A Poor Man's House Part 2

This morning, when I arrived downstairs, the kitchen was all of a caddle. Children were bolting their breakfast, seated and afoot; were washing themselves and being washed; were getting ready and being got ready for school. Mrs Widger looked up from st.i.tching the seat of a small boy's breeches _in situ_. "I've a-laid your breakfast in the front room."

Thither I went with a book and no uncertain feeling of disappointment.

[Sidenote: _BREAKFAST IN THE PARLOUR_]

The front room looks out upon Alexandra Square. It is, at once, parlour, lumber room, sail and rope store, portrait gallery of relatives and ships, and larder. It is a veritable museum of the household treasures not in constant use, and represents pretty accurately, I imagine, the extent to which Mrs Widger's house-pride is able to indulge itself. But I have had enough at Salisbury of eating my meals among best furniture and in the (printed) company of great minds.

The noise in the kitchen sounded jolly. Now or never, I thought. So after breakfast, I returned to the kitchen and asked for what bad behaviour I was banished to the front room.

"Lor'! If yu don't mind this. On'y 'tis all up an' down here...."

3

I went yesterday to see my old landlady at Egremont Villas. She asked me where I was lodging.

"At Tony Widger's, in Alexandra Square."

"Why, that's in Under Town."

"Yes, in Under Town."

"Oh, law! I can't think how you can live in such a horrid place!"

On my a.s.suring her that it was not so very horrid, she rearranged her silken skirts on the chair (a chair too ornamentally slight for her weight) and tilted up her nose. "I must get and lay the table," she said, "for a lady and gentleman that's staying with me. _Very_ nice people."

[Sidenote: _ALEXANDRA SQUARE_]

Under Town has, in fact, an indifferent reputation among the elect. Not that it is badly behaved; far from it. The shallow-pated resent its not having drawn into line with their cheap notions of progress. If Under Town had put plate-gla.s.s windows into antique buildings.... Visitors to Seacombe, not being told, hardly so much as suspect the existence of its huddled old houses and thatched cottages. The shingle-paved Gut runs down unevenly from the Sh.o.r.e Road between a row of tall lodging houses and the Alexandra Hotel, then opens out suddenly into a little square which contains an incredible number of recesses and sub-corners, so to speak, with many more doors in them than one can discover houses belonging to the doors. Two cottages, I am told, have no ground floors at all. Cats sun themselves on walls or squat about gnawing fish bones.

A houdan c.o.c.kerel with bedraggled speckly plumage and a ragged crest hanging over one eye struts from doorstep to doorstep. The children, when any one strange walks through the Square, run like rabbits in a warren to their respective doors; stand there, and stare. Tony Widger's house is the largest. Once, when Under Town was Seacombe, a lawyer lived here--hence the front pa.s.sage. It has a cat-trodden front garden, in which only wall-flowers and some box edging have survived. Over the front door is a broken trellis-work porch. Masts and spars lean against the wall. The house is built of red brick, straight up and down like an overgrown doll's house, but the whole of the wall is weathered and toned by the southerly gales which blow down the Gut from the open sea.

Those same winds see to it that Alexandra Square does not smell squalid, however it may look. At its worst it is not so depressing as a row of discreet semi-detached villas. It is, I should imagine, a pretty accurate mirror of the lives that are lived in it--poor men's lives that scarcely anybody fathoms. If one looks for a moment at a house where people have starved, or are starving.... What a gift of hope they must possess--and what a sinking in their poor insides!

4

This morning they told me how my little hunchbacked Commodore died. He had been ailing, they said; had come to look paler and more pinched in his small sharp face. Then (it was a fisherman who told me this): "He was in to house one morning, an' I thought as 'e were sleepin', an' I said, 'Harry, will 'ee hae a cup o' tay; yu been sleeping an't 'ee?'

An' 'e says, 'No, I an't; but I been sort o' dreaming.' An' 'e said as he'd see'd a green valley wi' a stream o' water, like, running down the middle o' it, an' 'e thought as 'e see'd Granfer there (that us losted jest before 'en) walking by the stream. A'terwards 'e sat on 's mother's lap, like 's if 'e wer a child again, though 'e wer nearly nineteen all but in size; an' 'e jest took an' died there, suddent an'

quiet like; went away wi'out a word; an' us buried 'en last January up to the cementry on land."

So the _Moondaisy_'s luckiest fisherman packed up and went.

5

It is astonishing how hungry and merry these children are, especially the boys. They rush into the kitchen at meal times and immediately make grabs at whatever they most fancy on the table.

[Sidenote: _MAN AND GEN'LEMAN_]

"Yu little cat!" says their mother, always as if she had never witnessed such behaviour before. "Yu daring rascal! Put down! I'll gie thee such a one in a minute. Go an' sit down to once." Then they climb into chairs, wave their grubby hands over the plates, in a pretence of grabbing something more, and spite of the whacks which sometimes fall, they gobble their food to the accompaniment of incessant tricks and roars of shrill laughter. Never were such disorderly, hilarious meals!

If Tony is here they simply laugh at his threats of weird punishment, and if he comes in late from sea, they return again with him and make a second meal as big as the first. Sometimes, unless the food is cleared away quickly, they will clamour for a third meal, and clamour successfully. What digestions they must have to gobble so much and so fast!

