; if her won't be nice to me when I wants her tu, I shall go into

Plymouth an' find out my li'l girl there...."

"Garn then, yu fule! I can du wi'out 'ee. I shall hae thic divorce.

Thee's think, I s'pose, as I can't get 'long wi'out 'ee? Thee's much

mistaken!"

"Well...."

"Git 'long out wi' 'ee!" repeated Mrs Widger, laughing and very

proudly. "Git 'long out an' let me clear these yer breakfast things."

"What have yu got for dinner, me dear? Then I'll remain with 'ee an'

not go out at all."

"G'out!"

Amid loud laughter, Tony snatched a kiss from both ladies, and pranced

out.

16

[Sidenote: _MRS WIDGER_]

"'Tisn't no use to be jealous," Mrs Widger says. "I used to be a bit

taken that way once, but I ain't now, an' 'twuden' make no difference

if I was." Doubtless she is quite right, and she certainly succeeds in

never showing what jealousy she may feel when, for instance, she

catches sight of Tony strolling in through the Gut with his arm half

round another woman's waist, as his playful way is. If Tony speaks of

his first wife she does not, like most second wives, stop talking. If

she hears of a woman unhappily married, she usually dismisses the

affair with a "Well, her shuden't ha' married 'en: her must put up wi'

'en now her's got 'en." The goings-on of unmarried people do not easily

scandalise her. "I reckon," she says, "yu can du as yu like afore yu'm

married, but after that yu'm fixed." She is so confident of the

fastness of the marriage tie (it is, of course, much more indissoluble

for poor people who cannot travel, have no servants, and cannot afford

lawyers for divorce proceedings) that she can afford to give Tony

plenty of rope in small things. Her trust in his faithfulness is

absolute, and justified. She has him; he cannot get along without her;

she knows that. Her attitude is founded on experience and common-sense;

not on some abstract system of morality that never controlled men's

lives, and never will.

When I used to look upon fishermen as picturesque common objects of the

seashore, I thought their womenfolk rather dreadful. Now, however, the

more I see of this household the more I admire Mrs Widger's management

of it. I know of few other women who could direct it better and with

less friction. Indeed, I am acquainted with no middle-class woman at

all who could direct any of these poor men's households as their own

wives so noisily and so cleverly do. Mrs Widger does not attempt to

gain her own way by sheer force and hardness, not even with the

children; she bends to every current; but she never breaks, and finally

prevails. Like most West-country people, she has more staying power

than visible energy. By going not straight over the hills, like a Roman

road, but round by the valleys and level paths, she arrives at her

journey's end just as quickly and with much less disturbance and

fatigue. She does nothing quite perfectly; neither cooking, mending,

cleaning nor child-rearing; but she does everything as well as is

practicable, as well as is advisable. Tony would often like things a

little better done, but if he had to do them they would be done a

little worse. Some people here greatly pride themselves on keeping

their homes spotlessly clean, and their front doors locked so that no

dirty boot shall soil the oilcloth in the passage. Mrs Widger says that

her house is for living in. Children run in and out of it, laughing and

shouting.

In some respects, she and Tony remind one of a French bourgeois couple.

He has the sentiment, the expressed ideality, the sensitiveness. He

perceives a great deal, but perceives much of it vaguely. He seldom

makes up his mind--then unalterably. He is like the little man in

Blake's drawing, who stands at the foot of a long ladder reaching up to

the moon, and cries, "I want!" What he wants, he does not precisely

know. Summut or other. Mrs Widger, on the other hand, knows what she

wants very exactly; so exactly that she is content to bide her

opportunity. When they were married, Tony had neither boats nor gear.

He has them now.

[Sidenote: _A STEADY HEAD_]

How she keeps a steady head passes my understanding; at breakfast-time,

for example, when the boys are clamouring for their kettle-broth or

loudly demanding fish, or trying to sneak lumps of sugar; and the

girls, nearly late for school, are asking what she wants from the

butcher's or stores; and one or two of them require clean things, or

something darned, or have not washed their faces or combed out their

hair properly; and Tony's and my breakfasts are cooking; and the kettle

is boiling out or over; and Tony is asking her where he has left his

other guernsey, and everybody is talking nineteen to the dozen--and she

wants her own breakfast too. It is at such a moment that she displays

best her most characteristic gesture.

Most people who work with a will, possess some gesture or movement

which is typical of, and sums up, the major part of their

activities--the gesture that sculptors and painters try to catch. To

lay out on home and family the earnings of a workman who is regularly

paid, calls for skill and care enough on the part of a wife who has no

reserve fund and must make the weekly accounts balance to within a few

ha'pence. But successfully to lay out, and to lay by, the earnings of a

man like Tony, whose family is large and whose money comes in with

extreme irregularity, requires a combination of forethought and

self-control which falls little short of genius. And it has to be done

on a cash basis, for debt would worry Tony out of his wits. The family

purse must necessarily be the centre, and the symbol, of Mrs Widger's

household activities; a matter to which she must give more thought than

to any other one thing.

