A Poor Man's House Part 19

"'He've a-gone a mile back'ards then!' says I.

"And with the same, d.i.c.k laughs out loud, an' I laughs, an' the tramp, he laughs.... 'Twas the first laugh us had since us left Seacombe, an'

I reckon it did us gude. Us went on better a'ter that. I covered the tramp up wi' hay in a hay loft, advising of him not to smoke. I could ha' slept tu; I wer heavy for a gude bed; but I saw lights in the farmhouse winder, an' us wer so near home again.

"Well, we crept into Seacombe by the back (people was jest astir, Sunday morning) going each our way from the churchyard, an' I listened outside mother's door. Father was home again, an' they was to breakfast. Her'd had my letter telling them as I'd a-s.h.i.+pped for Bombay.

"'They'll b.u.mbay the beggar!' father was saying, only 'twasn't 'beggar'

as he did say.

"Then my sister Mary, cried out: 'Here's Tony!'

"'I know'd _he'd_ never go to b.u.mbay!' outs father so quick as ever.

"But they was so pleased as Punch to see Tony back, cas I ude see, if they'd ha' cared to say so. I don' know 'xactly why I went off to sea--summut inside driving of me--'twasn't only 'cause there wern't nothing doin'--but I an't never been no more. An' thic Mam Widger there'd hae summut to say about it now. Eh, Annie?"

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[Sidenote: _THE SEA'S STAMP_]

It is an Englishman's privilege to grumble, and a sailorman's duty; yet one thing always strikes me in talking to seafaring men, namely how indelible the sea's stamp is; how indissolubly they are bound to the sea--with sunken bonds like those which unite an old married couple,--and also what outbursts of savage hatred they have against it.

Tony says that if he could earn fifteen s.h.i.+llings a week regularly on land, he would give up the sea altogether. I very much doubt it. The sea has him fast. He says further that n.o.body would go to sea unless he were caught young and foolish, and that few would stay there if they could get away. There are, among the older fishermen of Seacombe, some who have worked well, and could still work, but prefer to stay ash.o.r.e and starve. Tony holds them excused. "Aye!" he says, "they've a-worked hard in their day, an' they knows they ain't no for'arder. An' now they'm weary o' it all, an' don't care; an' that's how I'll be some day, if I lives--weary o'it, an' just where I was!"

But the sea has her followers, and will continue to have them, because seafaring is the occupation in which health, strength and courage have their greatest value; in which being a man most nearly suffices a man.

It is remarkable that Baudelaire, decadent Frenchman, apostle of the artificial, who was violently home-sick when he went on a voyage, should have expressed the relation of man and the sea--their enmity and love--more subtly than any English poet.

Homme libre, toujours tu cheriras la mer; La mer et ton miroir; tu contemples ton ame Dans le deroulement infini de sa lame, Et ton esprit n'est pas un gouffre moins amer.

Tu te plais a plonger au sein de ton image; Tu l'embra.s.ses des yeux et des bras, et ton coeur Se distrait quelquefois de sa propre rumeur Au bruit de cette plainte indomptable et sauvage.

Vous etes tous les deux tenebreux et discrets: Homme, nul n'a sonde le fond de tes abimes, O mer, nul ne connait tes richesses intimes, Tant vous etes jaloux de garder vos secrets!

Et cependant voila des siecles innombrables Que vous vous combattez sans pitie ni remord, Tellement vous aimez le carnage et la mort, O lutteurs eternels, o freres implacables!

[Sidenote: _SEA-LARGENESS_]

The sea is never mean. Strife and brotherhood with it give a largeness to men which, like all deep qualities of the spirit, can be neither specified nor defined; only felt, and seen in the outcome. The Seacombe fishermen are more or less amphibious; ocean-going seamen look down on them. They are petty in some small things, notably in jealousy lest one man do more work, or make more money, than another: to say a man is doing well is to throw out a slur against him.

Nevertheless in the larger, the essential things of life, their sea-largeness nearly always shows itself. They are wonderfully charitable, not merely with money. They carp at one another, but let a man make a mess of things, and he is gently treated. I have never heard Tony admit that any man--even one who had robbed him--had not his very good points. Is a man a ne'er-do-well, a drunkard, an idler?

