Chapter V (3)

As I pulled the boat across a loppy sea--
The bumping and splashing boat,
With the sail flapping round my head,
And the pile of mackerel amidships ever growing larger and lovelier
in the light--
And the sun rose behind the cliffs to eastward, and the sky became
lemon-yellow
(A graciously coloured veil twixt the earth and all mystery beyond),
And the wavelets sparkled and darted like ten thousand fishes at play
in the ambient dawn,--
It seemed that the sky and the sea and the earth gathered themselves
together,
And became one vast kind eye, looking into the stern of the boat,
At the father and boy.

Navy-blue guernsey, and trousers stained by the sea, scarce hiding
the ribbed muscles;
Tan-red face, the fresh blood showing through;
Blue eyes, all of a flash with fishing and the joy of hauling 'em in;
now on the luff of the sail (out of habit, there being hardly a
sail-full of air), now to wind'ard, and again smiling on the
child;
Big pendulous russet hands, white in the palms from salt water, and
splashed with scales--
Hands that seem implements rather, appearing strangely no part of the
man, but something, like the child, that has grown away from
him and has taken a life of its own--
Strong for a sixteen-foot sweep, delicate to handle the silken snood of
a line--
A man that the winds and the spray have blown on, gnarled and bent to
the sea's own liking,
The Father!

And the boy--
Like delicate dawn to the sunset was the child to his father--
A sturdy slight little figure, as straight as the mast,
A grey and more gently coloured figure, glancing round with the
father's self-same gestures softened, and with childish
trustful sea-blue eyes;
Pattering with naked feet on the stern-sheets, and hauling the fish
with a wary cat-like motion....
O splendid and beautiful pair!
O man of the sea! O child growing up to the sea!
You have given yourselves to the waters, and the waters have given
of their spirit to you,
And I know when you speak that the sea is speaking through you,
And I know when I look at the sea, 'tis the likeness of your souls,
And I know that as I love you, I am loving also the sea--
O splendid and beautiful portions of the sea!

18

[Sidenote: _MRS FINN'S PROFESSIONS_]

Mrs Pinn has put aside her respectful defiance, has ceased addressing me as _sir_, and turns out to be a most jolly old woman, possessed of any amount of laughing _camaraderie_. She frankly explains the change thus: "I used to think yu was reeligious. Yu du look a bit like a passon [parson] sometimes. Do 'ee know 't?--No, not now; be blow'd if yu du! Yu'm so wicked as the rest of 'em, _I_ believe, but yu ben't like they ol' passons. I'll 'llow yu'm better'n they." My own recollection, however, runs back to the evening when she brought her damped-down washing round, and I turned the mangle for her. It is hardish work. 'Tis a wonder how she, an old woman, can do it when, if births are scarce, she is reduced to taking in washing for a week or two. Tony calls her the Tough Old Stick. Excellent name! I can picture her in her cottage up on land, bringing up her long family with much shouting, much hard common sense, some swearing and a deal of useful prejudice. Now, in her second youth--not second childhood--she is mainly a lace-worker and midwife. One night, Tony and myself broke into her cottage, locked the door behind us and helped ourselves to what supper we could find--which was pickled beetroot and raw eggs. Grannie Pinn climbed in upon us through the little window, and afterwards, to gain breath, she sat down to her lace pillow. Her dexterity was marvellous. She _threw_ the bobbins about. I could not follow them with my eyes. She makes stock patterns only; refuses to be taught fresh patterns at her time of life, and cannot read them up for herself because she has never learned to read. The butterfly is her masterpiece. Working from early morning till evening's gossip-time, she can earn no less than nine pennies a day. What the lace-selling shop makes out of her, the lace-selling shop does not state.

As a midwife, no doubt, she earns more. She must be full of tonic sayings. I am told that when her patients are dying, she takes away the pillow 'so that they can die more proper like,' and also in order that they may get the dying over quicker. What scenes the Tough Old Stick have must been present at! Yet she is spryer by far than those who keep clear of tragedy. When I ask her to tell me truly how many patients she has killed off in her professional career, her eyes glitter and she bursts out: "Aw, yu! What chake yu got, to be sure!"

She has her share of professional pride, but nevertheless I should like to know how many corpses she really has laid out for burial--and what she thought the while.

Usually she comes in just before supper-time:

"Ain't yu gone yet? I know; yu got some mark or other to Seacombe. Come on! which o' the young ladies is't? Out wi' it! Which on 'em is't?" When I tell her that she is the best girl in Seacombe and that I won't give her the chuck until she finds me a mark as youthful as herself and a hundred times as rich, she says:

"Then yu'm done! her won't hae nort still, 'cause I an't got nort, an' a hundred times nort be nothing--he-he-he! I knaws thiccy."

The jokes, 'tis true, are poor. But the Tough Old Stick's enjoyment franks them all. You may fling a stinging fact in her face; tell her, if you like, that she could find plenty of marks for herself because, being old, she will have to die soon and then the poor fellow would be free again. "I know't!" she says, and flings you back another stinging fact. Admirable Old Stick! She never flinches at a fact, howsoever grisly it be.

Above all, she revels in a little mild blasphemy; hardly blasphemy--imaginary details, say, about hell, in the manner of Mark Twain. "Aw, my dear soul!" she exclaims. "How yu du go on! Aw, my dear soul! Yu'm going to hell, sure 'nuff yu be!"

