Your pity I crave,Won't you give me employ?Or forlorn I must wander,Said the poor smuggler's boy.
Your pity I crave,Won't you give me employ?Or forlorn I must wander,Said the poor smuggler's boy.
Your pity I crave,
Won't you give me employ?
Or forlorn I must wander,
Said the poor smuggler's boy.
Then the "Skipper and his Boy"—
Over the mounting waves so 'igh,We'll sail together, my boy and I-I,We'll sail together, my bo-oy and I!
Over the mounting waves so 'igh,We'll sail together, my boy and I-I,We'll sail together, my bo-oy and I!
Over the mounting waves so 'igh,
We'll sail together, my boy and I-I,
We'll sail together, my bo-oy and I!
"Have 'ee wrote to George?" Tony asked.
"'Tis your place to du that."
"I an't got time...."
"Thee asn't got time for nort!"
The fisher's is a merry life!Blow, winds, blow!The fisher and his vitty wife!Row, boys, row!He drives no plough on stubborn land,His fruits are ready to his hand.No nipping frosts his orchards fear,He has his autumn all the year,Blow, winds, blow!The farmer has his rent to pay,Blow, winds, blow!And seeds to purchase every day,Row, boys, row!But he who farms the rolling deep,He never sows, can always reap,The ocean's fields are fair and free,There ain't no rent days on the sea;The fisher's is a merry life!Blow, winds, blow!Blow, damn ye, blow!
The fisher's is a merry life!Blow, winds, blow!The fisher and his vitty wife!Row, boys, row!He drives no plough on stubborn land,His fruits are ready to his hand.No nipping frosts his orchards fear,He has his autumn all the year,Blow, winds, blow!
The fisher's is a merry life!
Blow, winds, blow!
The fisher and his vitty wife!
Row, boys, row!
He drives no plough on stubborn land,
His fruits are ready to his hand.
No nipping frosts his orchards fear,
He has his autumn all the year,
Blow, winds, blow!
The farmer has his rent to pay,Blow, winds, blow!And seeds to purchase every day,Row, boys, row!But he who farms the rolling deep,He never sows, can always reap,The ocean's fields are fair and free,There ain't no rent days on the sea;The fisher's is a merry life!Blow, winds, blow!Blow, damn ye, blow!
The farmer has his rent to pay,
Blow, winds, blow!
And seeds to purchase every day,
Row, boys, row!
But he who farms the rolling deep,
He never sows, can always reap,
The ocean's fields are fair and free,
There ain't no rent days on the sea;
The fisher's is a merry life!
Blow, winds, blow!
Blow, damn ye, blow!
"Aye!" said Tony with conviction, "thic's one side o'it."
"ROLLING HOME"
He tried a note or two at different pitches, then struck with energy into the fine song, "Rolling Home." (Who that has steered for England in a ship—and by ship I do not mean a bustling steam-packet or a floating hotel, but a ship to whose crew England stands for fresh food, women, wine, home.... Who that has so steered the course for England, does not feel a catch at his vitals on hearing the melody, at once plaintive and triumphant, of "Rolling Home?")
Pipe all hands to man the capstan, see your cables run down clear;Soon our ship will weigh her anchor, for old England's shores we steer;If we heave round with a will boys, soon our anchor it will trip,And across the briny ocean we will steer our gallant ship:Rolling home, rolling home!Rolling home across the sea!Rolling home to Merrie England!Rolling home, true love, to thee!Man the bars then with a will, boys, clap all hands that can clap on;As we heave around the capstan, we will sing this well-known song;It will bring back scenes and changes of this parting gift so rare;We shall hear sweet songs of music softly whispering through the air.Rolling home, rolling home!Rolling home across the sea!Rolling home to Merrie England!Rolling home, true love, to thee!Up aloft amid the rigging, as we sail the waters blue,Whilst we cross the briny ocean, we will always think of you;We will leave you our best wishes as we leave this rocky shore;We are bound for Merrie England, to return to you no more!Rolling home, rolling home!Rolling home, across the sea!Rolling home to Merrie England!Rolling home, my love to thee!
Pipe all hands to man the capstan, see your cables run down clear;Soon our ship will weigh her anchor, for old England's shores we steer;If we heave round with a will boys, soon our anchor it will trip,And across the briny ocean we will steer our gallant ship:Rolling home, rolling home!Rolling home across the sea!Rolling home to Merrie England!Rolling home, true love, to thee!