"Ah," they say, "his father rose he up like a gen'leman, an' that's what comes o'it." In their dealings, they curiously combine generosity and close-fistedness--close-fistedness in earning, and generosity in spending and lending. A beachcomber, for simply laying a hand to a rope, receives a pint of beer, or the price of it, and next moment the fisherman who paid the money may be seen getting wet through and spoiling his clothes in order to drag a farthing's worth of jetsam from the surf. Tony fails to understand how a gen'leman can possibly haggle over the hire of a boat. When he goes away himself, he pays what is asked; regrets it afterwards, if at all; and comes home when his money is done. "If a gen'leman," he says, "can't afford to pay the rate, what du 'ee come on the beach to hire a boat for--an' try to beat a fellow down? I reckon 'tis only a _sort o' gen'leman_ as does that!"

Like most seafarers, the fishermen are fatalistic. "What's goin' to be, will be, an' that's the way o'it." But they are not thoroughgoing fatalists, inasmuch as disappointment quickly turns to resentment against something handy to blame. If, for example, we catch no fish, Tony will blame the tide, the hour, the weather, the boat, the sail, the leads, the line, the hooks, the bait, the fish, his mate--anything rather than accept the one fact that, for reasons unknown, the fish are off the bite. A thoroughgoing fatalist would blame, if he did not acquiesce in, fate itself or his luck.

Tony is a black pessimist as regards the present and to-morrow; convinced that things are not, and cannot be, what they were; but as regards the further future, the day after to-morrow, he is a resolute optimist. "Never mind how bad things du look, summut or other'll sure to turn up. It always du. I've a-proved it. I've a-see'd it scores o'

times." He can earn money by drifting for mackerel and herring, hooking mackerel, seining for mackerel, sprats, flat-fish, mullet and ba.s.s, bottom-line fis.h.i.+ng for whiting, conger or pout, lobster and crab potting, and prawning; by belonging to the Royal Naval Reserve; by boat-hiring; by carpet-beating and cleaning up. I have even seen him dragging a wheel chair. His boats and gear represent, I suppose, a capital of near a hundred pounds. It would be hard if he earned nothing. Yet he is certain that his earnings, year in and year out, scarcely average fifteen s.h.i.+llings a week. "Yu wears yourself out wi'

it an' never gets much for'arder." The money, moreover, comes in seasons and lump-sums; ten pounds for a catch perhaps, then nothing for weeks. Mrs Widger must be, and is, a good hand at household management and at putting money by. I doubt if Tony ever knows how much, or how little, gold she has, stored away upstairs. Probably it is as well. He is a generous man with money. He 'slats it about' when he has it.

[Sidenote: _OPEN BOATS_]

It has to be realised that these fishermen exercise very great skill and alertness. To sail a small open boat in all weathers requires a quicker hand and judgment than to navigate a seagoing s.h.i.+p. Seacombe possesses no harbour, and therefore Seacombe men can use no really seaworthy craft. "'Tis all very well," Tony says, "for people to buzz about the North Sea men an' knit 'em all sorts o' woollen gear. They North Sea men an' the Cornishmen wi' their big, decked harbour boats, they _have_ got summut under their feet--somewhere they can get in under, out the way o'it. They _can_ make themselves comfor'able, an ride out a storm. But if it comes on to blow when we'm to sea in our little open craft, we got to hard up an' get home along--if us can.

For the likes o' us, 'tis touch an' go wi' the sea!"

Tony knows. At places like Seacombe every boat, returning from sea, must run ash.o.r.e and be hauled up the beach and even, in rough weather, over the sea-wall. The herring and mackerel drifters, which may venture twenty miles into the open sea, cannot be more than twenty-five feet in length else they would prove unwieldy ash.o.r.e. To avoid their heeling over and filling in the surf, they must be built shallow, with next to no keel. They have therefore but small hold on the water; they do not sail close to the wind, and beating home against it is a long wearisome job. Again, because the gear for night work in small craft must be as simple as possible, such boats usually carry only a mizzen and a dipping lug--the latter a large, very picturesque, but unhandy, sail which has to be lowered or 'dipped' every time the boat tacks. Neither comfort nor safety is provided by the three feet or so of decking, the 'cuddy' or 'cutty,' in the bows. To sleep there with one's head underneath, is to have one's feet outside, and _vice versa_. In rough broken seas the open beach drifter must be handled skilfully indeed, if she is not to fill and sink.

I have watched one of them running home in a storm. The wind was blowing a gale; the sea running high and broken. One error in steering, one grip of the great white sea-horses, meant inevitable wreck. Every moment or two the coastguard, who was near me with a telescope to his eye, exclaimed, "She's down!" But no. She dodged the combers like a hare before greyhounds, now steering east, now west, on the whole towards home. It was with half her rudder gone that she ran ash.o.r.e after a splendid exhibition of skill and nerve, many times more exciting than the manoeuvres of a yacht race. Were there not many such feats of seamans.h.i.+p among fishermen, there would be more widows and orphans.

