Chapter V (2)

The lines are trailed astern of the boat as it sails up and down,
where the mackerel are believed to be. When well on the feed they
will bite, even at the pipe clay and bare hook, faster than they
can be hauled inboard. River anglers and even some sea fishers
are disposed to deny the amount of skill, alertness and knowledge
which go to catching the greatest possible number of fish while
they are up. It is often said that the mackerel allows itself to
be caught as easily by a beginner as by an old hand. One or two
mackerel may: mackerel don't. In hooking, as opposed to fishing
fine with a rod, the sporting element is supplied by fish, not
_a_ fish; by numbers in a given time, not bend and break. The
tackle brought to the sea by the superior angler, who thinks he
knows more than those who have hooked mackerel for generations,
is a wonder, delight, and irritation to professional fishermen:
it is constructed in such robust ignorance of the habits, and
manner of biting, of mackerel, and it ignores so obstinately the
conditions of the sport. Likewise the fish ignore _it_.

[Sidenote: _DAWN AT SEA_]

Tony scrambled aboard over the starboard bow, his trousers and boots dripping. "'Tis al'ays like that, putting off from thees yer damn'd ol' baych. No won'er us gits the rhuematics." He hung the rudder, loosed the mizzen. I stepped the mast, hoisted the jib and lug, and made fast halyards and sheets. Our undignified bobbing, our impatient wallowing on the water stopped short. The wind's life entered into the craft. She bowed graciously to the waves. With a motion compounded of air and water, wings and a heaving, as if she were airily suspended over the sea, the _Cock Robin_ settled to her course. Spray skatted gleefully over her bows and the wavelets made a gurgling music along the clinker-built strakes of her.

Tony put out the lines: tangled two of them, got in a tear, as he calls it, snapped the sid, bit the rusty hook off, spat out a shred of old bait, brought the boat's head too far into the wind, cursed the flapping sail and cursed the tiller, grubbed in his pockets for a new hook, and made tiny knots with clumsy great fingers and his teeth. "An't never got no gear like I used tu," he complained, and then, standing upright, with the tiller between his legs and a line in each outstretched hand, he unbuttoned his face and broke into the merriest of smiles. "What du 'ee think o' Tony then, getting in a tear fust start out? Do 'ee think he's maazed--or obsolete? But we'll catch 'em if they'm yer. Yu ought to go 'long wi' Uncle Jake. He'd tell 'ee summut--and the fish tu if they wasn't biting proper!"

By the time the lines were out, the dun sou'westerly clouds all around had raised themselves like a vast down-hanging fringe, a tremendous curtain, ragged with inconceivable delicacy at the foot, between which, and the water-line, the peep o' day stared blankly. The whitish light, which made the sea look deathly cold, was changed to a silvery sheen where the hidden cliffs stood. From immaterial shadows, looming over the surf-line, the cliffs themselves brightened to an insubstantial fabric, an airy vision, ruddily flushed; till, finally, ever becoming more earthy, they upreared themselves, high-ribbed and red, bush-crowned and splashed with green--our familiar, friendly cliffs, for each and every part of whom we have a name. The sun slid out from a parting of clouds in the east, warming the dour waves into playfulness.

'Twas all a wonder and a wild delight.

As I looked at Tony, while he glanced around with eyes that were at once curiously alert and dreamy, I saw that, in spite of use and habit, in spite of his taking no particular notice of what the sea and sky were like, except so far as they affected the sailing of the boat,--the dawn was creeping into him. Many such dawns have crept into him. They are a part of himself.

[Sidenote: _A TENDERHEART BY NATURE_]

"Look to your lew'ard line!" he cried, "they'm up for it!"

He hauled a mackerel aboard, and, catching hold of the shank of the hook, flicked the fish into the bottom of the boat with one and the same motion that flung the sid overboard again; and after it the lead. Wedging the mackerel's head between his knees, he bent its body to a curve, scraped off the scales near its tail, and cut a fresh lask from the living fish. He is a tenderheart by nature, but now: "That'll hae 'em!" he crowed.

The mackerel bit hotly at our new baits.[10] Before the lines were properly out, in they had to come again. Flop-flop went the fish on the bottom-boards as we jerked them carelessly off the hooks. Every moment or two one of them would dance up and flip its tail wildly; beat on the bottom-boards a tattoo which spattered us with scales; then sink back among the glistening mass that was fast losing its beauty of colour, its opalescent pinks and steely blues, even as it died and stiffened.

[10] Undoubtedly, if the mackerel are only half on the feed, a
fresh lask is better than any other bait, better than an equally
brilliant salted lask. It is the shine of the bait at which the
fish bite, as at a spinner, but probably the fresh lask leaves
behind it in the water an odour or flavour of mackerel oil which
keeps the shoal together and makes them follow the boat.

Suddenly the fish stopped biting, perhaps because the risen sun was shining down into the water. The wind dropped without warning, as southerly winds will do in the early morning, if they don't come on to blow a good deal harder. The _Cock Robin_ wallowed again on the water. "We'm done!" said Tony. "Let's get in out o'it in time for the early market. There ain't no other boats out. Thees yer ought to fetch 'leven-pence the dizzen. We've made thees day gude in case nort else don't turn up."

While I rowed ashore, he struck sail, and threw the ballast overboard. Most pleasantly does that shingle ballast plop-rattle into the water when there is a catch of fish aboard. We ran in high upon a sea. Willing hands hauled the _Cock Robin_ up the beach: we had fish to give away for help. The mackerel made elevenpence a dozen to Jemima Caley, the old squat fishwoman who wears a decayed sailor hat with a sprig of heather in it. "Yu don' mean to say yu've a-catched all they lovely fish!" she said with a rheumy twinkle, in the hope of getting them for tenpence.