Pipe all hands to man the capstan, see your cables run down clear;
Soon our ship will weigh her anchor, for old England's shores we steer;
If we heave round with a will boys, soon our anchor it will trip,
And across the briny ocean we will steer our gallant ship:
Rolling home, rolling home!
Rolling home across the sea!
Rolling home to Merrie England!
Rolling home, true love, to thee!
Man the bars then with a will, boys, clap all hands that can clap on;As we heave around the capstan, we will sing this well-known song;It will bring back scenes and changes of this parting gift so rare;We shall hear sweet songs of music softly whispering through the air.Rolling home, rolling home!Rolling home across the sea!Rolling home to Merrie England!Rolling home, true love, to thee!
Man the bars then with a will, boys, clap all hands that can clap on;
As we heave around the capstan, we will sing this well-known song;
It will bring back scenes and changes of this parting gift so rare;
We shall hear sweet songs of music softly whispering through the air.
Rolling home, rolling home!
Rolling home across the sea!
Rolling home to Merrie England!
Rolling home, true love, to thee!
Up aloft amid the rigging, as we sail the waters blue,Whilst we cross the briny ocean, we will always think of you;We will leave you our best wishes as we leave this rocky shore;We are bound for Merrie England, to return to you no more!Rolling home, rolling home!Rolling home, across the sea!Rolling home to Merrie England!Rolling home, my love to thee!
Up aloft amid the rigging, as we sail the waters blue,
Whilst we cross the briny ocean, we will always think of you;
We will leave you our best wishes as we leave this rocky shore;
We are bound for Merrie England, to return to you no more!
Rolling home, rolling home!
Rolling home, across the sea!
Rolling home to Merrie England!
Rolling home, my love to thee!
To Mrs Widger's great disgust, Tony has been learningin bedthe correct words (he knew the tune) of "Gay Spanish Ladies." That he gave us as a finale.
Farewell and adieu to you, gay Spanish Ladies.Farewell and adieu to you, Ladies of Spain!For we've received orders for to sail for old England.But we hope in a short time to see you again.We'll rant and we'll roar like true British heroes,We'll rant and we'll roar across the salt seas,Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old England.From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues....
Farewell and adieu to you, gay Spanish Ladies.Farewell and adieu to you, Ladies of Spain!For we've received orders for to sail for old England.But we hope in a short time to see you again.
Farewell and adieu to you, gay Spanish Ladies.
Farewell and adieu to you, Ladies of Spain!
For we've received orders for to sail for old England.
But we hope in a short time to see you again.
We'll rant and we'll roar like true British heroes,We'll rant and we'll roar across the salt seas,Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old England.From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues....
We'll rant and we'll roar like true British heroes,
We'll rant and we'll roar across the salt seas,
Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old England.
From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues....
How we did rant and roar the wonderful up-Channel verse, with its clever use of the high-sounding promontories of the south!
The first land we made, it was called the Deadman,Next Ram Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight,We passed up by Beachy, by Parley and Dungeness,And hove our ship to off the South Foreland light....
The first land we made, it was called the Deadman,Next Ram Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight,We passed up by Beachy, by Parley and Dungeness,And hove our ship to off the South Foreland light....
The first land we made, it was called the Deadman,
Next Ram Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight,
We passed up by Beachy, by Parley and Dungeness,
And hove our ship to off the South Foreland light....
Our glasses were empty. We drove out the cat, gutted some fish, extinguished the lamp, and came upstairs to the tune, repeated, of "Rolling Home." All the tunes are ringing in my head.
ART THAT IS LIVED
There is something about this singing of sea-songs by a seafarer which makes them grip one extraordinarily. They are far from perfect in execution, they are not always quite in tune, especially on Tony's high notes, yet, I am certain, they are as artistic in the best sense as any of the fine music I have heard. Tony sings with imagination: he sees,liveswhat he is singing. Between this sort of song and most, there is much the same difference as between going abroad, and reading a book of travels; or between singing folk-songs with the folk and twittering bowdlerised versions in a drawing-room. However imperfect technically, Tony's songs are an expression of the life he lives, rather than an excursion into the realms of art—into the expression of other kinds of life—with temporarily stimulated and projected imagination. His art is perpetual creation, not repetition of a thing created once and for all. The art that islived, howsoever imperfect, has an advantage over the most finished art that is merely repeated. Next after the music of, as one might say, superhuman creative force—like Bach's and Beethoven's—comes this kind, of Tony's.