[Sidenote: _AGNOSTICISM_]

But her horror is only a pretence. She does not take such matters seriously. Indeed, few things have surprised me so much as the thoroughgoing agnosticism that prevails here. Uncle Jake is the religious member of the Widger family. For the rest, religion is the business of the clergy who are paid for it and of those who take it up as a hobby, including the impertinent persons who thrust hell-fire tracts upon the fisherfolk. "Us can't 'spect to know nort about it," says Tony. "'Tain't no business o' ours. May be as they says; may be not. It don't matter, that I sees. 'Twill be all the same in a hunderd years' time when we'm a-grinning up at the daisy roots."

Nevertheless, he is not atheistical, nor even wholly fatalistic. When his first wife was lying dead, he saw her in a dream with one of her dead babies in her arms, and he is convinced that that meant something very spiritual, although what it meant he does not care to enquire. The agnosticism refers not so much to immortality or the existence of a God, as to the religions, the nature of the God, the divinity of Christ, and so on.

"Us don' know nort about that, n'eet does anybody else, I believe, an' all their education on'y muddles 'em when they comes to weigh up thic sort o' thing."

[Sidenote: _SPARROWISM_]

If the sparrows themselves had been acquainted with 'Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father,' their attitude towards religion might have resembled Tony's--a mixture of trust and _insouciance_, neither of them driven to any logical conclusion and both tempered by fatalism. "When yu got to die, yu got tu," says Tony, and it makes little difference to him whether the event has been decreed since the beginning of time, or whether it is to be decreed at some future date by a being so remote as God. The thing is, to accept the decree courageously.

The children go to Sunday School, of course; it is convenient to have them out of the way while Sunday's dinner is being cooked and the afternoon snooze being taken. Besides, though the Sunday School teaching is a fearful hotch-potch of heaven, hell and self-interest, the tea-fights concerts and picnics connected with it are well worth going to. But the household religion remains a pure _sparrowism_, and an excellent creed it is for those of sufficient faith and courage.

Of how the Sunday School teaching is translated by the children into terms of every day life, we had a fine example two or three weeks ago. Jimmy came home full of an idea that 'if you don' ast God to stop it, Satant 'll have 'ee,' and Mrs Widger asked him: "What's the difference then between God an' Satant?"

"Ther ain't nort."

"Yes, there is. What does God du?"

"God don't do nort unless yu asks Him."

"An' what does Satant du?"

"Oh--I know!--Satant gets into yer 'art, an' gives 'ee belly-ache an' toothache."

Not many days afterwards, Tommy was being sent to bed for getting his feet wet. "Yu daring rascal! I'll knock yer head off if yu du it again. Yu'll die, yu will! An' what'll yu du then?"

"Go to heaven, o' course."

"An' what do you think they'll say to 'ee there? Eh?"

Tommy was puzzled.

"You can ask 'em to send us better weather." I suggested.

"Tell 'ee what I'll do," said Tommy with a prodigiously wise squint. "I'll take up a buckle-strap to thiccy ol' God, if 'er don't send better weather, an' then yu won't none on 'ee get sent to bed for wet feet!"

19

At a corner near here, there is a very blank cottage wall, and in the centre of it a little window. Behind the closed window, all day and every day, sits an old woman at her lace pillow. Some portraits--Rembrandt's especially--give one the impression that a shutter has suddenly been drawn aside; that behind the shutter we are allowed to watch for a moment or two a face so full of meaning as to be almost more than human. The same impression is given me by the old lace-maker in the window when I pass to and fro, and catch sight of her face so still, her hands so active, her bobbins so swift and, because of the intervening glass, so silent. How nervously the hands speed with the bobbins, how very deliberately with the pins that make the pattern! How hardly human it is!

One evening, however, the window was open, children stood round in a group, and I heard the small click of the bobbins through the still air. The children were laughing, delighted with the old woman's swiftness. She that had been a picture, was become a living being.

No doubt, she is working at her lace pillow now. She has several mouths to feed. I wonder does she earn as much as Grannie Pinn?

20

[Sidenote: _CONGERING_]

This long time I have wished to go congering all night, but have been unable to do so for want of a mate. It is more than one man's work to haul a boat up the beach in daytime, let alone the middle of the night or at early dawn. If the _Moondaisy_'s old crew was here....

Ah! those were days--when George and the Little Commodore and the Looby and myself used to row out with a swinging stroke at sundown to Elm-beech-tree[13] and Conger Pool. The choosing of the mark; the careful heaving of the sling-stone; the blinn, skate, pollack, spider-crabs, and conger eels, we used to catch; the fights with the conger in the dark or by the light of matches or of an old lantern that blew out when it was most wanted; the absurd way the crew turned up their noses at my nice tomato sandwiches and gobbled down stringy corned beef; their quiet slumber round the stern seats and my solitary watch amidships over all the lines, and at the sea-fire trailing in the flood-tide; their crustiness when I awoke them to shift our mark and their jubilation when a whopper was to be gaffed; the utter peacefulness of the night after they had gone to sleep again; our merry row home and hearty beaching of the boat; the cup of hot tea.... It is all clean gone. George is in the Navy and the Little Commodore is under a glass box of waxen flowers up on land. Did I bring back a catch alone, perhaps the old boat would be stove in.

[13] A spot found by getting an elm-tree on the cliffs in a line
with a beech-tree up on land.

Tony, however, has been saying that, on the rough ground a mile or so out, good-sized conger can be caught by day. On Saturday, therefore, I collected gear from the Widger linhays, borrowed a painter and anchor, and, the wind being easterly, I luffed the _Moondaisy_ out a mile and a half south-east. There I dropped anchor.