"'Levenpence a dozen, Jemima!"

"Aw well then, yu must let I pay 'ee when I sold 'em. An't got it now. Could ha' gived 'ee tenpence down."

With a mackerel stuck by the gills on the tip of each finger, I came in house. The children were being got ready for school. When I returned downstairs with some of the fishiness washed off, Mrs Widger was distributing the school bank-cards and Monday morning pennies. (By the time the children leave school, they will have saved thus, penny by penny, enough to provide them with a new rig-out for service--or Sunday wear.) There was a frizzling in the topsy-turvy little kitchen.

[Sidenote: _A DARING RASCAL_]

"Mam! Vish!"

"Mam! I wants some vish. Mam 'Idger...."

"Yu shall hae some fish another time."

"No-o-o!"

"Go on!"

"Well, jam zide plaate then."

Jimmy's finger was in the jampot.

"Yu daring rascal!" shrieks Mam Widger. "Get 'long to school with 'ee! Yu'll be late an' I shall hae the 'spector round. Get 'long--and see what I'll hae for 'ee when yu comes back."

"Coo'h! Bulls' eyes! Ay, mam? Good bye, Dad. Good bye, Mam. Bye, Mister Ronals. Gimme a penny will 'ee?"

"God damn the child--that ever I should say it--get 'long! _I'll_ hae a bull's eye for 'ee. Now go on."

A tramp of feet went out through the passage.

Mrs Widger shovelled the crisp mackerel from the frying-pan into our plates. Tony soused his with vinegar from an old whiskey bottle. We lingered over our tea till he said: "Must go out an' clean they ther boats--the popples what they damn visitors' children chucks in for to amuse theirselves, not troubling to think us got to pick every one on 'em out be hand, an' looking daggers at 'ee when you trys to tell 'em o'it so polite as yu can. Ay, me--our work be never done."

"No more ain't mine!" snapped Mrs Widger, moving off to her washtub.

10

For the last two or three days there has been a large flat brown-paper parcel standing against the wall on the far side of my bed. I have wondered what it was.

This evening, after we had all finished tea, while Tony was puffing gingerly at a cigarette (he is nothing of a smoker) with his chair tilted back and a stockinged foot in Mrs Widger's lap, Jimmy said, as Jimmy usually says: "Gie us another caake, Mam 'Idger." He laid a very grubby hand on the cakelets.

"Yu li'l devil!" shouted his mother. "Take yer hands off or I'll gie 'ee such a one.... Yu'd eat an eat till yu busted, I believe; an yu'm that cawdy [finical] over what yu has gie'd 'ee...."

Tony took up the poker and made a feint at Jimmy, who jumped into the corner laughing loudly. With an amazing contrast in tone, Mrs Widger said quietly: "Wait a minute an' see what I got to show 'ee, if yu'm gude."

[Sidenote: _ROSIE'S PHOTOGRAPH_]

She went upstairs with that peculiar tread of hers--as if the feet were very tired but the rest of the body invincibly energetic,--and returned with the flat parcel. She undid the string, the children watching with greedy curiosity. She placed on the best-lighted chair an enlargement of a baby's photograph, in a cheap frame, all complete. "There!" she said.

"What is ut?" asked Tony. "Why, 'tis li'l Rosie!"

"Wer did 'ee get 'en?" he continued more softly. "Yu an't had 'en give'd 'ee?"

"Give'd me? No! Thic cheap-jack.... But 'tisn' bad, is it?"

"What cheap-jack?"

"Why, thic man to the market-house--wer I got the cruet."

"O-oh! I didn' never see he.... What did 'ee pay 'en for thic then?"

"Never yu mind. 'Twasn't none o' yours what I paid. What do 'ee think o'it?"

"'Tisn' bad--very nice," remarked Tony, bending before the picture, examining it in all lights. "Iss; 'tisn' bad by no means. Come yer, Jimmy an' Tommy. Do 'ee know who that ther is?"

"Rosie!" whispered Jimmy.

"What was took up to cementry," added Tommy in a brighter voice.

"Iss, 'tis our li'l Rosie to the life (mustn' touch), jest like her was."

A moment's tension; then, "A surprise for 'ee, en' it?" Mrs Widger enquired.

"My ol' geyser!"

The children's riot began again. "Our Rosie...." they were saying. Mam 'Idger, slipping out of Tony's grasp, carried the picture off to the front room. She was sometime gone.

Wordsworth's _We are Seven_ came into my mind:

"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
'Twas throwing words away; for still
The little maid would have her will,
And said, "Nay, we are seven!"

I knew, of course, intellectually, that the poem records more than a child's mere fancy; but never before have I felt its truth, have I been caught up, so to speak, into the atmosphere of the wise, simple souls who are able to rob death of the worst of its sting by refusing to let the dead die altogether, even on earth. Rosie is dead and buried. I perceive also--I perceived, while Tony and the children stood round that picture--that Rosie is still here, in this house, hallowing it a little. The one statement is as much a fact as the other; but how much more delicately intangible, and perhaps how much truer, the second.