Cultured people talk about the artistic tastes of the poor, would have them read—well, they don't quite know what—something 'good,' something namely that appeals to the cultured. It has always been my experience in much lending of books, that the poor will read the literature of life's fundamental daily realities quickly enough, once they know of its existence. What they will not read, what in the struggle for existence they cannot waste time over, is the literature of theetceterasof life, the decorations, the vapourings. Sane minds, like healthy bodies, crave strong meats, and the strong meats of literature are usually the worst cooked. I am inclined to think that the taste of the poor, the uneducated, is on the right lines, though undeveloped, whilst the taste of the educated consists of beautifully developed wrongness, an exquisite secession from reality. As Nietzsche pointed out, degenerates love narcotics; something to make them forget life, not face it. Their meats must be strange and peptonized. Therefore they hate, they are afraid of, the greatest things in life—the commonplace. Much culture has debilitated them. Rank life would kill them—or save them.
VI
Salisbury,October.
1
It is just at dawn that the coming day declares itself most plainly; not earlier, not later. This morning at peep o' day the wind was NNW., the air delicate and peaceful. A band of dirty red water washed in fantastic outline along the cliffs. The sea, with its calm great rollers, bore upon it only the rags of last night's fury; as if it had been less a part of the storm than a thing buffeted by the storm, and now glad to sink into tranquillity. The air was scented with land smells. Shafts of the dawn's sunlight beamed across it. Three punts put off to find out if the lobster-pots had been washed away; the sea had its little boats upon it again. But the sky, to the SW., was looking very wild. The wind was SW. in the offing.
While we were at breakfast a southerly squall burst open the kitchen door. Mrs Widger got up to see what child it was. A screaming sea-gull mocked her.
The storm came. The trees by the railway bowed and tossed. Rain spattered against the carriage windows. Dead leaves scurried by. I wanted to get out, to go back. I wanted to know whether Tony was at sea. Here, at Salisbury they are already talking about the 'great storm'; some of the beautiful elms are down. What must the storm have been at Seacombe!
Curiously, I felt, the first time for years, as if I were leaving home for boarding school—the warmth behind, the chill in front. I smelt again the rank soft-soap in the great bare schoolrooms.
2
A postcard from Tony—
"quite please to get your letter this morning it as been rough ever since you left Seacombe it was a gale the night you went Back the sea was all in over and knocking the boats about the road. I haven been out sea sinsce it is still rough hear now it is blowing a gale of wind I expect we shall get some witing and herring in the bay when the weather get fine the sea hear is like the cliff now red. Us aven catched nort nobody cant go to sea."Tony."I will write a letter soon."P.S. Tony just waked up. George is coming home, Tony mazed with excitement and wishes you was here."MamW."
"quite please to get your letter this morning it as been rough ever since you left Seacombe it was a gale the night you went Back the sea was all in over and knocking the boats about the road. I haven been out sea sinsce it is still rough hear now it is blowing a gale of wind I expect we shall get some witing and herring in the bay when the weather get fine the sea hear is like the cliff now red. Us aven catched nort nobody cant go to sea.
"Tony.
"I will write a letter soon.
"P.S. Tony just waked up. George is coming home, Tony mazed with excitement and wishes you was here.
"MamW."
So do I!
3
TONY OFF TO SEA
The evening before I left Seacombe, Tony was telling us how upset and miserable he was, how he cried, when his two elder brothers left home to join the Navy. Also he told us what I knew nothing of before—his own one attempt to go to sea aboard a merchantman. When he was at Cloade's he looked on fishing as a refuge from groceries, and when he had given up groceries for fishing, he looked on a ship's fo'c'stle as a refuge from that. Fishing was very bad one summer. He and Dick Yeo agreed to run away together:
"Us was doin' nort noway wi' the fishing—nort 't all. Father, Granfer that is, wer away to his drill wi' the Royal Naval Reserves. So Dick Yeo an' me agreed to go off together. Where he went, I was to go tu, an' where I went, he was to come. He had two pounds put away, in gold. I only had half a crown, an' cuden't see me way to get no more nuther. 'Casn' thee ask thy maid for some?' Dick said. I was ashamed, like, but I did.
"'What's thee want it for?" her asked.
"'Tisn' nothing doing down here,' I says, 'an' I wants to go to sea.'
"'I an't got no money,' the maid says.
"'Casn' thee get nort?' I asks, having begun, you see. I'd been goin' with her for nigh on two years.
"Her cried bitter at the thought o' me going, but her did get seven shillin's from a fellow servant. I told me mother—her cried tu'—an' off us started, going by train to Bristol and stopping the night at the Sailor's Rest. 'Twasn't bad, you know. They Restis be gude things. Dick, he woke in the morning wi' a swelled faace, but I didn' feel nort.
