"Widworthy, I am gone to London. Your dinner is in the saucepan. I shall be back directly."
"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 playGod Save the Kingon 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."
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 givenGood Nightfrom 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 wifeisgone."
"Well, didn't 'ee know that?"
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, saidGood-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,Ibe 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 thepercentage criminalityof 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. Ona 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!"
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 theCock Robinand 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."
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.
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.
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 stilllookedclean, 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....
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.
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 brandishsirs, 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, thatmentalcomfort 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
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 anæmia 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 ofyouryoung 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
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 itwashis 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 reallyveryclean here." 'Twas an untruth. We are notveryclean: 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."
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
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.
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 notforgivechildren; 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.
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'theeswinter." 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 theMoondaisy.... 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 littleMoondaisy, lying on ways at the water's edge, looked as if she had a small deckhouse aft. Sixteen boat-nets,19with 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.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"Iknows; 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. ButIshuden' 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!"
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. "'Tisan 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.
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. Theplopwas 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(orPull 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.
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.
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. "'Tisa 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. 'Tissome mates I've had for thees yer job. Most of 'em won't come when they can pay the brewer any other way.I'llnever 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.Hewon'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 itslap-lap-lapunder 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 theMoondaisyup 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. "DuIwant to die?" he says when asked his age. "Why, I'd like to live a thousand years!"
14
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.
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.
"Ican'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.
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
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.
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."
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 WidgerThe 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.
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 theMoondaisyso 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 bebeing 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.