11

[Sidenote: _ROSIE'S DEATH_]

While we waited for Tony to come in to supper, Mrs Widger told me about Rosie's death. "It must be awful," she said, "to lose a child fo them as an't got nor more. I know how I felt it when Rosie was took. Nothing would please me for months after but to go up to the cementry, to her little grave. 'Most every evening I walked up after tea--didn' feel as if I could go to bed an' sleep wi'out. Tony had to fend for hisself if he wanted his supper early. Ther wasn't no reason, but it did ease me, like, to go up there, an' it heartened me a little for next day's work. 'Twas a sort o' habit, p'raps. What broke me of it was my bad illness. [When the twins, 'what nobody didn' know nort about,' were born.] At first, I used to think o' Rosie, when I were lyin' alone upstairs, most 'specially at night time if Tony wer out to sea an' it come'd on to blow a bit. I used to think, if ort happened to Tony.... Our room to the top o' the house, sways when it do blow. I don't trouble me head about Tony when he's to sea ordinary times--expects 'en when I sees 'en--but then I wer weak, like, an' full o' fancies. An' after I got about again I wer much too weak to go to cementry: I used to faint every time I come'd downstairs. Howsbe-ever, I did come down again, an' Tony used to go out and get me quinine wine and three-and-sixpenny port an' all sorts o' messes, to put me on me legs wi'out fainting. 'Twas thic illness as broke me o' going up to Rosie's grave."

"You walk up now on Sunday evenings...." I hazarded, recollecting that then the children run wild for a couple of hours and come in tired and dirty to cry for their mam.

"Yes...." said Mrs Widger.

I saw that I had trespassed into one of the little solitary tracts of her life.

"One day," she continued, backing the conversation with an imperfectly hidden effort, "when Dr Bayliss come to see me, Tony was asleep in the next bed, snoring under the clothes after a night to sea. Dr Bayliss didn' say nort, 'cept he said: 'Your husband's a fisherman, isn't he, Mrs Widger?' But I saw his shoulders a-shaking as he went out the door, an' that evening he sent me a bottle o' port wine out o' his own cellar, an' it did me a power o' gude. Tony--he was that ashamed o' hisself, though I told 'en 'twasn't nothing for a doctor to see 'en...."

[Sidenote: _FRANKNESS AND SMUT_]

At that moment Tony returned. He really was ashamed of the doctor finding him in bed, whether as a breach of manners or of propriety was not plain. Possibly the latter. He has an acute sense of decency, though its rules and regulations are not the same as those of the people he calls gentry. Our conversation here would hardly suit a drawing-room. Tony, if he comes in wet, thinks nothing of stripping down to his shirt. But, curiously enough, one of his chief complaints about the people who hire boats, is their occasionally unclean conversation. "The likes o' us 'ould never think of saying what they du. Me, I didn' know nort about half the things they say till I wer grow'd up an' learnt it from listening to the likes o' they. Yu'd hear bad language wi' us an' plain speaking, but never what some o' they talks about when they got no one to hear 'em 'cept us they hires, an' they thinks us don't matter." Tony is right, I believe. Most of the impropriety I used to hear at school, university, and in the smoking room, though often little but a reaction against silly conventions, a tilt against whited sepulchres,--was well-named _smut_. It was furtive, a distortion of life's facts and inimical therefore to life. Impropriety here, on the other hand, is a recognition of life's facts, an expression of life, a playful ebullition.

Tony, when he came in, enquired of Mam 'Idger what she had done with the picture. "Did Rosie die in the summer?" I asked, remembering how the children will run out to the milkman with a dirty can unless a sharp eye is kept upon them, and how also the larder is fixed up over the main drain.

"Her died late in the autumn with convulsions from teething," Mrs Widger replied. "An' her didn't ought to ha' died then but for Dr Brown. When her was took ill, proper bad, I sent one of the maidens for Dr Bayliss, but he was out to the country for they didn' know how long. So off I sends the maid to Dr Brown, an' he sends back a message as he cuden' attend Dr Bayliss's patients wi'out Dr Bayliss asked him. Certainly 'twas late; but my blood jest boiled, an' I took Rosie into Grannie's an' goes up myself. Rosie didn' belong to no doctor. Her'd never had one. Howsbe-ever, Dr Brown says to me the same as he'd told the maid, that he cuden' come. An' then he says, 'My good woman, I _won't_ come!' Jest like that! My flare was up; I wer jest about to let fly my mind at 'en--an' I remembered Rosie lying in convulsions to Grannie's, an' flew out o' his house like a mad thing. Rosie wer all but dead. Her was gone when Dr Bayliss come'd next morning."

"Aye!" added Tony. "That wer it. Some doctors be kind, an' some don't trouble nort about the likes o' us when they got visitors to run a'ter. I don' say they treats the likes o' us worse'n other people; I don' know: oftentimes they'm so kind as can be; but when they don't behave like they ought to, other people has the means to make 'em sorry for it, an' us an't. They knows that. Us can't do nort an' that's the way o'it. Rosie didn' never ought to ha' died."

"No-o-o!" said Mrs Widger.

One can see the tigress in most women, in every mother, if one waits long enough. I saw it in Mrs Widger then. If she ever has the whip-hand of Dr Brown....

12

This mackerel hooking, which is a two-man job though Tony could and would do it by himself were I not here, has most fortunately raised me out of the position of a mere lodger, a household excrescence, tolerated only for the sake of certain shillings a week. It has provided me with a niche of my own, which I occupy--at sea the mate on a mackerel hooker, on shore a loafer 'ready to lend a hand,' and in the house a sort of male Cinderella. It is far pleasanter, I find, to be a small wheel in the machine than to remain seated on a mound of pounds, shillings and pence--beflunkeyed, as if in a soulless hotel!