"Dick Yeo paid both our boat fares from Bristol to Cardiff. The steward—what us urned against aboard ship—recommended us to a lodging house in Adelaide Street, an' he giv'd me a note for a man at the Board o' Trade, sayin' we was Demshire fishin' chaps an' gude seamen.
"Well, us went to the lodging house an' gave in our bags an' took a room wi' fude [food] for two an' six a day—each, mind yu. Then us looked into a big underground room wer there was a lot o' foreigners gathered round a fire an' us didn' much like the looks o' that. So us went straight down to the docks an' tried to ship together on several sailing ships an' steamers. Some on 'em would on'y take me, an' some were down to sail at a future date, like, what our money wouldn't last out tu.Icude ha' got a ship, 'cause I had me Naval Reserve ticket, but nobody cuden't du wi' both on us—an' where one went t'other was to go tu, by agreement.
AT THE BOARD O' TRADE
"Us went back to the lodging house, into a sort o' kitchen in a cellar, where there was a 'Merican wi' a long white beard cooking, an' men drunk spewing, an' men lying about asleep like logs. The 'Merican, his beard looking so red as hell in the firelight, wer stirring some kind o' stew. Yu shade ha' see'd the faaces what the glow o' they coals shined on! An' the fude.... An' the tables an' plates.... I've a-gone short many a time in my day, but I'd never ha' touched muck like they offered to gie us there. Dick an' me crept up the staircase to bed wi' empty bellies thic night.
"Soon a'ter we was to bed, Dick says to me: 'Can 'ee feel ort yer Tony?'
"'No,' I says, an' whatever 'twas, I didn' feel ort o'it. But I see'd 'em crawling so thick as sea-lice on the wall in a southerly gale, an' I tell 'ee, 'twas they things what took the heart out o' me more'n ort else, aye! more'n the food an' being away from home. Us cuden turn out, 'cause the landlord had our bags an' us hadn' got no money to get 'em back wi', nor nowhere else at all to go tu.
"Next morning, us went straight down to the docks again. Cuden' eat no breakfast what they give'd us. Didn' know what to du. I only had tuppence left, which wuden' ha' taken me home again, not if I'd been willing to give up and go. Come to the last, us was forced to break our agreement. I signed on as able seaman—ableseaman 'cause I was a fishing chap an' had me Royal Naval Reserve ticket—aboard theBrooklands, bound for Bombay. Penny o' me tuppence, I spent writing home to tell mother. I cuden' stay aboard the ship (an' get summut to eat) 'cause I had my gear to get an' a ship to find for Dick—an' we still had hopes, like, o' getting a ship together. Howsbe-ever, us cuden't, nohow. The writer aboard theBrooklandswuden't advance me no wages to get any gear. He told me the landlord to the lodging house wude, him what had our bags a'ready.
"Then I thought o' the steward's note to the Board o' Trade officer, an' us inquired our way to the Board o' Trade, where ther was a gert crowd outside. 'Twas by that us know'd the place. A man told us as the officer what the note was directed tu, wude appear outside the door an' call. Sure 'nuff, he did—wi' gold buttons on his coat—an' called out: 'Six A.B.'s for theAsia'!
"'Who be that?' I asked.
"'That's he,' the man said. 'He'll come out again by'm-bye.'
"Us worked our way to the front—getting cussed horrible for our pains—an' when Mr Gold-Buttons 'peared again, I give'd him the steward's note. He luked at it—an' us. He cude offer me something an' said as he'd du his best for me, but he cuden' hold out no promise for Dick because, see, he hadn' got no Naval Reserve ticket.
"WER DICK GOES, I GOES"
"'Wher Dick goes, I goes,' I says, like that. With which the Board o' Trade officer leaves us waiting there.
"After an hour or so, he com'd out an' called, as if he hadn' ha' know'd us: 'Anthony Widger an' Richard Yeo! Richard Yeo an' Anthony Widger o' Seacombe!'
"'Yer we be, sir,' shouts I, thinking we was fixed up.
"'Be yu Anthony Widger an' Richard Yeo? Come in.'
"Dick, he went in behind the officer, an' me behind Dick. 'Twer a darkish passage, but as the door closed I luked, an' there, hidden behind the door, sort o' flattened against the wall, who did I see but Dick's mother; her'd come all that way by herself. I called to Dick.
"'What the bloody hell be doin' here?' said Dick swearing awful.