Tony had given me two mackerel for bait, one fresh and the other somewhat otherwise; that is to say it was merely fishmonger fresh--quite good enough for eating but hardly good enough for conger who, though they have a reputation for feeding on dead men, will only touch the freshest of bait. With the fresh mackerel I caught one large conger (it ripped in the sail a hole that took Mam Widger an hour to mend) and two dog-fish. Nothing at all would bite at the stale mackerel. The easterly sea was making a little and skatting in over the bows. Besides which, the _Moondaisy_ began to drag her anchor. My hand to jaw-and-tail fight with the conger had made me a little unsteady; had made my muscles feel as if they might string up with cramp; which is not good for stepping a heavyish mast and sailing a boat. So I stepped the mast and set sail, to make sure, and ran homewards with the wind almost abeam.

We decided to save the conger for Sunday's dinner.

Mrs Widger made a most savoury stew of it, and when Tony came in as usual, asking, "Be dinner ready, Missis?" she placed the stew on the table.

Tony's face fell.

"Be this my dinner, Annie?"

"Iss, for sure."

"_Thees?_"

[Sidenote: _HOT BAKE_]

"What d'yu think then?"

"_Thees!_ Wer's yer baked spuds?"

"Do' ee gude to hae a change. Ther's some cold taties to the larder if you likes to get 'em."

"_Thees!_ Why, I wish thees yer conger hadn't never been catched!"

"G'out!--Now then, you childern...."

Tony picked over the fish, going _Tsch!_ for every bone his fingers came across.

"Thee't look so sulky as an ol' cow," said Mam Widger.

"Well, what do 'ee think? Thees yer.... Did 'ee ever see the like o'it?"

Presently it occurred to him to peep inside the oven. His face brightened. "I know'd her 'ouldn't du me out o' me Sunday dinner. Bring it out, Missis. Sharp! Gie thiccy stuff to the cat. Baked spuds! What's Sunday wi'out baake? 'Tain't no day at all! I couldn' ha' put away an hour after thic."

For the remainder of the meal, when Tony was not eating, he was singing; and several times he chucked Mam Widger under the chin, and she retorted: "G'out, yu cupboard-loving cat!"

21

This is the recipe for baked dinner:

Turn out the children and turn on the oven. Into the middle of a large baking tin place a saucer piled up with a mixture of herbs (mainly parsley), one sliced onion and breadcrumbs, the whole made sticky with a morsel of dripping. Round about the saucer put a layer of large peeled potatoes, and on top of all, the joint. Set the baking tin on the hob and into it pour just enough warm water to run over the rim of the saucer. Soon after the water boils, transfer the whole to a fairly quick oven. When the meat is brown outside, slow the oven down. Serve piping hot from the oven, placing the tin on a folded newspaper and the joint, if large, on a hot plate.

To dish up hot bake in the ordinary way would be to let the nature out of it. The smell is a wonderful blend, most hunger-provoking. True, the joint, unless pork or veal, is apt to be a little tough, but the taties are a delicious shiny brown, their soft insides soaked through and through with gravy. Bake is a meal in itself. Pudding thereafter is a work of supererogation--almost an impertinence.

Mrs Widger's cookery, though sometimes a little greasy for one who does no great amount of manual labour and undergoes no excessive exposure, is far from bad.

[Sidenote: _FOOD_]

Food reformers; patrons of cookery schools where they try, happily in vain, to teach the pupils to prepare dishes no working man would adventure on; physical degenerates who fear that unless the working man imitates them, he will become as degenerate as they are, and quite unfit to do the world's rough work--forget that whereas they have only one staple food, if that, namely bread, the poor man has several staple dishes which he likes so well that he is loth to touch any other.

One day we did have at my suggestion a rather fanciful supper. Tony tasted, ate, and cleared the dish. Then he asked: "An't 'ee got nort to make a meal on, Missis? no cold meat nor spuds?" He believes in the theory that good digestion waits on appetite rather than on digestible or pre-digested foods; that the meal which makes a man's mouth water is the best to eat; and that solid foods give solid strength. And if the same dish can make his mouth water nearly every day in the week, how much more fortunate is he than fickle gourmets!

When I first came here, I used periodically to run after the flesh-pots. I used to sneak off to tea at a confectioner's. Now I seldom feed out of house--simply because I don't want to. We start the day about sunrise with biscuits and a cup of tea which I make and take up myself. (Mam Widger and Tony look so jolly in bed, her indoor complexion and white nightgown beside his blue-check shirt and magnificently tanned face, that I've dubbed them 'The Babes in the Wood.') For breakfast, we have fried mackerel or herrings, when they are in season; otherwise various mixtures of tough bacon and perhaps eggs (children half an egg each) and bubble and squeak.[14] Sometimes the children prefer kettle-broth,[15] but they never fail to clamour for 'jam zide plaate.' Bake, hot or cold, and occasionally (mainly for me, I think) a plain pudding, or on highdays a pie, make up the dinner that is partaken of by all. But before the pudding is eaten, Tony and myself are already looking round to see that the kettle is on a hot part of the fire, and when the children are gone off to school, Mam Widger throws us out a cup o' tay each, with now and then a newly baked gentry-cake. Tony, who would like meat or a fry of fish for tea, has usually to content himself with bread and butter. The children go off to bed with a biscuit or a small chunk of cheese, and we may eat the same with pickles, or else fried or boiled fish if there is any in the house.... Supper, in fact, is the meal of many inventions, including all sorts of crabs, little lobsters, and such unsaleable fish as dun-cow [dog-fish], conger, skate or weever, together with dree-hap'orth, or a pint, of stout and bitter from the Alexandra. Just before turning in, Tony and myself have a glass of hot grog.