[Sidenote: _THE EARLY CUP O' TAY_]

Tony cannot fill his spare time by reading: it makes his long-sighted eyes smart. On account of that, and of nights at sea, with rest taken when and where possible, he has developed an amazing talent for 'putting it away'; that is, for sleeping. He can turn out perfectly well at any hour, if need be, but at ordinary times he is most content to follow somebody else's first. I on my part, sleeping indifferently well, wake usually before dawn, and greatly dislike waiting for an early cup o' tay.

About half-past four I jump out of bed, creep downstairs and chop wood. That warms me. Then with a barbaric glee, I scrape out the ashes, sending clouds of dust over the guernseys and boots that have been set near the fire to dry. No matter; being light and fire-dry, it will brush off the one and shake out of the other. People who never light fires at dawn can have no idea of the exhilaration to be obtained from a well-laid, crackling, flaming fire.

Tony appears at the door, half-dressed, yawning and stretching his arms on high. "Yu an't been an' made tay, have 'ee?" he says with delighted certainty. The cups are filled. He takes up Mam 'Idger's cup and returns with the paper roll of 'Family Biscuits.' We forage for tit-bits, feed standing, yawn again, and go out to 'see what to make o'it.'

Unless the sea is broken by the wind, there is about it just before dawn a peculiar creeping clamminess. It seems but half awake, like ourselves. It has no welcome for us. "Can't you wait," it seems to say, "till I begin to sparkle?"

Tony looks out over. "Had us better tu?" he asks with a shiver.

"Why not?"

"Shove her down then. There's macker out there!"

By the time the sun is rising (it never rises twice the same) south of the easternmost headland, Tony has worked himself into a tear over self-tangling lines, and has been laughed out of it again. We are perhaps a mile or two out, and if the mackerel are biting well, we are hauling them in, swiftly, silently, grimly; banging them off the hook; going _Tsch!_ if they fall back into the sea; cutting baits from fish not dead. If, however, they are not on the feed, we sing blatant or romantic or sentimental songs (it is all one out there), and laugh with a hearty sea-loudness. And if the mackerel will not bite at all we invent a score of reasons and blame a dozen people and things. But there we are--ourselves, the sea, and the heavenly dawn--the sea heaving up to us, and ourselves ever heaving higher, up and over the lop. It exalts us with it. We hardly need to talk. A straight look in the face, a smile.... We are in the more immediate presence of one another. Did we lie to each other with our tongues, the greater part of our communications would yet be truth.

[Sidenote: _THE PRICE OF FISH_]

We sail or row home, turn the mackerel out on the beach, count them back into the box, wash the blood off them, and stoop low, turning them over and over, whilst we haggle for our price. The other day, with the exuberance of the sea still upon me, I slapped old Jemima Caley's rusty shoulder and lo! she rose her price one penny.

"Damme!" she said, "I'll gie 'ee ninepence a dozen if I has to go wi' out me dinner for't! They _be_ fine fish."

"_Sweet_ fish, Jemima!"

"Lor' bless 'ee, yes!"

But she hawked them at twopence-halfpenny or threepence a pair according to the customer. And now, her wry sly smile, peeping from underneath her battered hat-brim, meets me at every back-street corner.

Soap and water, the buzz of the children, their mother's loud voice, and mackerel for breakfast.... It is all quite prosaic and perfectly commonplace, it is far from idyllic; yet it would need the touch of a poet to bring out the wonder, the mystery, of it all: to light up the door of the soul-house through which we pass to and fro, scarce knowing.

Tony comes in early to dinner after a morning's frighting. His object is to get an hour or so for sleep before the visitors come out from their later lunch. Mam 'Idger says we are lazy; that she 'don't gie way to it, she don't!' (She did a couple of days ago.) When the after-dinner tea is finished, Tony makes a start for 'up over!' Mrs Widger enquires if I have some writing to do--and asks also if I would like to be awakened before tea-time!

Never does sleep at night come so graciously as that afternoon snooze, while the sound of the sea and the busy noises of the square float gently in at the windows; float higher and higher; float right away. About half-past two, Tony goes down to take somebody out for a sail or to paint his boats. I frequently do not hear him.

13

Is there not more than one signification to the words "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me?" There are times when the mind is lifted up by a master-emotion, arising one hardly knows how, nor whither leading; a feeling that takes charge of one, as a big wave is said to take charge of a boat when it destroys steerageway; an emotion so powerful that it does but batten on all which might be expected to clash with it. These are the periods when day and night are enveloped in one large state of mind, and life ceases to be a collection of discrete, semi-related moods. These are the dawns of the soul, the spring seasons of the spirit. The world is created afresh.

Everything, and nothing, is prosaic. 'Tis _all according_. But it is startling indeed how suddenly sometimes the earth takes on a new wonderfulness, and Saint Prosaic a new halo. What, to put it in the plainest manner possible, am I doing here? Merely fishing and sailing on the cheap (not so very cheaply); roughing it--pigging it, as one would say--with people who are not my people and do not live as I have been accustomed to do. Yet, as I know well _all_ the time, this change from one prosaic life to another has brought about a revelation which, like great music, sanctifies things, makes one thankful, and in a sense very humble; incapable of fitting speech, incapable of silence.

14

[Sidenote: _UNDER TOWN_]

Astonishment at, and zest in, these Under Town lives; the discovery of so much beauty hitherto unsuspected and, indeed, not to be caught sight of without exceptional opportunity, sets one watching and waiting in order to find out the real difference of their minds from the minds of us who have been through the educational mill; also to find out where and how they have the advantage of us. For I can feel rather than see, here, the presence of a wisdom that I know nothing about, not even by hearsay, and that I suspect to be largely the traditional wisdom of the folk, gained from contact with hard fact, slowly accumulated and handed on through centuries--the wisdom from which education cuts us off, which education teaches us to pooh-pooh.