"'Don't thee swear at thy mother, Dick,' I says.
"'Dick!' her says, 'Dick, come home again. Your father's breakin' his heart.'
"'Go to b——ry!' says Dick, swearing worse'n ever, 'causehewas wanting in his heart to be home again, yu see.
"I burst out crying, then and there, wi' seeing Dick's mother cry, an' all o'it what we'd been drough. The Board o' Trade officer repeated as he'd help me an' no doubt find me a ship, but Dick—his mother was come'd for he.
"'Wer Dick goes, I goes,' says I.
"Then Dick's mother, her says: 'Will 'ee come home then, Tony?'
"'Wer Dick goes, I goes,' I says again. 'Twas fixed in me head, like.
"'Well,' her says, 'if Dick comes home, will yu come too?'
"I told her: 'I've a-signed on aboard theBrooklands, an' I'll hae to tramp it 'cause I an't got no money.'
"'Well, if I paysyourfare too?'
"'Wer Dick goes, I'll go!' I says.
"So her got over Dick a bit, an' the Board o' Trade man told us to come again, saying as he'd do anything for me, but Dick's mother was come'd for he. An' Mrs Yeo asked us to go wi' her to a restaurant.... That turned me more'n ort else 'cause us hadn' eaten the stuff to the lodging house an' uswashungry. An' her telegraphed home to Dick's father for a trap to meet us to Totnes, for 'twas a Saturday an' there wern't no trains no nearer home.
"Us went to the station, Dick swearing awful, an' in the end us come'd to Totnes to find the trap.
"The trap was there at the inn, sure 'nuff, an' the ostler was waiting up, but the man what come'd wi' the trap was disappeared. We on'y found 'en at two in the morning, sleeping dead drunk in the manger, an' then he an' the ostler began fighting on account o' the ostler casting out a slur 'cause Dick's mother didn' gie him no more than a shilling. A policeman come an' cleared us out o' it!
CARRIAGE PEOPLE
"Two or dree mile out o' Totnes the horse stops dead an' begins to go back'ards. Us coaxed 'en, like, an' still he kept on stopping an' walking back'ards. Dick an' me got out to walk to the halfway inn. There the landlord wuden' come down for us. But he did when the trap come'd up—us was carriage people than, yu see. We had drinks round, an' us give'd flour an' water to the horse to make 'en go. But us hadn' gone far when he stopped an' began to go back'ards again. Dick, he started swearing. 'Let's walk on,' I says, to get 'en out o'it; an' so us did for a mile or so. 'Twas dark, wi' a mizzling rain—an' quiet—an' the trees like shadows. A proper logie night 'twas. Wude 'ee believe me when I says I cude smell the flowers I cuden' see? Us was glad when a tramp caught up wi' us.
"'Have 'ee see'd ort o' a horse an' trap wi' two persons in 'en?' I askis.
"'Two mile back,' he says.
"'Us lef 'en only a mile back,' Dick says.
"'He've a-gone a mile back'ards then!' says I.
"And with the same, Dick laughs out loud, an' I laughs, an' the tramp, he laughs.... 'Twas the first laugh us had since us left Seacombe, an' I reckon it did us gude. Us went on better a'ter that. I covered the tramp up wi' hay in a hay loft, advising of him not to smoke. I could ha' slept tu; I wer heavy for a gude bed; but I saw lights in the farmhouse winder, an' us wer so near home again.
"Well, we crept into Seacombe by the back (people was jest astir, Sunday morning) going each our way from the churchyard, an' I listened outside mother's door. Father was home again, an' they was to breakfast. Her'd had my letter telling them as I'd a-shipped for Bombay.
"'They'll Bumbay the beggar!' father was saying, only 'twasn't 'beggar' as he did say.
"Then my sister Mary, cried out: 'Here's Tony!'
"'I know'dhe'dnever go to Bumbay!' outs father so quick as ever.
"But they was so pleased as Punch to see Tony back, cas I ude see, if they'd ha' cared to say so. I don' know 'xactly why I went off to sea—summut inside driving of me—'twasn't only 'cause there wern't nothing doin'—but I an't never been no more. An' thic Mam Widger there'd hae summut to say about it now. Eh, Annie?"