"Mabel, I want you to go out for me," she says. "Get me my purse."

[Sidenote: _CHARACTERISTIC GESTURE_]

Standing, as a rule, by the dresser, she receives the purse into her

hand, opens it meditatively, looks in, pokes a ringer in, tips the

purse and peers between the coins as they fall apart; takes one or two

out and replaces them as if they fitted into slots. Then with a

wide-armed gesture, curiously commanding and graceful, she hands out to

the child perhaps a ha'penny. "Get me a ha'porth o' new milk, quick!"

The purse is put away.

So striking is the little ceremony, so symbolic, so able to stop our

chatter while we look, that we have nicknamed Mam Widger _The Purse

Bearer_.

That is the name for her--Purse Bearer.

17

Downstairs in the front room there are two or three photographs of

George, that he himself has sent home since that day he went off to the

Navy. The earliest shows him still boyish, sitting small, as it were,

and a little shy of his new uniform. In the latest, taken not long ago,

nor very long in point of time after the first, he is sitting bolt

upright, chest inflated, arms akimbo with a straight, level, almost

ferocious look in his eyes. He has apparently taken a measure of the

world outside Under Town, and is all the surer of his feet for having

stood up against greater odds and for having walked the slippery plank

of Navy regulations. "If you'm minded to run up against me," he seems

to be saying, "come and try; here I am." The two photographs suggest

the difference between a bird in winter and in the mating season.

George's uniform, in the later photograph, has become his spring

plumage.

[Sidenote: _GEORGE HOME_]

When he sent word that he was coming home on leave, I was prepared for

a great change in him, but scarcely for the new George. He used to be

so like a cat on a sunny wall; used to lie along the stern seat of the

_Moondaisy_ so lazy and content that only his ever-watchful eyes

held any expression. He was deeply sunburnt: scraggy in the neck;

strong and lissome, but not very smart.

He is returned home no less strong and lissome, and exceedingly smart.

The sunburn is gone; indeed there's many a maiden would envy his

complexion; and his long stout neck, with the broadening bands of

muscle, would delight a sculptor. The alert expression, that used to be

more or less limited to his eyes, has spread, so to speak, over all his

face, over the whole of him and into all his movements. He is

organised; unified. In repose now, he would not be simply lazy; he

would be _being lazy_. His features, rather indeterminate of old, have

become curiously refined, almost delicate, almost supercilious (in the

pride of young strength), but not quite either. It is noticeable

generally that an orderly mental existence has great power to

regularise the features, and in so doing, to refine them. Hence perhaps

this refinement of feature in George; for if, in the effort to gain

promotion, he has been putting his heart into his work--the routine

work of his ship and the Naval barracks--it follows that his mental

existence must have been very orderly and regular. But how far the

total change in him is due to Navy discipline, and how far to his

arrival at mating time, one cannot say, neither probably could he.

Among working people nothing so smartens a young man and so quickly

sets him on his own feet as a little traffic with the maidens;

especially when he can't get his own way too easily. George, I gather,

is paying attention to two or three.

Whereas his toilet used to consist of dragging on trousers, guernsey

and boots, and lacing up the last-named aboard his boat, if at all, it

is now a function delightful to witness as he stumps backwards and

forwards between the kitchen looking-glass and the scullery-sink. What

a washing and spluttering! what a boot-blacking and hair brushing! what

retouches and last glances into the glass! The cap comes off and is

replaced at a jauntier angle, a ribbon is tied again, the lanyard is

put just right, and George goes forth to a war that began before

battleships were thought of. One makes fun of his titivations, and

admires nevertheless. Pride o' life, I have heard it called. Hitching

one's wagon to a star is doubtless good; so is driving one's wagon

along mankind's track. Thank God we have still a deal of the monkey in

us.

I should like to see how Master George would carry on the land campaign

if he had money to spare. That, however, he has not. The presents he

brought home for the whole family, as is customary, must have cost him

a good deal. He has had, too, a spell in the Naval barracks--which

means spending money on shore amusements instead of putting it by. And

as he has bought some civilian clothes on the instalment system, and

will have that to pay off, he cannot borrow much of his father or

mother.

Being 'on his own' now, he does not, of course expect a supply of money

from his father, nor on the other hand does Tony try to force his

authority upon George. Whilst he was here, George met a few of his old

chums up in the Town, and about midnight he came home rather drunk. We

were all abed; he had to knock several times; and in the end Tony went

down to let him in. 'Twas a good opportunity for a quarrel that would

have wakened the whole Square. But Tony said nothing then. He saw

George safely to bed, and merely remarked next day in George's hearing,

that "'Tisn't gude to drink tu much if you can help o'it, specially

when yu'm young; besides, it costis tu much." George was very ashamed.

[Sidenote: _MRS WIDGER'S DIPLOMACY_]

Mrs Widger it was who had the row over George's spree, but not with

George, and owing to her clever diplomacy it was hardly a row at all.