[14] Fried mixed vegetables.

[15] Bread broth with butter, or dripping, and water instead of
milk. A dash of skim milk is sometimes added.

[Sidenote: _DRINK_]

From such a list of our fare, it would seem as if we over-ate ourselves as consistently as the _en pension_ visitors at the hotels. (Mrs Widger, who has done a good deal of waiting, frequently tells us how manfully the visitors endeavour to eat their money's worth at the _tables d'hote_). Tony's appetite--his habit of pecking at the food after a meal is over and the way he, and the children too if they have the chance, mop up pickles and Worcester sauce--is a continual joy to me. We do not drink much alcohol. On the other hand, the children are curiously discouraged from drinking cold water. Skim milk, tea, stout, ale, or even very dilute spirit is considered better for them--a prejudice which dates probably from the days before a pure water supply. Since, however, I who am known to possess a contemptible digestion, have been seen to drink down several glasses of cold water daily, and to take no hurt, the ban on it has been more or less removed.

The above-mentioned goodies are distributed, it is true, over a good many days in the year, and I fancy that my being here drives up the scale of living somewhat. At all events, we do not go short. Waste on the one side, mainly arising from small eyes being bigger than small stomachs, is more than counterbalanced by a wonderful ability to swallow down gristle, rinds and hard bits without apparent harm. Granfer, indeed, says that he 'wouldn't gie a penny a pound for tender meat that don't give 'ee summut to bite at.' The children clamour always for 'jam zide plaate.' Without that or the promise of it, they often refuse to eat anything. They do not believe me when I tell them that they have more food than ever I did at their age; that I had to eat a piece of bread and a potato for each slice of meat; that jam and butter together was not thought good for me except on birthdays and Sundays. "G'out!" they say. "Ye lie!" Sometimes their mother is irritated into calling them 'cawdy li'l devils.' It does seem almost a pity that they have not had any of the discipline of starvation. The Yarty children who go half the day, and only too often whole days, on empty stomachs, are certainly as happy as ours: they never cry because dinner is not so good as they expect, and if we give them half a pie their earth is straightway heavenly. Tony thinks now and then how hard it will go with his children if the money runs short, as it has done and may easily do again. "I mind the time," he says, "when I used to come in hungry and kneel down beside me mother wi' me head across her lap, crying! Her crying too; mother 'cause her hadn't got nort to eat in house, and me 'cause her didn't get nort, and 'cause her cuden't get nort, not even half an ounce o' tay, not havin' no money in house to get it with. An' then I used to go out an' try an' earn something, twopence maybe, just to stay us on."

And that it is which has helped to make Tony the man he is.

22

[Sidenote: _A SUDDEN STORM_]

Seldom does one catch the exact moment of an abrupt change in nature. Yesterday, however, I watched a wonderful thing--the oncoming of a sudden storm.

Uncle Jake had been holding forth on the beach. "Us ain't had no equinoctial gales thees year, not proper like us used to. This season's going to break up sudden and wi' thunder, an' when it du, look out! I'd rather be here now than out in the offing, for all the sea's so calm. Ah!" pointing to a dinghy that was shoving off the beach, "they bwoys 'ould laugh in me faace if I was to go an' say, 'Don' go. 'Tisn't fit.' But _I_ knows."

I left him gazing seaward over the stern of his drifter, and walked up to the Western Cliffs. The air, scarcely a breath from the north-east, was oppressive in the extreme; very warm, too, for autumn. The sea was almost unruffled; the sky to westward magnificently heaped up with what Uncle Jake calls wool-packs. A fog crept over all the southern horizon, dimming with its misty approach the eastern headlands and making the sea like a dulled mirror. I felt, rather than heard, distant thunder.

The fog lifted. It hung low in the sky, a sulky blue cloud. Beneath it, the sea, still unruffled, was of a dense blue that, so it seemed, would have been black altogether but for its transparency and the refracted light within it.

Going on, I walked for some distance beneath a semi-arch of the wind-bowed lichenous thorns that grow upon the cliff-edge.

Without any warning--maybe there was a little hum in the air--a leafless bough, like a withered arm with its sinews ragged out, bent over across my path. The sea gulls screamed and screeched; they flocked out from the cliff-ledges, and with still wings they towered up into the sky. Every twig and leaf began to play a diabolic symphony. Where the hedge ended I was blown back upon my heels.--It was more than half a gale of wind from the south-east.

The horizon was become clear; jagged like a saw. Divergent strings, marvellously interlaced on the water, streamed in with the wind, broadened into ribands fluttering over green-grey patches. The whole sea trembled, as if life were being breathed into it. White spots, curling wavelets, dotted it; then broke abroad as white-horses in full mad landward career. The whistle in the grass rose louder and shriller; the boughs bent further and let fly their autumn foliage horizontally into the wind; the gulls screeched wildly and more wildly; the chafing of the surf below took possession of the air....

[Sidenote: _UNCLE JAKE ON FOOLS_]

I saw the dinghy put about and run for shore.

When I got back, Uncle Jake was still watching.

"Ah!" he said. "Ah! Ah! I don't like they centre-keel boats wi' bumes [booms]. They'm all right for fine weather, but.... Ah! They'm goin' to gybe if they ain't careful. There! Did 'ee see? Why don't they ease their sheet off more? If the wind catches thic sail the wrong side.... Did 'ee see that? Thic bume was all but coming over. Gybe, gybe, yu fules! Yu'm capsized if yu du, wi' thic heavy bume. Look'se! Have 'em got their drop-keel up, I wonder? Not they! They thinks that's the same as extra ballast. 'Twon't make no difference if a sea takes charge of 'em. Ah! did 'ee see the leach o' the sail flutter? Nearly over! Let 'em gybe, if they'm set on it. 'Twill upset they.--O-ho! They'm goin' to haul down an' row for it. Best thing the likes o' they can du. They calls me an ol' fule for joggin' along in my ol' craft while they has drop-keels and bumes, all the latest. I've a-know'd thees yer sea for fifty year an' more, an' I say, I tell thee, that two oars be better than two reefs any day. Le'but the seas take charge o' one o' they boats running afore the wind.... All up! They spins like a top, an' gybes.... 'Tis all up! Howsbe-ever, they'm saafe now, if they don't sheer broadside coming ashore. But _they_ won't learn their lesson; not they. They maakes fun o' us as knows.

"There! the wind be softening now. I've a-know'd they thunder-puffs come down on 'ee like a hurricane. If they lasted long.... 'Tis blowin' out in the Channel still. The horizon's black--see? 'Twill back, an' blow from the nor'east to-night, in here, but 'twill be east to south-east in the Channel, an' wi' thees flood tide runnin' up against it, yu'll see the say make!"

23

It did blow during the night; it must have been rough out in the Channel; then the wind dropped to a light breeze. But before ever Tony and myself were out of doors we heard the heave and thump of the long easterly swell.

We hauled the _Cock Robin_ down to the water's edge, put in five bags of ballast ("Doesn't look 's if it's blow'd itself out," said Tony) and a spare oar--and stood and looked.

"Be it wuth it?" he questioned.

"Not much wind now, is there?"

"Can the two o'us shove off in thees yer swell? Can ee see any o' the other boats shoving down?"

"No...."

"There won't be much frighting to-day, for sure. Must make the day gude if us can. Yer's a calm. Jump in quick. Shove! Shove, casn'! Row. Lemme take an oar. Keep her head on. _Pull_--thic west'ard oar!"

[Sidenote: _PLUCK--_]

We were fairly afloat outside the surf-line, both of us very red in the face. We upsailed--and away. After a few minutes' worry, deciding whether the mainsail and mizzen without the foresail would be enough, on a sea so much bigger than the wind, and looking for the _Cock Robin's_ chronic leak, the bouncing, tumbling and splashing, the heave up and the mighty rushes down, put us both in high spirits. We decided to hoist the foresail after all. "Let her bury her head if her wants to!"

Accordingly, I went for'ard to hook the foresail's tack to the bumkin [short iron bowsprit]. The thimble was too small. As I sat on the bow and leaned out over, my hand all but dipped into the waves. A stream of water did once run up my sleeve. Looking round and seeing Tony smile, I yelled back aft: "What be smiling 'bout, Tony?" He replied: "I was a-gloryin' in yer pluck."

Which was very pleasant to hear--for a moment.

My position on the bow of the boat was absolutely safe, and I knew it. There was no risk at all, except of a bruise or a wetting. My toe was firmly hooked under the for'ard thwart, and short of my leg breaking, I could not have lost my hold. Besides, even had I fallen overboard, I could easily have swum round while Tony 'bouted the boat. Tony was deceived. There was no pluck.

His words set me thinking, and I had to recognise, rather bitterly, that what I call pluck did not form a great part of my birthright. I find myself too apprehensive by nature; imagine horrid possibilities too keenly; and indeed would far rather hurt myself than think about doing so. I suppose I have a certain amount of courage, for I am usually successful in making myself do what I funk; but I like doing it none the better for that. And up to the present, I have not failed badly in tight corners. On the contrary, I find (like most nervy people) that actual danger, once arrived, is curiously exhilarating; that it makes one cooler and sharper, even happy. One has faced the worst in imagination, and the reality is play beside it.

[Sidenote: _AND COURAGE_]

In the dictionary, _courage_ is defined as 'The quality which enables men to meet danger without fear.' _Pluck_ is merely defined as courage. There is, or ought to be, an essential difference between the meaning of the two words. Courage is a premeditated matter, into which the will enters, whilst pluck is an unpremeditated expression of the personality, an innate quality which, so to speak, does not need to be set in operation by the will. Courage rises to the occasion; pluck is found ready for it. Would it not, therefore, be more correct to say that _pluck_ is the quality which enables men to meet danger without fear: and that _courage_ is the quality which enables men to meet danger with fear overcome? The greatest courage might go farther than the greatest pluck, but for occasions on which either can be used, pluck, the more spontaneous, is also the superior. Most of us are irregularly, erratically plucky; one man with horses, who funks the sea; another man at sea who is afraid of horses. One man who fears live fists may think nothing of watching by the dead. Another who stands up pluckily in a fight, refuses to go near a corpse. One of the pluckiest men I know 'don't like dogs.' Pluck runs in streaks, but courage, to whatever degree a man possesses it, runs through him from top to bottom.

All the churches in the world may talk about sin and virtue, and make most admirable and subtle distinctions. We know very well in our hearts that pluck and courage are the great twin virtues, and that cowardice is the fundamental sin. The perfectly plucky and courageous man would never sin meanly; he would have no need to do so. He, and not the beefy brute or the intellectual paragon, would be Superman. The Christ, it often seems to me, keeps his hold on the world, and will keep it, not because he was God-man or man-God, not because he was born normally or abnormally, not because he redeemed mankind or didn't, not because he provided a refuge for souls on their beam-ends, but because, of all the great historic and legendary figures, he is the one who convinces us that he was never afraid. In him, as we picture him, courage and pluck were the same thing, and perfect.

But the present point is, or points are: How many men whose pluck and courage I have admired so much, have deceived me as I deceived Tony? And what combination of pluck and courage is it which enables these fishermen to follow their constantly dangerous occupation with equable mind; which, indeed, enables so many working men to follow their dangerous trades? For it is one thing to approach danger by way of sport, and another to work for a livelihood _in_ danger.

One's analytics fail. It is, however, stupid merely to say, "Ah, they are inured to it. Familiarity has bred contempt." Seafaring men realise the dangers of the sea a good deal better than anyone else. Familiarity with the sea does not breed contempt; the older the seaman the more careful he is. I have met old seamen, heroes in their day, whom one would almost call nervous on the water. And in any case, what a state of mind it is--to be _inured_ to danger! to be on familiar terms with the possibility of death! to be able to flout, to play with, to live on, that which all men fear!

24

[Sidenote: _LUSCOMBE_]

I have been up the coast to have dinner and a chat with my old coastguard friend, Ned Luscombe, the man who taught me knots and splices during the night watches when I was a visitor here years ago. To go to his house now is very pleasant. For a long time after their first baby died on the day they entered a new house, before even the beds were up, it seemed as if Mrs Luscombe, a gentle, delicate woman, 'with the deuce of a will of her own,' Luscombe says, was going to decline and die too. The new baby, which was to have killed her, has put new life into her instead. They are touchingly proud of it, and very happy altogether. I do like to see married couples happy.

Luscombe himself is rather an extraordinary man; short, vivacious and solid; full of generous impulses, yet very well able to look after his own interests. It was he who dared the neighbourhood, and caused his wife to invite often to their house a crippled girl that had been raped by a scoundrel and then given the cold-shoulder by everyone else. Something of a sea-lawyer, he is one of the sharpest-brained--I don't say deepest-thinking--men I have ever come across. Hardly educated at all as a boy, he races through books (he read my Cary's _Dante_ in a week), extracts the main gist of them, and is always learning some new thing, from shorthand to cooking, though he has no need to do much but behave himself for a pension. Almost harshly honest, he yet brings out with pride a large edition of Pope that he 'nicked' from the second-hand bookstall of a heathen Chinee at Singapore. That little episode will not make a very big blot, I imagine, on the Book of Judgment. If I remember aright, the British Navy was then occupied in protecting land or concessions that the nation itself had 'nicked' from the heathen.

Luscombe's opinion on books, men and things, unless it has been borrowed from a newspaper, is always well worth hearing. His light of nature, by which he judges, is exceptionally powerful.

While we were smoking in his front room--furnished with a curious mixture of cheap English things and beautiful Eastern curios--a steward from one of the great liners came in. He began talking about the behaviour in a gale of a rich snobbish Jew and the behaviour of Jews generally on shipboard, and was inclined to take up the high, superior, patriotic attitude that Jews, not being Englishmen, were necessarily a nuisance in a storm. "Well," said Luscombe, "all I know is, when a man tells me he's never been afraid of anything anywhere, I tells him to his face, 'You'm a damn'd liar!' One day, in a pub at Plymouth, there was a man--a bluejacket too--boasting he'd never known what fear was, and I up and asked him, 'Eh, chum? Did you say _Never_?'

"'Never!' he says. 'Never in me life!'

"'You'm a liar then,' says I.

"'We'll see,' says he--goodish-sized chap.

"'You'm a bloody liar,' says I, 'and what's more, you ain't truthful.'

"So we squared up there and then, and the bung and his men hyked us out into the street and we was having our scrap out when the police came up. He ran! 'Eh, Mr Liar!' I yelled after him. 'Did you say you was never afraid?'

"If I hadn't wasted time doing that, I shouldn't have got caught either. Very nearly landed me in chokey, that did. We was shipmates afterwards, me and that man, and very good friends. He's a warrant officer now."

[Sidenote: _LOWER DECK TO QUARTER-DECK_]

Thence the conversation passed naturally to promotion from the ranks. "I don't believe in it, not as a general rule," said Luscombe. "Officers ought to be officers, and men ought to be men, and a ship's always more comfortable when both keep their places. Rankers as officers are apt to be bullies: that we all know jolly well. And besides that, the likes of us can't keep our kecker up the same as gen'lemen, and therefore I says we ain't fit for the quarter-deck, not yet awhile. Tisn't that the lower deck ain't so brave as the quarter-deck, because it is; only it can't keep it up so long; it gets discouraged like, when 'tis a long job, specially when 'tis one of those waiting-an-doing-nothing jobs. We ain't bred up to it, and our fathers wasn't, and there's no good to be got out of trying to pretend 'tisn't so."

We argued on. Luscombe would not yield an inch of his position. I can't say offhand how far history bears him out, but I fancy that he is right to this extent: the lower deck has less flexibility of mind. It cannot view a depressing situation from so many sides at once. It is not, for instance, so quick to see the underlying humour of an emergency; not so ready to appreciate the so-called irony of fate. It cannot so easily turn round and laugh at itself and its predicament. So, though the lower deck's courage may be fully as great as, or greater than, that of the upper deck, it is applied more constantly, with less mental diversion, and therefore it tires sooner. Hence, it _may_ not be so effective.

The argument undoubtedly has a true bearing on that sort of promotion which, in the prevailing educational cant, is called giving every poor boy (by free education, scholarships and other lures) his chance of climbing to the top of the ladder--as if success in life were one great tall ladder instead of many ladders of varying builds and heights. In attempting to justify modern educational policy, its victims are egged on too fast into a field of commercial, intellectual, or emotional stress for which they lack the fundamental grit, or rather for which the fundamental grit they do possess is not adapted, nor can be adapted in a generation. Their spirit, fine and valuable for the old purpose perhaps, is not suited to the new. Therefore, of good workmen _in posse_ we make bad clerks and shopmen _in esse_; of good clerks detestable little bureaucrats or mean-minded commercial men, and so on. Possible wives and mothers we turn into female creatures. And Merrie England swarms with makeshift folk and breakdowns.

Happily nature, heredity, sometimes intervenes, and at adolescence the sharp boy, the pride of the examination room, develops into quite a nice commonplace young man, like the missionaries' nigger boy, and is saved, if he be not already committed to an unsuitable career. Otherwise, what mental deformity and slaughter! It was well said that education--what is called education--was the cruellest thing ever forced upon the poor. Mam Widger agrees. She knows her two boys are above the average in brains, but she says: "I'd far rather for them to fend for themselves an' make gude fishermen like their father or gude sailors like their uncles, than for 'em to be forced on by somebody else to what they ain't fitted for. 'Tis God helps them as helps themselves, they du reckon, but I can't see as he helps them as is pushed."

25

Uncle Jake allows us fine weather for the Regatta. "But when it du break up, after this yer logie [dull, hazy, calm] spell, look out!" he says. "Iss; look out!"

[Sidenote: _WINKLING_]

The day before yesterday, we were having a yarn together on the Front. "Must go t'morrow an' pick Jemima Cayley some wrinkles [periwinkles]," he said. "I got a lot o' work to do wi' my taties up to my plat [allotment], but I promised Jemima her should hae 'em for Regatta, an' her shall, if I lives to get 'em. Her says my wrinkles be twice so heavy as anybody else's what her has--an' so they be, proper gert gobbets! They t'other fellows don' know where to go for 'em, but I du--master wrinkles, waiting there for Jake to pick 'em. On'y I ain't goin' to tell they beer-barrels where 'em be. Not I!--Wude yu like to come? Nobody goes where I goes."

"Where's that?"

"Ah! Down to Longo. Yu'll see, if yu comes."

"Haven't yu got a mate for it then?"

[Sidenote: _UNCLE JAKE_]

"_Mate!_ I'd rather go be myself than wi' some o' they bladder-headed friends o' brewers. _They_ don' like wrinklin' wi' Jake; makes 'em blow too much when they has to carry a bushel o' wrinkles, like I've a-done often, over the rocks an' up the cliff, two or dree miles home. They Double-X Barrels can't du that. Lord! can't expect 'em to.--_We'll_ go in the _Moondaisy_ t'morrow, an' then if we can't sail home, we can row, an' if it comes on a fresh wind, we'll haul her up to Refuge Cove an' go'n look how my orchards be getting on."

It is good to hear Uncle Jake talk about the work that nobody else will do. (The exposure alone would be too much for many of them.) His face wrinkles up within its grey picture-frame beard, his keen yet wistful eyes open wide, and he draws up that youthful body of his--clad in faded blue jumper and torn trousers--on which the head of a venerable old man seems so incongruously set. He is the owner of a big drifter which hardly pays her expenses; he feels that taking out pleasure parties is no work for a fisherman--'never wasn't used to be at the beck an' call o' they sort o' people when I wer young';--and therefore he picks up a living, laborious but very independent, between high and low tide mark for many miles east and west of Seacombe. Nobody learns exactly when or where he goes, nor what little valuables are in the old sack that he carries. He seldom sleeps for more than two hours on end; has breakfast at midnight, dinner in the early morning, and tea-supper only if it happens to be handy; and he feeds mainly on bread, cheese, sugar and much butter, with an occasional feast of half a dozen mackerel at once, or a skate or a small conger. Singularly straightforward in all his dealings, a little of the old West-country wrecking spirit yet survives in him, and he enjoys nothing better than smuggling jetsam past the coastguards. Social position saves no one from hearing what Uncle Jake thinks. His tongue is loaded with scorn and sarcasm, but his heart holds nothing but kindness. He will jeer and taunt a man off the Front, and give him money round the corner or food in house. His nicknames are terrible--they stick. Few would care to turn and fight such an old man, and if they did he would almost certainly knock them into the dust or throw them into the sea. He is childless; and, since her illness several years ago, his wife, an untidy woman with beautiful eyes, has been scatterbrained and more trouble than use, a spender of his savings. He nursed her himself for many months. He does most of the housework now. He may remark on his wife, if he knows you very well, but about the childlessness he never talks.

At eight in the morning we made sail with the wind just north of east. The little _Moondaisy_ was full of sacks, old boots and gear. Past Refuge Cove we sailed, past Dog Tooth Ledge, and across the out-ground of Landlock Bay, which holds the last long stretch of pebble beach for some miles down. Uncle Jake pointed to the western end of it. "If ever yu'm catched down here by a sou'wester, yu can al'ays run ashore, just there--calm as a mill-pond no matter how 'tis blowing. Yu can beach there when yu can't beach to Seacombe for the roughness o' the sea. Aye, I've a-done it! But yu can't get out o' Landlock Bay, though I mind when you could climb up the cliff jest to the east'ard o' thic roozing [landslip]. Howsbe-ever, 'tis a heavy gale from the south-east on a long spring tide as'll drive 'ee out o' thic cave there where the beach urns up. Now yu knows that: 'tisn't all o'em does."