4
THE SEA'S STAMP
It is an Englishman's privilege to grumble, and a sailorman's duty; yet one thing always strikes me in talking to seafaring men, namely how indelible the sea's stamp is; how indissolubly they are bound to the sea—with sunken bonds like those which unite an old married couple,—and also what outbursts of savage hatred they have against it. Tony says that if he could earn fifteen shillings a week regularly on land, he would give up the sea altogether. I very much doubt it. The sea has him fast. He says further that nobody would go to sea unless he were caught young and foolish, and that few would stay there if they could get away. There are, among the older fishermen of Seacombe, some who have worked well, and could still work, but prefer to stay ashore and starve. Tony holds them excused. "Aye!" he says, "they've a-worked hard in their day, an' they knows they ain't no for'arder. An' now they'm weary o' it all, an' don't care; an' that's how I'll be some day, if I lives—weary o'it, an' just where I was!"
But the sea has her followers, and will continue to have them, because seafaring is the occupation in which health, strength and courage have their greatest value; in which being a man most nearly suffices a man. It is remarkable that Baudelaire, decadent Frenchman, apostle of the artificial, who was violently home-sick when he went on a voyage, should have expressed the relation of man and the sea—their enmity and love—more subtly than any English poet.
Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer;La mer et ton miroir; tu contemples ton âmeDans le déroulement infini de sa lame,Et ton esprit n'est pas un gouffre moins amer.Tu te plais à plonger au sein de ton image;Tu l'embrasses des yeux et des bras, et ton cœurSe distrait quelquefois de sa propre rumeurAu bruit de cette plainte indomptable et sauvage.Vous êtes tous les deux ténébreux et discrets:Homme, nul n'a sondé le fond de tes abîmes,O mer, nul ne connaît tes richesses intimes,Tant vous êtes jaloux de garder vos secrets!Et cependant voilà des siècles innombrablesQue vous vous combattez sans pitié ni remord,Tellement vous aimez le carnage et la mort,O lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!
Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer;La mer et ton miroir; tu contemples ton âmeDans le déroulement infini de sa lame,Et ton esprit n'est pas un gouffre moins amer.
Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer;
La mer et ton miroir; tu contemples ton âme
Dans le déroulement infini de sa lame,
Et ton esprit n'est pas un gouffre moins amer.
Tu te plais à plonger au sein de ton image;Tu l'embrasses des yeux et des bras, et ton cœurSe distrait quelquefois de sa propre rumeurAu bruit de cette plainte indomptable et sauvage.
Tu te plais à plonger au sein de ton image;
Tu l'embrasses des yeux et des bras, et ton cœur
Se distrait quelquefois de sa propre rumeur
Au bruit de cette plainte indomptable et sauvage.
Vous êtes tous les deux ténébreux et discrets:Homme, nul n'a sondé le fond de tes abîmes,O mer, nul ne connaît tes richesses intimes,Tant vous êtes jaloux de garder vos secrets!
Vous êtes tous les deux ténébreux et discrets:
Homme, nul n'a sondé le fond de tes abîmes,
O mer, nul ne connaît tes richesses intimes,
Tant vous êtes jaloux de garder vos secrets!
Et cependant voilà des siècles innombrablesQue vous vous combattez sans pitié ni remord,Tellement vous aimez le carnage et la mort,O lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!
Et cependant voilà des siècles innombrables
Que vous vous combattez sans pitié ni remord,
Tellement vous aimez le carnage et la mort,
O lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!
SEA-LARGENESS
The sea is never mean. Strife and brotherhood with it give a largeness to men which, like all deep qualities of the spirit, can be neither specified nor defined; only felt, and seen in the outcome. The Seacombe fishermen are more or less amphibious; ocean-going seamen look down on them. They are petty in some small things, notably in jealousy lest one man do more work, or make more money, than another: to say a man is doing well is to throw out a slur against him. Nevertheless in the larger, the essential things of life, their sea-largeness nearly always shows itself. They are wonderfully charitable, not merely with money. They carp at one another, but let a man make a mess of things, and he is gently treated. I have never heard Tony admit that any man—even one who had robbed him—had not his very good points. Is a man a ne'er-do-well, a drunkard, an idler? "Ah," they say, "his father rose he up like a gen'leman, an' that's what comes o'it." In their dealings, they curiously combine generosity and close-fistedness—close-fistedness in earning, and generosity in spending and lending. A beachcomber, for simply laying a hand to a rope, receives a pint of beer, or the price of it, and next moment the fisherman who paid the money may be seen getting wet through and spoiling his clothes in order to drag a farthing's worth of jetsam from the surf. Tony fails to understand how a gen'leman can possibly haggle over the hire of a boat. When he goes away himself, he pays what is asked; regrets it afterwards, if at all; and comes home when his money is done. "If a gen'leman," he says, "can't afford to pay the rate, what du 'ee come on the beach to hire a boat for—an' try to beat a fellow down? I reckon 'tis only asort o' gen'lemanas does that!"