Mabel rushed into the house at breakfast-time.

"Mother, is George come home?"

"Course he is. What next?"

"Well, Lottie Rousdon says as he come'd home last night an' yu an' Dad

wuden' let 'en in. Drunk's a handcart, falling about, her says he was."

"Tis a lie!" began Mrs Widger loudly. Then she appeared to think of

something; her eyes widened, and she spoke quietly.

"Who told yu thic tale?"

"Why, May Rousdon jest as I was coming in now. Her stopped me an' asked

if what Lottie'd told her was true."

"Yu go an' tell Lottie Rousdon that if she has a minute to spare when

she comes home this afternoon to clean herself [Lottie Rousdon is a day

servant], as mother'd like to see her. Don't yu"--this with rising

voice--"don't yu tell anything more'n that or I'll break your neck for

yu."

Mabel rushed out full of importance.

"The lying bitch!" remarked Mam Widger.

Lottie Rousdon walked into the trap. She came in the early evening,

feathers flying, very innocent. She was in a strange house, not in the

Square or among her relatives. Mrs Widger was on her own ground. Both

went into the front room.

"What for did yu--" we could not help hearing.

"Oh, I didn't, Mrs Widger; I'm sure I didn't----"

"Yu did!"

"Mabel," called Mrs Widger. "Go'n ask May Rousdon to kindly step this

way."

May Rousdon came.

"Who told yu what yu told Mabel about George, this morning? Did _yu_

make it up?"

"'Twas Lottie told me, Mrs Widger."

"There! if I didn't think.... Don't yu ever say such a wicked thing

again! Yu don' know what harm...."

The parlour door was shut fast. A hubbub went on within. After a time,

Lottie, weeping, was led out of the house by her sister.

"The lying bitch," Mrs Widger repeated. "I've a-give'd it to her.

Making up that tale so pat as if 'twas all true! That's the sort o'

thing they used to put about when Tony and me was first married, but I

fought 'em down, I did, an' I thought 'twas all stopped long ago. They

tried to make out as 'twas me drove George to sea. Nobody can't ever

say I haven't luked after Tony's first wife's children so well as I

have me own--but they _have_ said it, all the same, an' I've up an'

give'd it to 'em 'fore now. Whenever I used to correct the children,

they'd only to run out o' the house an' they cude always find someone

to listen to 'em and say as I was cruel to 'em and God knows what. One

time, when I wasn't very well, I felt I cuden' put up wi' it any

longer. But I did. An' here I be, same's ever. Pretty times us used to

have, I can tell yu, when we was first married an' some of 'em put my

blood up!"

I understand that she cursed several--literally kicked one or two--out

of the house; but now when anybody is ill, or anything has to be done,

she is the first person to be sent for; and when George said goodbye to

her at the station, he wept.

18

[Sidenote: _IN THE BAR_]

I was in the Alexandra bar this evening, drinking bitter ale. Apart

from the new saloon counter, it is an old-fashioned place, full of

wooden partitions and corners and draughts. The incandescent light was

flickering dimly in the draught that the sea-wind drove through the

window and the front door. Seated around the fireplace or against the

painted partitions, and standing about in groups, were fishermen in

guernseys, ex-fishermen, some bluejackets, and some solid-looking men

who were pensioners or sailors in mufti. A couple of repulsive

lodging-house keepers (they eat too much that falls from the lodgers'

tables) were talking local politics with a foxy-faced young tradesman

of the semi-professional sort. The barman, who had had enough to drink,

was thumb-fingered, loud-voiced, hastily slow. Sometimes the sound of a

heavier wave than usual broke through the buzz of conversation, and

sometimes, when the conversation dropped, wave after wave could be

heard sweeping the shingle along the beach.

A party of vagrant minstrels came to the front-door steps. They played

a comic song, and the voices within rose in defiance of the music, so

that when it stopped suddenly, they were surprised into silence.

Up through that silence welled the opening notes of Schubert's

_Serenade_. Nobody spoke. The barman took up a glass cheerily. "My

doctor ordered me to take a little when I feel I need it," he said; and

was _hushed_ down. Some edged towards the door, others sat back with

faces and pipes tilted up, and others gazed down at the floor. A

memory-struck, far-away look came into their eyes. Only the barman with

his glass, and the tradesman in his smart suit, seemed wholly

themselves.

The _Serenade_ ceased. None spoke. The light gave a great flicker.

"What the bloody hell!" exclaimed John Widger. The day-dreamers awoke,

as if from a light sleep. An everyday look came quickly into their eyes

and each one shifted in his seat. Some even shook themselves like dogs.

A joke was made about the woman who came in to collect pence, and the

conversation rose till nothing of the sea's noise could be heard.

I realised with a shock that in four days I shall not be here, and when

I left the bar, I forgot entirely to say _Good-night_.

[Sidenote: _A GLIMPSE_]

It was as if, for the moment, we had all been very intimate; as if we

had all gone an adventure together and had peeped over the edge of the

world.