Such wisdom is difficult to grasp; very shy. My chance of observing it lies precisely in this: that I am neither a sky-pilot, nor a district visitor, nor a reformer, nor a philanthropist, nor any sort of 'worker,' useful or impertinent; but simply a sponge to absorb and, so far as can be, an understander to sympathize. It is hard entirely to share another people's life, to give oneself up to it, to be received into it. They know intuitively (their intuitions are extraordinarily acute) that one is thinking more than one gives voice to; putting two and two together; which keeps alive a lingering involuntary distrust and a certain amount, however little, of ill-grounded respectfulness. (Respectfulness is less a tribute to real or fancied superiority, than an armour to defend the poor man's private life.) Besides which, these people are necessary to, or at least their intimacy is greatly desired by, myself, whereas their own life is complete and rounded without me. I am tangential merely. They owe me nothing; I owe them much. It is I who am the client, they the patrons.

[Sidenote: _CLASS DISTINCTIONS_]

We are told often enough nowadays that capital fattens on labour, naturally, instinctively, without much sense of wrong-doing, and has so fattened since the days when Laban tried to overreach Jacob. What we are not so often told is that the poor man not less instinctively looks upon the gen'leman as legitimate sport. 'An 'orrible lie' between two poor people is fair play from a poor man to a wealthier, just as, for instance, the wealthy man considers himself at liberty to make speeches full of hypocritical untruth when he is seeking the suffrage of the free and independent electors or is trying to teach the poor man how to make himself more profitable to his employer. It is stupid, at present, to ignore the existence of class distinctions; though they do not perhaps operate over so large a segment of life as formerly, they still exist in ancient strength, notwithstanding the fashionable cant--lip-service only to democratic ideals--about the whole world kin. There is not one high wall, but two high walls between the classes and the masses, so-called, and that erected in self-defence by the exploited is the higher and more difficult to climb. On the one side is a disciplined, fortified Gibraltar, held by the gentry; then comes a singularly barren and unstable neutral zone; and on the other side is the vast chaotic mass. In Under Town, I notice, a gentleman is always _gen'leman_, a workman or tramp is _man_, but the fringers, the inhabitants of the neutral zone, are called _persons_. For example: "That _man_ what used to work for the council is driving about the _gen'leman_ as stays with Mrs Smith--the _person_ what used to keep the greengrocery shop to the top of High Street afore her took the lodging house on East Cliff." It is, in fact, strange how undemocratic the poor man is. (Not so strange when one realises that far from having everything to gain and nothing to lose by a levelling process, he has a deal to lose and his gains are problematical.) I am not sure that he doesn't prefer to regard the gen'leman as another species of animal. Jimmy and Tommy have a name of their own for the little rock-cakes their mother cooks. They call them _gentry-cakes_ because such morsels are fitted for the--as Jimmy and Tommy imagine--smaller mouths of ladies and gentlemen. The other afternoon Mabel told me that a boat she had found belonged not to a boy but to a _gentry-boy_. Some time ago I begged Tony not to _sir_ me; threatened to punch his head if he did. It discomforted me to be belaboured with a title of respect which I could not reasonably claim from him. Rather I should _sir_ him, for he is older and at least my equal in character; he has begotten healthy children for his country and he works hard 'to raise 'em vitty.' Against my book-knowledge he can set a whole stock of information and experience more directly derived from and bearing upon life. I don't consider myself unfit to survive, but he is fitter, and up to the present has done more to justify his survival--which after all is the ultimate test of a man's position in the race. At all events, he did cease _sir-ing_ me except on ceremonial occasions. At ordinary times the detested word is unheard, but it is still: "Gude morning, sir!" "Gude night, sir!" And sometimes: "Your health, sir!" At that the matter must rest, I suppose, though the _sir_ is a symbol of class difference, and to do away with the symbol is to weaken the difference.

[Sidenote: _THE WORD "LIKE"_]

But at the same time, I am lucky enough to possess certain advantages. I have, for instance, managed to preserve the ability to speak dialect in spite of all the efforts of my pastors and masters to make me talk the stereotyped, comparatively inexpressive compromise which goes by the name of King's English. Tony is hard of hearing, catches the meaning of dialect far quicker than that of standard English, and I notice that the damn'd spot _sir_ seldom blots our conversation when it is carried on in dialect. Finally there is the great problem of self-expression. There, at any rate, I am well to windward.

The cause of the uneducated man's use of the word _like_ is interesting. He makes a statement, uses an adjective, and--especially if the statement relates to his own feelings or to something unfamiliar--he tacks on the word _like_, spoken in a peculiarly explanatory tone of voice. What does the word mean there? Is it merely a habit, a 'gyte,' as Tony would say? And why the word _like_?

When a poet wishes to utter thoughts that are too unformulated, that lie too deep, for words--

Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me--

he has recourse to simile and metaphor. Take, for example, the transience of human life, a subject on which at times we most of us have keen vague thoughts that, we imagine, would be so profound could our tongues but utter them.

Blake's Thel is a symbol of the transience of life.

O life of this our Spring! why fades the lotus of the water?
Why fade these children of the Spring, born but to smile and fall?

"Thel, the transient maiden, is.... What is Thel?" says Blake, in effect. Thel cannot be described straightforwardly. "What then is Thel _like_?"