Like most seafarers, the fishermen are fatalistic. "What's goin' to be, will be, an' that's the way o'it." But they are not thoroughgoing fatalists, inasmuch as disappointment quickly turns to resentment against something handy to blame. If, for example, we catch no fish, Tony will blame the tide, the hour, the weather, the boat, the sail, the leads, the line, the hooks, the bait, the fish, his mate—anything rather than accept the one fact that, for reasons unknown, the fish are off the bite. A thoroughgoing fatalist would blame, if he did not acquiesce in, fate itself or his luck.
Tony is a black pessimist as regards the present and to-morrow; convinced that things are not, and cannot be, what they were; but as regards the further future, the day after to-morrow, he is a resolute optimist. "Never mind how bad things du look, summut or other'll sure to turn up. It always du. I've a-proved it. I've a-see'd it scores o' times." He can earn money by drifting for mackerel and herring, hooking mackerel, seining for mackerel, sprats, flat-fish, mullet and bass, bottom-line fishing for whiting, conger or pout, lobster and crab potting, and prawning; by belonging to the Royal Naval Reserve; by boat-hiring; by carpet-beating and cleaning up. I have even seen him dragging a wheel chair. His boats and gear represent, I suppose, a capital of near a hundred pounds. It would be hard if he earned nothing. Yet he is certain that his earnings, year in and year out, scarcely average fifteen shillings a week. "Yu wears yourself out wi' it an' never gets much for'arder." The money, moreover, comes in seasons and lump-sums; ten pounds for a catch perhaps, then nothing for weeks. Mrs Widger must be, and is, a good hand at household management and at putting money by. I doubt if Tony ever knows how much, or how little, gold she has, stored away upstairs. Probably it is as well. He is a generous man with money. He 'slats it about' when he has it.
OPEN BOATS
It has to be realised that these fishermen exercise very great skill and alertness. To sail a small open boat in all weathers requires a quicker hand and judgment than to navigate a seagoing ship. Seacombe possesses no harbour, and therefore Seacombe men can use no really seaworthy craft. "'Tis all very well," Tony says, "for people to buzz about the North Sea men an' knit 'em all sorts o' woollen gear. They North Sea men an' the Cornishmen wi' their big, decked harbour boats, theyhavegot summut under their feet—somewhere they can get in under, out the way o'it. Theycanmake themselves comfor'able, an ride out a storm. But if it comes on to blow when we'm to sea in our little open craft, we got to hard up an' get home along—if us can. For the likes o' us, 'tis touch an' go wi' the sea!"
Tony knows. At places like Seacombe every boat, returning from sea, must run ashore and be hauled up the beach and even, in rough weather, over the sea-wall. The herring and mackerel drifters, which may venture twenty miles into the open sea, cannot be more than twenty-five feet in length else they would prove unwieldy ashore. To avoid their heeling over and filling in the surf, they must be built shallow, with next to no keel. They have therefore but small hold on the water; they do not sail close to the wind, and beating home against it is a long wearisome job. Again, because the gear for night work in small craft must be as simple as possible, such boats usually carry only a mizzen and a dipping lug—the latter a large, very picturesque, but unhandy, sail which has to be lowered or 'dipped' every time the boat tacks. Neither comfort nor safety is provided by the three feet or so of decking, the 'cuddy' or 'cutty,' in the bows. To sleep there with one's head underneath, is to have one's feet outside, andvice versa. In rough broken seas the open beach drifter must be handled skilfully indeed, if she is not to fill and sink.
I have watched one of them running home in a storm. The wind was blowing a gale; the sea running high and broken. One error in steering, one grip of the great white sea-horses, meant inevitable wreck. Every moment or two the coastguard, who was near me with a telescope to his eye, exclaimed, "She's down!" But no. She dodged the combers like a hare before greyhounds, now steering east, now west, on the whole towards home. It was with half her rudder gone that she ran ashore after a splendid exhibition of skill and nerve, many times more exciting than the manœuvres of a yacht race. Were there not many such feats of seamanship among fishermen, there would be more widows and orphans.