Similar bits of lore or reminiscence did he give me about every few yards of the coastline. Most merrily had the easterly wind and a following sea brought us down. Now we drew near the rocks, where at high tide the land drops sheer to the water. In the dry sunshine, such a sparkle was on the waves, such a shimmer on the high red cliffs, that it was hard to follow Uncle Jake when he said, as if he revered the place, "_'Tis_ an ironbound show! _'Tis_ a shop! Poor devils, what gets throwed up here! But I know where ther's some fine copper bolts waiting for me. I'll hae 'em! I've had some on 'em, an' I'll hae the rest when they rots out o' the timbers. Year '63 that wreck was--lovely vessel, loaded wi' corn. I mind it well. _'Twas_ a night!"

[Sidenote: _AN IRONBOUND SHOW_]

We ran the _Moondaisy_ ashore at Brandey-Keg Cove--a little beach running up into a deep gloomy cave where the smugglers used to store their cargoes and haul them up over the cliff. "Us can walk down to Lobster Ledge an' west from there to Tatie Rock. I knows where they master gobbets be, if nobody an't had 'em--an' nobody an't. They don' like this iron-bound shop. They leaves it to Jake. But they wuden't, if they know'd what was here."

I ate some of my breakfast while Uncle Jake was changing his boots and shifting his outer clothing. He would accept only one of my small cheese sandwiches. "I got some bread and butter here," he said, but I 'took partic'lar notice,' as Tony puts it, that he ate none of the bread and butter. And he refused to take a second sip of my tea because his sensitive nose detected that there had been whiskey in the bottle.

As we walked along the rocks, he placed above high-tide mark what bits of wreckage he could find, and kept a sharp look-out for any rabbits which might have fallen over the cliff. The only two we found, however, had been partially eaten by sea-gulls and rats. "Let 'em hae 'em an' welcome," said Uncle Jake. "The winter's coming. I can't think how they poor gulls lives when all the sea round about is a hustle o' froth. I al'ays feeds 'em when I can. Don't yu think that _they_ gets hungry tu?"

At Lobster Ledge--a jumble of peaked rocks with pools between--he left his sack conspicuously on the top of a high stone, and hopped--seemed to hop--down to a pool. "They'm here!" he cried. I heard them clatter-clatter into his old cake tin, and then a tin-full rattle into his sack. On those rocks, where few can step at all without great care, he raced about, bent down double, and jumped and glided as actively as an acrobat--a veritable rock-man. "Come here!" he called. "Jest yu turn over thic stone. Ther's some there. My senses, what gobbets they be! If they ther fuddle-heads what goes nosing about Broken Rocks, on'y know'd...."

Underneath the stone, clinging to it and lying on the bed of the pool, were so many large winkles that instead of picking them out, I found it quicker to sweep up handfuls of loose stuff and then to pick out the refuse from the winkles. When Uncle Jake came across an unusually good pocket he would call me to it and hop on somewhere else. There was an element of sport in catching the dull-looking gobbets so many together. I soon got to know the likely stones--heavy ones that wanted coaxing over,--and discovered also that the winkles hide themselves in a green, rather gelatinous weed, fuzzy like kale tops, from which they can be combed with the fingers. They love, too, a shadowed pool which is tainted a little, but not too much, by decaying vegetable matter. Uncle Jake likes the stones turned back and then replaced 'as you finds 'em.'

[Sidenote: _WHAT GOBBETS THEY BE!_]

I emptied my baler, holding perhaps a quart, into the ballast-bag. How one's back ached! How old and rheumaticy had one's knees suddenly become! Uncle Jake feels nothing of that, for all his sixty-five years. He still skipped from pool to pool. He flung me a lobster. "There! put that in your bag for tay. Tide's dead low. The wind's dying away: sun's burnt it up. Shuden' wonder if it don't come in sou'west, an' if it du we'll hae a fair wind home along.--Well, how du 'ee like it? Eh?"

"All right."

"Ah! yu ought to be down here in the winter, like I been, when you got to put your hands wet into your pockets to get 'em warm enough to feel the gobbets--aye, to hold 'em! Then carry 'em five mile home on your back to make 'ee warm again."

So we went on: grab, grab, grab! clatter-clatter! rattle! We talked less and worked harder, because we were tired. The tide crept up. The wind veered to south-east and strengthened. "'Tis time to be off out of thees yer," said Uncle Jake. "The lop'll rise when the flid tide makes. Yu may know everything there is to know about fishing, but," he added grimly, "if yu don' know when to be off, 'twill all o'it be no gude to 'ee some day. Blast thees wind! We'll hae to row home now, or ratch out a couple o' miles to fetch in."

We shouldered our sacks for the half-mile walk to the _Moondaisy_. Walk.... Scramble! Uncle Jake seemed to glide from rock to rock, but with two or three stone weight awkwardly perched on my shoulder, the wet running down my neck and an arm going numb, I slithered down the weed-covered slopes in a very breakneck fashion. I rather felt for the bladderheads who refuse to go wrinkling far from home.

[Sidenote: _CAUGHT BY THE TIDE_]