Ah! Thel is like a watery bow, and like a parting cloud,
Like a reflection in a glass, like shadows on the water,
Like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant's face,
Like the dove's voice, like transient day, like music in the air.

[Sidenote: _DIALECT_]

Shakespeare, in a corresponding difficulty, uses one convincing simile:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

Drummond of Hawthornden exclaims:

This Life, which seems so fair,
Is like a bubble blown up in the air
By sporting children's breath....

Bacon speaks more boldly and concisely. He forsakes simile for metaphor, leaving the word _like_ to be understood.

The World's a bubble, and the Life of Man
Less than a span....

Were Tony to try and express himself by the same means, he would say: "The world's a bubble, like, and the life of man less than a span, like."

_Like_, in fact, with the poor man as with the poet, connotes simile and metaphor. The poor man's vocabulary, like the poet's, is quite inadequate to express his thoughts. Both, in their several ways, are driven to the use of unhackneyed words and simile and metaphor; both use a language of great flexibility;[11] for which reason we find that after the poet himself, the poor man speaks most poetically. Witness the beautiful description: "All to once the nor'easter springed out from the land, an' afore us could down-haul the mainsail, the sea wer feather-white an' skatting in over the bows." New words are eagerly seized; hence the malapropisms and solecisms so frequently made fun of, without appreciation of their cause. _Obsolete_ has come hereto from the Navy, through sons who are bluejackets. Now, when Tony wishes to sum up in one word the two facts that he is older and also less vigorous than formerly, he says: "Tony's getting obsolete, like." A soulless word, borrowed from official papers, has acquired for us a poetic wealth of meaning in which the pathos of the old ship, of declining years, and of Tony's own ageing, are all present with one knows not what other suggestions besides. And when _obsolete_ is fully domesticated here, the _like_ will be struck off.

[11] The flexibility and expressiveness of dialect lies largely
in its ability to change its verbal form and pronunciation from a
speech very broad indeed to something approaching standard
English. For example, "You'm a fool," is playful; "You'm a fule,"
less so. "You're a fool," asserts the fact without blame; while
"Thee't a fule," or "Thee a't a fule!" would be spoken in temper,
and the second is the more emphatic. The real differences between
"I an't got nothing," "I an't got ort," and "I an't got
nort,"--"Oo't?" "Casn'?" "Will 'ee?" and "Will you?"--"You'm
not," "You ain't," "You bain't," and "Thee a'tn't,"--are hardly
to be appreciated by those who speak only standard English.
_Thee_ and _thou_ are used between intimates, as in French.
_Thee_ is usual from a mother to her children, but is
disrespectful from children to their mother.

[Sidenote: _THOUGHTS AND MIND PICTURES_]

In short, every time Tony uses _like_, he is admitting, and explaining, that he has expressed himself as best he could, but inadequately notwithstanding. He has felt something more delicately, thought upon something more accurately, than he can possibly say. He is always pathetically eager to make himself plain, to be understood. One knows well that touching look in the eyes of a dog when, as we say, it all but speaks. Often have I seen that same look, still more intense, in Tony's eyes, when he has become mazed with efforts to express himself, and I have wished that as with the dog, a pat, a small caress, could change the look into a joyfulness. But it is just because I am fond of him that I am able to feel with him and to a certain extent to divine his half-uttered thoughts; to take them up and return them to him clothed in more or less current English which, he knows, would convey them to a stranger, and which shows him more clearly than before what he really was thinking. That seems to be one of my chief functions here--thought-publisher. Evidently grateful, he talks and talks, usually while the remains of a meal lie scattered on the table. "Aye!" he says, at the end of a debauch of _likes_. "I don' know what I du know. Tony's a silly ol' fule!"

He does not believe it; nor do I; for I am often struck with wonder at the thoughts and mind-pictures which we so curiously arrive at together.

15

The old feudal class-distinctions are fast breaking down. But are we arriving any nearer the democratic ideal of _Liberte_, _Egalite_, _Fraternite_? In place of the old distinctions, are we not setting up new distinctions, still more powerful to divide? There is to-day a greater social gulf fixed between the man who takes his morning tub and him who does not, than between the man of wealth or family and him who has neither. New-made and pink, the 'gentleman' arises daily from his circle of splashes, a masculine Venus from a foam of soap-suds. (About womenfolk we are neither so enquiring nor so particular.) For the cults of religion and pedigree we have substituted the cult of soap and water, and 'the prominent physician of Harley Street' is its high priest. Are you a reputed atheist? Poor man! doubtless God will enlighten you in His good time. Are you wicked? Well, well.... Have you made a fortune by forsaking the official Christian morality in favour of the commercial code? You can redeem all by endowing a hospital or university. But can they say of you that somehow or other you don't look quite clean? Then you are damn'd!

The cottage where the heroine of the 'nice' book lives is always spotlessly clean. A foreigner who adopts the bath-habit, is said to be just like an Englishman. It is the highest praise he can earn, and will go further in English society than the best introductions.