BOATS SHEERING
Those are the craft, those the sort of men—two usually to a boat—that put to sea an hour or two before sunset, ride at the nets through the night, and return towards or after dawn. Anything but a moderate breeze renders drifting impossible. In a calm, the two men are bound to row, for hours perhaps, with heavy 16-20 ft. sweeps. Moreover, if the sea makes, or a ground swell rises, the least mistake in beaching a boat will cause it to sheer round, capsize, and wash about in the breakers with the crew most probably beneath it. Yarns are told of arms and legs appearing, of a horrible tortured face appearing, while the upturned boat washed about in the undertow, and those ashore were powerless to help. There is nothing the fishermen dread so much. One of them owns to leaving the beach when he has seen a boat running in on a very rough sea, so that he might not endure witnessing what he could not prevent.—He peeped however.
These risks need considering, not in order to exaggerate the dangers of drifting in open beach boats—in point of fact, accidents seldom do happen,—but to show what skill is habitually exercised, what a touch and go with the sea it is.
Sundown is the time for shooting nets. Eight to fourteen are carried for mackerel, six to ten for herrings—the scantier the fish, the greater the number of nets. At Seacombe they are commonly forty fathoms in length along the headrope which connects them all, and five fathoms deep. Stretching far away from the boat, as it drifts up and down Channel with the tides, is a line, perhaps a thousand yards long, of cork buoys. From these hang the lanyards16which support the headrope, from the headrope hang perpendicularly the nets themselves. Judgment is needed in shooting a fleet of nets. They may get foul of the bottom or of another boat's fleet. When, on account of careless shooting or tricks of the tide, the nets of several boats become entangled, there is great confusion, and the cursing is loud.
Nets shot, the fishermen make fast the road for'ard; sup, smoke, sing, creep under the cutty, and sleep with one eye open.
Sometimes they are too wet to sleep; often in the winter it is too cold.
Afterwards, the laborious hauling in—one man at the headrope and the other at the foot. Contrary to a very general impression, the fish are not enclosed within the net, as in seining or in pictures of the miraculous draught of fishes. They prod their snouts into the meshes, and are caught by the gills. There may not be a score in a whole fleet of nets, or they may come up like a glittering mat, beyond the strength of two men to lift over the gunwale. Twenty-five thousand herring is about the burthen of an open beach drifter. Are there more, nets must be given away at sea, or buoyed up and left—or cut, broken, lost. Small catches are picked out of the nets as they are hauled in, large catches ashore.
FISHERMEN FLEECED
It is ashore that the fisherman comes off worst of all. Neither educated nor commercialized, he is fleeced by the buyers. And if he himself dispatches his haul to London.... Dick Yeo once went up to Billingsgate and saw his own fish sold for about ten pounds. On his return to Seacombe, he received three pounds odd, and a letter from the salesman to say that there had been a sudden glut in the market. Fishermen boat-owners have an independence of character which makes it difficult for them to combine together effectively, as wage-servers do. They act too faithfully on the adage that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and ten shillings on the beach a sovereign at Billingsgate. So 'tis, when
There's little to earn and many to keep,
and no floating capital at a man's disposal.
In recent years, owing to bad prices and seasons and general lack of encouragement, or even of fair opportunity, the number of sea-going drifters at Seacombe has decreased by two-thirds. Much the same has happened at other small fishing places along the coast. This decline—so complacently acquiesced in by the powers that be—is of national importance; for the little fisheries are the breeding ground of the Navy. Nowadays fishermen put their sons to work on land. "'Tain't wuth it," they say, "haulin' yer guts out night an' day, an' gettin' no forrarder at the end o'it." Luckily for England the sea's grip is a firm one, and many of the sons return to it.
When one hears Luscombe talk about the maddening trouble he has had in teaching plough-tail or urban recruits to knot and splice a rope, or watches, as I have, a couple of blue-jackets drive ashore in a small boat because they couldn't hoist sail, then one comprehends better the importance of the fisher-families whose work is made up of endurance, exposure, nerve and skill; who play touch and go with the sea; and who in the slack seasons have—unlike the ordinary workman—only too much time to think for themselves. They are the backbone of the Navy.
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."
A MARK
Then I offered her fiveper 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 doyuwant?" 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?"
"Yudidn' 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.
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.
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
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 himJacks 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 £50 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 £50 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 notfeelthat 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.
PRAWNING
"Coo'h!" Uncle Jake exclaimed. "'Tisa 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.Itells '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 orthirts—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.Iknows '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 intheygoes—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!"
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'tyu 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'tsee'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."
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.
EAST WITH A SKIM-NET
Next day we sailed east in theMoondaisy. Uncle Jake straddled the pools and lifted the heavy stones. Then in a skim-net,18with 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.
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.
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 manversustradesman.
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.
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: