Read Ebook: A Poor Man's House by Reynolds Stephen Sydney

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Ebook has 942 lines and 74216 words, and 19 pages

babies , or running errands for the many relatives who live hereabout. Both of them are more featureless, show less of the family likeness, than the boys. One cannot so easily forecast their grown-up appearance. At times, during the day, they come in house with a rush, but say little, except to blurt out some piece of news, or to tell their step-mother that: "Thic Jimmy's out to baych--I see'd 'en--playin' wi' some boys, an' he's got his boots an' stockings so wet as...."

The two girls, in fact, do not seem to enter so fully as the boys into the life of the household, though they are always very ready to take up the responsibility of keeping the boys in order.

"Jimmy! Tommy--there! Mother, look at thic Jimmy! Mother, Tommy's fingering they caakes!"

"I'll gie thee such a one in a minute! Let 'lone.... Ther thee a't, Mabel, doin' jest the same, 's if a gert maid like yu didn't ought to know better."

The children merely laugh at him.

At supper to-night, Tony was talking about his second wedding and about his children, who, dead and alive, number twelve. "Iss, 'tis a round dozen, though I'd never ha' thought it," he said reckoning them up on his fingers. "Ther be six living an' four up to the cementry, an' two missing, like, what nobody didn' know nort about, did they, Annie? Janie--that's my first wife, afore this one,--her losted three boys when they was two year an' ten months old, an' one year an' seven months, an' nine months old. An' her died herself when Mabel here was six months old, didn' 'er, Annie? An' yu've a-losted Rosie, an' the ones what never appeared in public. Our last baby, after Tommy, wer two boys, twinses. One wer like George an' one like Tommy most; one wer my child an' t'other wer yours, Annie. Six on 'em dead! Aye, Tony've a see'd some trouble, I can tell 'ee, an' he ain't so old as what some on 'em be for their age, now, thru it all. But it du make a man's head turn like."

Mrs Widger's gaze at him while he talked about the dead children was wonderful to see--wide-eyed, soft, unflinching--wifely and motherly at once.

"John," Tony continued, speaking of his youngest brother who has only two children, "John du say as a man what's got seven or eight childern be better off than a man what's got on'y two, like he, 'cause he don't spend so much on 'em. 'Tis rot, I say! Certainly, he du spend so much on each o' his as us du on two o' ours p'raps; but I reckon a hundred pounds has to be wrenched an' hauled out o' these yer ol' rheumaticy arms o' mine for each child as us rears up."

"Yes--'t has--gude that," said Mrs Widger.

"'Tisn' that I don' du it willingly. I be willing enough. But it du maake a man du more'n he'd hae to du otherwise, an' it wears 'en out afore his time. Tony's an ol' man now, almost, after the rate, though he bain't but forty or thereabout, an' s'pose us has six or a dozen more come along, Annie...."

"Gude Lord! 'Twon't be so bad as that, for sure. An' if 'tis, can't be helped. Us must make shift wi' 'em."

"No-o-o! Her had her sleeves tucked up like 's if her 'adn't finished her housework. Her wern't dressed nor nothin' to ree-ceive me."

"I didn' know what I wer doing all thic day."

"Ah, yu'm a saving dear, ben' 'ee. Spends all my money."

"Well for yu! I should like to know what yu'd do wi' it if yu hadn't had me to lay it out for 'ee."

Tony did not wish to question that. The recollection of the wedding had put him in high spirits. He got up from his second supper , and pirouetted round the table singing,

"Sweet Ev-eli-na, sweet Ev-eli-na! My lo-ove for yu-u Shall nev-ver, never die...."

He dragged Mrs Widger out of her chair, whisked her across the room. "There!" he said, setting her down flop. "'En't her a perty li'I dear!"

Once again, after another little supper, he got up and held Mrs Widger firmly by the chin, she kicking out at his shins the while. "Did 'ee ever see the like o'it? Eh? Fancy ol' Tony marryin' thic! Wouldn' 'ee like a kiss o'it? I du dearly. Don' I, Missis?"

"G'out!" says Mrs Widger, speaking furiously, but smiling affectionately. "G'out, you fule! Yu'm mazed!"

Tony returned to his third supper quite seriously, only remarking: "I daresay yu thinks Tony a funny ol' fule, don' 'ee?"