[Sidenote: _BOATS SHEERING_]

Those are the craft, those the sort of men--two usually to a boat--that put to sea an hour or two before sunset, ride at the nets through the night, and return towards or after dawn. Anything but a moderate breeze renders drifting impossible. In a calm, the two men are bound to row, for hours perhaps, with heavy 16-20 ft. sweeps. Moreover, if the sea makes, or a ground swell rises, the least mistake in beaching a boat will cause it to sheer round, capsize, and wash about in the breakers with the crew most probably beneath it. Yarns are told of arms and legs appearing, of a horrible tortured face appearing, while the upturned boat washed about in the undertow, and those ash.o.r.e were powerless to help. There is nothing the fishermen dread so much. One of them owns to leaving the beach when he has seen a boat running in on a very rough sea, so that he might not endure witnessing what he could not prevent.--He peeped however.

These risks need considering, not in order to exaggerate the dangers of drifting in open beach boats--in point of fact, accidents seldom do happen,--but to show what skill is habitually exercised, what a touch and go with the sea it is.

Sundown is the time for shooting nets. Eight to fourteen are carried for mackerel, six to ten for herrings--the scantier the fish, the greater the number of nets. At Seacombe they are commonly forty fathoms in length along the headrope which connects them all, and five fathoms deep. Stretching far away from the boat, as it drifts up and down Channel with the tides, is a line, perhaps a thousand yards long, of cork buoys. From these hang the lanyards[16] which support the headrope, from the headrope hang perpendicularly the nets themselves. Judgment is needed in shooting a fleet of nets. They may get foul of the bottom or of another boat's fleet. When, on account of careless shooting or tricks of the tide, the nets of several boats become entangled, there is great confusion, and the cursing is loud.

[16] For herrings the lanyards may be of such a length that the foot of the net almost touches the sea-bottom. For mackerel, which is a surface and midwater fish, they are much shorter, so that the headrope lies just below the top of the water.

Nets shot, the fishermen make fast the road for'ard; sup, smoke, sing, creep under the cutty, and sleep with one eye open.

Sometimes they are too wet to sleep; often in the winter it is too cold.

Afterwards, the laborious hauling in--one man at the headrope and the other at the foot. Contrary to a very general impression, the fish are not enclosed within the net, as in seining or in pictures of the miraculous draught of fishes. They prod their snouts into the meshes, and are caught by the gills. There may not be a score in a whole fleet of nets, or they may come up like a glittering mat, beyond the strength of two men to lift over the gunwale. Twenty-five thousand herring is about the burthen of an open beach drifter. Are there more, nets must be given away at sea, or buoyed up and left--or cut, broken, lost.

Small catches are picked out of the nets as they are hauled in, large catches ash.o.r.e.

[Sidenote: _FISHERMEN FLEECED_]

It is ash.o.r.e that the fisherman comes off worst of all. Neither educated nor commercialized, he is fleeced by the buyers. And if he himself dispatches his haul to London.... d.i.c.k Yeo once went up to Billingsgate and saw his own fish sold for about ten pounds. On his return to Seacombe, he received three pounds odd, and a letter from the salesman to say that there had been a sudden glut in the market.

Fishermen boat-owners have an independence of character which makes it difficult for them to combine together effectively, as wage-servers do.

They act too faithfully on the adage that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and ten s.h.i.+llings on the beach a sovereign at Billingsgate. So 'tis, when

There's little to earn and many to keep,

and no floating capital at a man's disposal.

In recent years, owing to bad prices and seasons and general lack of encouragement, or even of fair opportunity, the number of sea-going drifters at Seacombe has decreased by two-thirds. Much the same has happened at other small fis.h.i.+ng places along the coast. This decline--so complacently acquiesced in by the powers that be--is of national importance; for the little fisheries are the breeding ground of the Navy. Nowadays fishermen put their sons to work on land.

"'Tain't wuth it," they say, "haulin' yer guts out night an' day, an'

gettin' no forrarder at the end o'it." Luckily for England the sea's grip is a firm one, and many of the sons return to it.

When one hears Lus...o...b.. talk about the maddening trouble he has had in teaching plough-tail or urban recruits to knot and splice a rope, or watches, as I have, a couple of blue-jackets drive ash.o.r.e in a small boat because they couldn't hoist sail, then one comprehends better the importance of the fisher-families whose work is made up of endurance, exposure, nerve and skill; who play touch and go with the sea; and who in the slack seasons have--unlike the ordinary workman--only too much time to think for themselves. They are the backbone of the Navy.

VII

SEACOMBE, _November_.

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