To judge by their way of talking, they divide the world into folk and gentlefolk. "Who gie'd thee thic ha'penny?" Mrs Widger asked Jimmy.

"A man, to beach."

"G'out!" said Mabel. "Twas a gen'leman."

"Well...."

"Well, that ain't a _man_!"

Usually, at breakfast time, the voices of Tony's small nieces may be heard coming down the pa.s.sage: "Aun-tieAnn-ie! Aunt-ieAnn-ie!" Their tousled, tow-coloured little heads peep round the doorway. If we have not yet finished eating, they are promptly ordered to 'get 'long home to mother.' Otherwise, they come right in and remain standing in the middle of the room, apparently to view me. Unable to remember which is Dora and which Dolly, I have nicknamed them according to their hair, Straighty and Curley. What they think of things, there is no knowing; for they blush at direct questions and turn their heads away. So also, when I have been going in and out of the Square, they have stopped their play to gaze at me, but have merely smiled shyly, if at all, in answer to my greetings. Yesterday, however, they had a skipping rope. I jumped over it. Instantly there was a chorus of laughter and chatter.

The ice was broken. This morning, after a moment or two's consideration behind her veil of unbrushed hair, Straighty came and clambered upon the arm of the courting chair--dabbed a clammy little hand down my neck, whilst Curley plumped her fist on my knee and stayed looking into my face with very wondering smiling blue eyes. By the simple act of jumping a rope, I had gained their confidence; had proved I was really a fellow creature, I suppose. Now, when I pa.s.s through the Square, some small boy is sure to call out, "Where yu going?" And my name is brandished about among the children as if I were a pet animal. They have appropriated me. They have tamed that mysterious wild beast, 'the gen'leman.'

One boy, Jimmy--a very fair-headed, blue-eyed, chubby little chap, seven years old--Tony's eldest boy at home--seems to have taken a particular fancy to me. Whether it began with bananas, or with my giving him a pick-a-back to the top of the cliffs, I hardly know. At all events he has decided that I am a desirable friend. He has shown me his small properties--his pencil, and his boats that he makes out of a piece of wood with wing-feathers for sails and a piece of tin, stuck into the bottom, for centre-keel;--has told me what standard he is in at school; and one of the first things I hear whenever he comes into the house, is: "Mam! Wher's Mister Ronals?"

[Sidenote: _JIMMY OUT TO TEA_]

To-day, on my way to the Tuckers' to tea, I pa.s.sed Jimmy's school. The boys were just let loose. Jimmy left a yelling group of them to come along with me. Nearby the Tuckers' gate, I told him where I was going, and said _Good-bye_. Jimmy fell behind. But whilst we were at tea, I repeatedly saw a white head sneaking round the laurels outside the window, and blue eyes peeping. Miss Tucker had him in; whereupon, rather shyly, with hands horribly grubby from the school slates, Jimmy ate much bread and b.u.t.ter and many cakelets, and ended up by tucking three apples into his blouse. He came home very pleased indeed with himself.

Tony was almost angry. "However come'd 'ee, Missis, to let 'em go out to a gen'leman's to tay in thic mess?"

"Stupid! How cude I help o'it?"

"What did 'ee think o'it, Jimmy?"

"The lady gie'd I dree apples!"

Tony, though shocked, was also pleased; Jimmy delighted. Every now and then he draws himself up with a "Coo'h! I been out to tay wi' Mister Ronals!"

They have a strange way, these children, of placing their hands on one, smiling up into one's face, and saying nothing. It has the effect of making one feel their separate, distinct personalities, and, additionally, of making one feel rather proud of the approbation of those small personages who think so much and divulge so little.

6

There has been no fishing. Either the sea has been too rough to ride to a slingstone[1] for blinn and conger, or else too calm, so that the mackerel hookers[2] could not sail out and therefore no fresh bait was to be had. It is quite useless to fish for conger with stale bait. Tony tells me that I ought to be here in a month's time, when he will have fewer pleasure parties to attend to, and will go out for mackerel, rowing if he cannot sail. He says there will _have_ to be a good September hooking season, because, though the summer has been fair, the fisherfolk have not succeeded in putting by enough money to last out the winter, should the herrings fail to come into the bay, as they have failed the last few years. I should like to _work_ at the mackerel hooking with him. Indeed, although I am looking forward to a glorious tramp across Dartmoor, yet I am more than half sorry that I have a room bespoken at Prince Town for the day after to-morrow.

[1] A heavy stone used instead of an anchor over rocks, among which an anchor might get stuck and lost.

[2] After the end of July, the mackerel are mostly caught not in nets, but by trailing a line behind a sailing boat.

[Sidenote: _AN INOPPORTUNE REMARK_]

Putting aside one or two things that are unpleasant--a few disagreeables resolutely faced--it is wonderful how rapidly one feels at home here. The welcome, the goodfellowship, is so satisfying. This morning, the visitor from the hotel, who has Mrs Widger's front room, so far presumed on the fact that we were educated men among uneducated--both gen'lemen, Tony would say--as to remark flippantly though not ungenially, "The Widgers are not bad sorts, are they? I say, what a mouth Mrs Widger's got!"

Mrs Widger has a noticeably wide mouth; I know that perfectly well; but I can hardly say how indignant I felt at his light remark; how insulted; as if he had spoken slightingly of someone belonging to me.