That, I did not. Indeed, I begin to think them peculiarly wise. There is the spontaneity of animals about their play, and a good deal of the unembarassed movements of animals--with something very human superadded. One reads often enough about the love-light in the eyes of lovers, and sometimes one catches sight of it. Either frank ridicule, or else great reverence, is the mood for witnessing so delicate and strong, so racial a thing. Yet this love-light, seen in the eyes of a man and wife who have been married ten years, and have settled down long ago to the humdrum of married life, seems to me a far finer manifestation of the hither mysteries, a far greater triumph. What freshness, what perpetual rejuvenation they must possess! The more one regards such a thing, the more magnificent and far-reaching it appears. No philosophical bulwark against trouble can compare with it. Such love ceases to be a matter for novels and selected moments and certain lusty ages; ceases to be exceptional. It is the greatest of those very great things, the commonplaces. Tony tells me that when he comes in at night, cold from fishing, Mrs Widger always turns over to the other side of the bed, leaving him a warm place to creep into. Mrs Widger says that no matter what time Tony comes in or gets up, he never fails to make, and take her up, a cup o' tay. So does their love direct the prosaic details of living in one house together. I do not think I am wrong in fancying that it percolates right down through the household, and even contributes to the restfulness I feel here, spite of unorderly children and the strident voices. "Yu dang'd ol' fule!" can mean so much. Here it appears to be an expression of almost limitless confidence.

Mrs Widger has put me this time into the front bedroom, which overlooks the Square and has, through the Gut, a narrow view of the sea.

Tony's sister, who lives almost next door, is giving birth to a child this evening. I can see the light in her window--a brighter light than usual,--and the shadows passing across the yellow blind. Many other eyes are turned towards the window. There is a subdued chatter in the Square.

Little did I foresee what sleeping in the front bedroom means. Tony's sister gave birth to a boy about ten o'clock. On hearing that everything was as it should be, I went to bed, but, alack! not to sleep. For the subdued chatter grew into an uproar which continued till fully midnight. All the women in the neighbourhood seemed to have come this way; and they meg-megged, and they laughed, and when their children awoke they shouted up at the windows from outside. I heard snatches of childbearing adventures, astonishing yarns, interspersed with hard commonsense, not to say cynicism--the cynicism of people who cannot afford to embroider much the bare facts of existence or to turn their attention far from the necessities of life. "Her'll be weak," one woman said, "an' for a long time--never so strong as her was before. 'Tis always worse after each one you has, 'cepting the first, which is worst of all, I say. But there, her must take it as it comes...."

Sundry other bits of good practical philosophy I perforce listened to; and at last, when everybody had turned in ; when, I say, everybody had turned in, an offended dog in the hotel yard began to howl.

If it were not that the window of the back bedroom is over the scullery, the ash-heap and the main drain, I would ask to move back there.

In Under Town a birth makes the stir that is due to such a stupendous event.

The Widger's kitchen is an extraordinary room--fit shrine for that household symbol, the big enamelled tin teapot. At the NW. corner is the door to the scullery and to the small walled-in garden which contains--in order of importance--flotsam and jetsam for firewood, old masts, spars and rudders, and some weedy, grub-eaten vegetables. At the top of the garden is a tumble-down cat-haunted linhay, crammed to its leaky roof with fishing gear. No doubt it is the presence everywhere of boat and fishing gear which gives such a singular unity to the whole place.

The kitchen is not a very light room: its low small-paned window is in the N. wall. Then, going round the room, the courting chair stands in the NE. corner, below some shelves laden with fancy china and souvenirs--and tackle. The kitchener, which opens out into quite a comforting fireplace, is let into the E. wall, and close beside it is the provision cupboard, so situated that the cockroaches, having ample food and warmth, shall wax fat and multiply. Next, behind a low dirty door in the S. wall, is the coalhole, then the high dresser, and then the door to the narrow front passage, beneath the ceiling of which are lodged masts, spars and sails. The W. wall of the kitchen is decorated with Tony's Oddfellow 'cistificate,' with old almanacs and with a number of small pictures, all more or less askew.

There is an abundance of chairs, most of them with an old cushion on the seat, all of them more or less broken by the children's racket. Over the pictures on the warm W. wall--against which, on the other side, the neighbour's kitchener stands--is a line of clean underclothing, hung there to air. The dresser is littered with fishing lines as well as with dry provisions and its proper complement of odd pieces of china. Beneath the table and each of the larger chairs are boots and slippers in various stages of polish or decay. Every jug not in daily use, every pot and vase, and half the many drawers, contain lines, copper nails, sail-thimbles and needles, spare blocks and pulleys, rope ends and twine. But most characteristic of the kitchen are the navy-blue garments and jerseys, drying along the line and flung over chairs, together with innumerable photographs of Tony and all his kin, the greater number of them in seafaring rig.

Specially do I like the bluejacket photographs; magnificent men, some of them, though one strong fellow looks more than comical, seated amid the photographer's rustic properties with a wreath of artificial fern leaves around him and a broadly smiling Jolly-Jack-Tar face protruding from the foliage. Some battleships, pitching and tossing in fearful photographers' gales and one or two framed memorial cards complete the kitchen picture gallery.