[Sidenote: _CLEANLINESS_]

Cleanliness is our greatest class-symbol. In living with people who have been brought up to different ways of life, a consideration of cleanliness is forced upon one; for nothing else rouses so instantaneously and violently the latent snobbery that one would fain be rid of. Religiously, politically, we are men and brothers all. Yet still--there _are_ men we simply cannot treat as brothers. By what term of contempt (in order to justify our unbrotherliness) can we call them? Not _poor men_; for we have _Poor but honest_ too firmly fixed in our minds, and we would all like a colonial rich rough diamond of an uncle to appear suddenly in our family circle. Hardly _men of no family_; for men of no family are received at court. Not _workmen_; for behold the Carlylese and Smilesian dignity of labour! Not _the masses_; for the masses are supposed to be our rulers. What then can we call these people with whom we really cannot associate on equal terms? Why, call them THE GREAT UNWASHED. O felicitous phrase! O salve of the conscience! That is the unpardonable social sin. At the bottom of our social ladder is a dirty shirt; at the top is fixed not laurels, but a tub! The bathroom is the inmost, the strongest fortress of our English snobbery.

Cleanliness as a subject of discussion is, curiously enough, considered rather more improper than disease. Yet it has to be faced, and that resolutely, if we would approach, and approaching, understand, the majority of our fellow-creatures.

Chemically all dirt is clean. Just as the foods and drinks of a good dinner, if mixed up together on a dish, would produce a filthy mess, so conversely, if we could separate any form of dirt into the pure solid, liquid and volatile chemical compounds of which it is composed, into pretty crystals, liquids and gases, exhibited in the scientific manner on spotless watch-glasses and in thrice-washed test-tubes,--we might indeed say that some of these chemicals had an evil odour, but we could not pronounce them unclean. Prepared in a laboratory, the sulphuretted hydrogen gas which makes the addled egg our national political weapon, is a quite cleanly preparation. Dirt is merely an unhappy mixture of clean substances. The housewife is nearest a scientific view of the matter when she distinguishes between 'clean dirt' and 'dirty dirt,' and does not mind handling coal, for instance, because, being clean dirt, it will not harm her. Cleanliness is a process by which we keep noxious microbes and certain poisons outside our systems or in their proper places within. (It has been shown that we cannot live without microbes, and that there exist normally in some parts of the body substances which are powerfully poisonous to other parts.) Rational cleanliness makes for health, for survival. It is, ultimately, an expression of the Will to Live.

[Sidenote: _DIRT_]

Far, however, from being rational, our notions on cleanliness are in the highest degree superficial. We make a great fuss over a flea; hardly mention it in polite company; but we tolerate the dirty housefly on all our food. We eat high game which our cook's more natural taste calls muck. We are only just beginning to realise the indescribable filthiness of carious teeth, than which anything more unclean, a few diseases excepted, can scarcely be found in slums. Even in this great age of pseudo-scientific enlightenment, we do not have a carious tooth extracted until it aches, though we have a front tooth cleaned and stopped on the first appearance of decay. What the eye doth not see.... Yet we presume to judge men by their deviation from our conventional standards of cleanliness.

My lady goes to the doctor for her headaches and _crises de nerfs_. "Dyspepsia and autotoxaemia," says the doctor. "Try such-and-such a diet for a month, then go to Aix-les-Bains." But how would my lady be ashamed did he tell her plainly: "Madam, though I observe that you bathe frequently, your cleanliness, like your beauty, is only skin-deep. You are fair without and foul within. Your alimentary canal is overloaded and your blood is so unclean that it has poisoned your nervous system. Eat less, take more exercise and drink plenty--of water. Try to be as clean as your gardener." It has been remarked that the labourer who sweats at his work is, in reality, far cleaner than the bathing sedentary man, for the labourer has a daily sweat-bath, whereas the other only washes the outside of him: the cleanliness of the latter is skin-deep, and of the former blood-deep. Once stated, the fact is obvious. Moreover, the labourer has the additional advantage of being self-cleansing, whereas the sedentary man, for his inferior kind of cleanliness, requires a bath and all sorts of apparatus. No doubt, in time we shall learn to value both kinds of cleanliness, each at its worth. The Martians of fiction, when in a fair way to conquer the earth, succumbed before earthly microbes to which they were unaccustomed, against which they had not acquired immunity. If by antiseptics they could have kept these microbes at bay, they would have done well, but if, like mankind, they had possessed self-resistance against them (that is, if they had been self-cleansing) it would have been still better. There is no paradox in saying that, practically, it is very difficult for a healthy person to be genuinely unclean; and that ideally, in the surgeon's eyes, we are, all, rich man and tramp, so unclean that there is little to choose between us, and every one of us requires a comprehensive scrubbing in an antiseptic tub.

[Sidenote: _DISADVANTAGES_]

But just as the habit of aiding nature by eating predigested food is bad, so too rigid a habit, too great a need of cleanliness is a positive disadvantage in the struggle for existence. Harry Stidston says fleas are loveable little creatures. I have had to learn to put up with one or two sometimes. Tommy makes his mother undress him in the middle of dinner to find one. In other words, Harry Stidston can do his work and live under conditions which would put me to flight, and I have a like advantage over Tommy. Again, Tony can do with an occasional bath and can eat his food with fishy hands, while I am a worm and no man without my daily bath, or at least a wash-over, and, except at sea, turn against the best of food if I can smell fish on my fingers. The advantage is Tony's. It is good to be clean, but it is better to be able to be dirty.

The upshot is half-a-dozen--maybe unpleasant--truths, without recognition of which the latter-day citadel of snobbery cannot be stormed, nor the poor man and his house appreciated at their worth; namely:--

1. _Ideally_: We are all so unclean that there is little to
choose between us.

2. _Scientifically_: Cleanliness, as practised, is
conventional and irrational.

3. Blood-cleanliness is better than skin-cleanliness.

4. To be self-cleansing is better than to be cleansed by outside
agents.

5. It is hard for a healthy, active person to be really unclean.

6. _Practically_: The need of cleanliness is a weakness.