Composite pictures apparently; made from a photograph of a ship and of a bad painting of a hurricane.

It is a place of many smells which, however, form a not disagreeable blend.

An untidy room--yes. An undignified room--no. Kitchen; scullery ; eating room; sitting room; reception room; storeroom; treasure-house; and at times a wash-house,--it is an epitome of the household's activities and a reflexion of the family's world-wide seafaring. Devonshire is the sea county--at every port the Devonian dialect. It is probably the pictures and reminders of the broad world which, by contrast, make Mrs Tony's kitchen so very homely.

At nine years old, Tony was put with old Cloade, the grocer, now dead; and by the time he was twelve, he was earning four shillings a week, not a penny of which he ever saw or had as 'spending money'; for his mother used to go to the shop every Saturday night and lay out all poor Tony's wages in groceries. The only pocket-money he ever received was a copper or two 'thrown back' from what he could earn by going to sea for mackerel early enough to return to work by half-past six in the morning. Besides running errands, he had to clean boots and knives and to scrub out and tidy up the bar, which in those days was attached to every Devon grocery. Then he could go home to breakfast. And if old Cloade was going up on land, shooting, Tony had to get up and wake him at half-past three and to cork bottles or something of that sort before the master started out for his day's sport. And again, if Tony had fallen foul of any of the shop assistants during the day, had cheeked them perhaps, or stayed overlong at meals, then, waiting till closing time at eight or nine in the evening, they would send him a couple of miles inland, to the top of the hills, with a late parcel of groceries. His possible working day was from 3.30 a.m. to 10.0 p.m.

The chief part of his work, when he was not cleaning up or running errands, was the sorting of fruit and the cracking of sugar. Every nail of his fingers has come off more than once on account of the damage done them by the sugar-cracker. Better than any national event, he recollects the introduction of cube sugar. "When they tubs o' ready-cracked sugar fust come'd down to Seacombe, 'twer thought a gert thing--an' so 'twas."

Tony, in short, put a couple of the bruised oranges into his pocket, ran off, and delivered his parcel at Southview House. On the way back, he ate one of the oranges and, boyishly, threw the peel about outside Mr Brindley-Botton's side gate. He heard someone shouting to him and--but without turning his head--he shouted "Hell about it!" airily back. Then, as it was the dinner hour, he loitered on the Green Patch to play marbles with some other lads, and to share the second bruised orange. On returning to Cloade's:

"Whu did I see but Mr Brindley-Botton's coachman wi' a little packet in white paper. 'Twas thic orange peel, all neatly done up, an' a li'I note saying as I'd a-been cheeky to him, which I hadn't, not knowingly. Mr Cloade, he called me into his little office, asted me what I'd been doing, where I went, an' where I got the oranges.

"'Twas a lie, an' I hadn't no need for to tell it, seeing I was al'ays free to take a bruised orange or two when I wer sorting of 'em. On'y I wer frightened. 'Where did you get them?' he asked.

"'Did you?'

"'Are you telling me a lie? I can find out, mind.'

"'No, sir,' I said.

"'Be you sure you ain't telling of a lie?'

Prawning.

Periwinkle gathering.

When Tony was indisputably grown up, one half of what he earned went, according to custom, to the boat-owner, in this case his father, frequently had be thu to pay for repairs and new gear. That went on for years after he was married--'hauling an' rowing an' slaving an' pulling me guts out wi't!'--until, in fact, the present Mrs Widger insisted on his buying boats of his own.

Our talk shifted to Tony's first wife, who died as the result of the landlord's taking up the drains, and leaving them open, in the height of a hot summer. Tony told me about her people and her native place, a fishing village along the coast. He showed me photographs of her, and a framed, pathetically ugly, imitation cameo memorial, which is getting very dirty now. I knew he loved her very much. He nearly went out of his mind when she died, leaving him with four young children. The untidy little kitchen, with its bright fire, its deep shadows and its white clothes hung along the line; Tony's drooping figure, bent over the hearth in an old blue guernsey: the contrasting redness of his face, and the beam of light from a cracked lamp-shade falling across his wet, memory-stuck blue eyes.... The kitchen seemed full of the presence of the long-dead woman whom Tony was still grieving for in some underpart of his mind. "Iss, her was a nice woman," he said, "a gude wife to me; a gude wife: I hadn't no complaint to make against she."

The one shabby sentence hit into me all his sorrow, that which remains and that which has sunk into time.

The Mrs Widger that is, returned from the Dutch auction with an elaborate badly-plated cruet. "Al'ays using up my saxpinces what I has to slave for," said Tony.

"G'out! 'Tis jest what us wants."

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