According to the orthodox standards, this house of Tony's is by no means so clean as the rose-embowered cottage of romance. It was not hygienically built. The children gain health by grubbing about outside, then come in house and demonstrate their healthy appetite by grabbing. I could wish at times that they were a little more conscious of their noses. We cannot, try how we will, get wholly rid of fleas, because fleas flourish in beaches, boats and nets. There are several things here to turn one's gorge, until prejudices are put aside and the matter regarded scientifically. For, as one may see, the effective cleanliness of this household strikes a subtle balance between more contending needs than can be fully traced out. If, for instance, Mrs Widger came down earlier and scrupulously swept the house, her temper would suffer later on in the day. If she did not sometimes 'let things rip,' and take leisure, her health, and with it the whole delicate organisation of the household, would go wrong. Of a morning, I observe she has neck-shadows. Horrid! Perhaps, but being a wise woman, pressed always for time, she postpones her proper wash until the dirty work is done. Were we to kill off the wauling cats which make such a mess of the garden, the neighbourhood would lose its best garbingers. Baked dinner is never so tasty as when the tin, hot from the oven, is placed upon a folded newspaper on the table. Tony and the children tear fish apart with their fingers. It does not look nice, but that is the reason why they never get bones in their throats, for, as a fish-eating instrument, sensitive fingers are much superior to cutlery and plate, and so on....

I used to think that I was pigging it here. Now I do not.[12]

[12] On the moral aspect of cleanliness I have not touched. Miss
M. Loane, a Queen's Nurse, in her remarkable book _The Next
Street but One_, observes "Cleanliness has often seemed to me
strangely far from godliness. Where the virtue is highly
developed there is often not merely an actual but an absolute
shrinkage in all sweet neighbourly charities. If an invalid's
bedroom needs scrubbing and there is no money to pay for the
service, or if a chronic sufferer's kitchen is in want of a
'thorough good do-out,' if two or three troublesome children have
to be housed and fed during the critical days after an operation
on father or mother, do I look for assistance from 'the cleanest
woman in the street?' Alas, no; whether she be wife, widow, or
spinster, I pass her by, careful not to tread on her pavement,
much less her doorstep, and seek the happy-go-lucky person whose
own premises would be better for more water and less grease, but
from whose presence neither husband nor child ever hastens away."

16

[Sidenote: _JIMMY COMES HOOKING_]

The dawns are later now. We do not need to get up quite so early, and usually, just as we are drinking our cup o' tay, we hear a pattering of naked feet on the staircase. Jimmy, the Dustman still in his eyes, appears at the door. He has an air of being about to do something important. He picks out his stockings and old grey suit from the corners where they were left to dry. He does not ask to have his boots laced up nor complain of their stiffness. Then with his coat exceedingly askew on his shoulders, he demands: "Tay! please."

"What do _yu_ want? Git up over to bed again."

"I be comin' hooking wiv yu."

"Be 'ee? Yu'll hae to hurry up then."

When the sea is not too loppy nor the wind too cold, Jimmy goes with us. The soft-mouthed mackerel need hauling up clear of the gunwale with a long-armed swing, beyond Jimmy's power to give, and therefore as a rule he is not at first allowed to have a line; for fish represent money and mackerel caught now will be eaten as bread and dripping in the winter. Jimmy sits huddled up on the lee side for'ard. He becomes paler, looks plaintively, and sighs a big sigh or two.

"What's the matter, Jim-Jim? Do 'er feel leery?"

If Jimmy volunteers a remark, nothing is the matter. But if he merely answers "No-o-o!" he means _yes_, and in order to stave off sea-sickness he must be given a line.

[Sidenote: _EDUCATION EVILS_]

Then is Jimmy 'proper all right.' Then does he brighten up. "How many have us catched?" he asks. The sight of him fishing in the stern-sheets re-assures me as to his future, about which I am sometimes fearful, just as some men are depressed by a helpless baby because they foresee, imaginatively, the poor little creature's life and all possible troubles before it. When I watch Jimmy in house, rather naughty perhaps, or when I hear Bessie, fresh from the twaddle that they put into her head at school, saying, "If Dad'd earn more money, mother, us could hae a shop an' he could buy me a pi-anno;" or when, as I am out and about with the boats, a grubby small hand is suddenly slipped into mine and a joyful chirping voice says, "What be yu 'bout?"--then, and at a score of other times, I am fearful of what they may be led to do with Jimmy; fearful lest they may put the little chap to an inland trade where he is almost bound to become a lesser man than his father, be removed from the enlarging influence of the sea, and have it given him as the height of ambition to grow up a dram-drinking or psalm-smiting, Sunday-top-hatted tradesmen. Then I desire savagely to have the power of a God, not that I might direct his life--he can sail his own boat better than I,--but that I might keep the ring clear for him to fight in, and prevent foul play. What indeed would I not do to remove some of the guilt of us educated men and women who force our ideas on people without asking whether they need them, without caring how maimed, stultified and potent for evil the ideas become in process of transmission, without seeing that for the age-old wisdom of those whom we call the uneducated we are substituting a jerry-built knowledge--got from books--which we only half believe in ourselves? New lamps for old! The pity of it! The farce!

But when I watch Jimmy fishing, I grow confident that the sea has its grip on him; that it will drag him to itself as it dragged his father from the grocery store; that whatever happens, it will always be part of his life to keep trivialities, meannesses and education from quite closing in around him.

17

[Sidenote: "_THE FISHER FATHER AND CHILD_"]

_The Fisher Father and Child_