A Traveller in Little Things Part 13

"And after that, he said, 'Good-bye,' without a smile, and walked off.

"And there at the door I stood, I don't know how long, looking after him going down the road. Then I laughed; I don't know that I ever laughed so much in my life, and at last I had to sit down on the bricks to go on laughing more comfortably, until the missus came and arst me, sarcastic-like, if I'd got the high-strikes, and if she'd better get a bucket of water to throw over me.

"I says, 'No, I don't want no water. Just let me have my laugh out and then it'll be all right.' Well, I don't see nothing to laugh at,' she says. 'And I s'pose you thought you giv' him a penny. Well, it wasn't a penny, it was a florin,' she says.

"'And little enough, too,' I says. 'What that man said to me, to say nothing of the bird, was worth a sovereign. But you are a woman, and can't understand that,' I says. 'No,' she says, 'I can't, and lucky for you, or we'd 'a' been in the workhouse before now,' she says.

"And that's how I got the bird."

XXIX

A WONDERFUL STORY OF A MACKEREL

The angler is a mighty spinner of yarns, but no sooner does he set about the telling than I, knowing him of old, and accounting him not an uncommon but an unconscionable liar, begin (as Bacon hath it) "to droop and languish." Nor does the languishing end with the story if I am compelled to sit it out, for in that state I continue for some hours after. But oh! the difference when someone who is not an angler relates a fishing adventure! A plain truthful man who never dined at an anglers' club, nor knows that he who catches, or tries to catch a fish, must tell you something to astonish and fill you with envy and admiration. To a person of this description I am all attention, and however prosaic and even dull the narrative may be, it fills me with delight, and sends me happy to bed and (still chuckling) to a refreshing sleep.

Accordingly, when one of the "commercials" in the coffee-room of the Plymouth Hotel began to tell a wonderful story of a mackerel he once caught a very long time back, I immediately put down my pen so as to listen with all my ears. For he was about the last person one would have thought of a.s.sociating with fish-catching--an exceedingly towny- looking person indeed, one who from his conversation appeared to know nothing outside of his business. He was past middle age--oldish-looking for a traveller--his iron-grey hair brushed well up to hide the baldness on top, disclosing a pair of large ears which stood out like handles; a hatchet face with parchment skin, antique side whiskers, and gold-rimmed gla.s.ses on his large beaky nose. He wore the whitest linen and blackest, glossiest broadcloth, a big black cravat, diamond stud in his shirt-front in the old fashion, and a heavy gold chain with a spade guinea attached. His get-up and general appearance, though ancient, or at all events mid-Victorian, proclaimed him a person of considerable importance in his vocation.

He had, he told us at starting, a very good customer at Bristol, perhaps the best he ever had, at any rate the one who had stuck longest to him, since what he was telling us happened about the year 1870. He went to Bristol expressly to see this man, expecting to get a good order from him, but when he arrived and saw the wife, and asked for her husband, she replied that he was away on his holiday with the two little boys. It was a great disappointment, for, of course, he couldn't get an order from her. Confound the woman! she was always against him; what she would have liked was to have half a dozen travellers dangling about her, so as to pit one against another and distribute the orders among them just as flirty females distribute their smiles, instead of putting trust in one.

Where had her husband gone for his holiday? he asked; she said Weymouth and then was sorry she had let it out. But she refused to give the address. "No, no," she said; "he's gone to enjoy himself, and mustn't be reminded of business till he gets back."

However, he resolved to follow him to Weymouth on the chance of finding him there, and accordingly took the next train to that place. And, he added, it was lucky for him that he did so, for he very soon found him with his boys on the front, and, in spite of what she said, it was not with this man as it was with so many others who refuse to do business when away from the shop. On the contrary, at Weymouth he secured the best order this man had given him up to that time; and it was because he was away from his wife, who had always contrived to be present at their business meetings, and was very interfering, and made her husband too cautious in buying.

It was early in the day when this business was finished. "And now,"

said the man from Bristol, who was in a sort of gay holiday mood, "what are you going to do with yourself for the rest of the day?"

He answered that he was going to take the next train back to London. He had finished with Weymouth--there was no other customer there.

Here he digressed to tell us that he was a beginner at that time at the salary of a pound a week and fifteen shillings a day for travelling expenses. He thought this a great thing at first; when he heard what he was to get he walked about on air all day long, repeating to himself, "Fifteen shillings a day for expenses!" It was incredible; he had been poor, earning about five shillings a week, and now he had suddenly come into this splendid fortune. It wouldn't be much for him now! He began by spending recklessly; and in a short time discovered that the fifteen shillings didn't go far; now he had come to his senses and had to practise a rigid economy. Accordingly, he thought he would save the cost of a night's lodging and go back to town. But the Bristol man was anxious to keep him and said he had hired a man and boat to go fishing with the boys,--why couldn't he just engage a bedroom for the night and spend the afternoon with them?

After some demur he consented, and took his bag to a modest Temperance Hotel, where he secured a room, and then, protesting he had never caught a fish or seen one caught in his life, he got into the boat, and was taken into the bay where he was to have his first and only experience of fishing. Perhaps it was no great thing, but it gave him something to remember all his life. After a while his line began to tremble and move about in an extraordinary way with sudden little tugs which were quite startling, and on pulling it in he found he had a mackerel on his hook. He managed to get it into the boat all right and was delighted at his good luck, and still more at the sight of the fish, shining like silver and showing the most beautiful colours. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life! Later, the same thing happened again with the line and a second mackerel was caught, and altogether he caught three. His friend also caught a few, and after a most pleasant and exciting afternoon they returned to the town well pleased with their sport. His friend wanted him to take a share of the catch, and after a little persuasion he consented to take one, and he selected the one he had caught first, just because it was the first fish he had ever caught in his life, and it had looked more beautiful than any other, so would probably taste better.

Going back to the hotel he called the maid and told her he had brought in a mackerel which he had caught for his tea, and ordered her to have it prepared. He had it boiled and enjoyed it very much, but on the following morning when the bill was brought to him he found that he had been charged two shillings for fish.

"Why, what does this item mean?" he exclaimed. "I've had no fish in this hotel except a mackerel which I caught myself and brought back for my tea, and now I'm asked to pay two shillings for it? Just take the bill back to your mistress and tell her the fish was mine--I caught it myself in the Bay yesterday afternoon."

The girl took it up, and by-and-by returned and said her mistress had consented to take threepence off the bill as he had provided the fish himself.

"No," he said, indignantly, "I'll have nothing off the bill, I'll pay the full amount," and pay it he did in his anger, then went off to say goodbye to his friend, to whom he related the case.

His friend, being in the same hilarious humour as on the previous day, burst out laughing and made a good deal of fun over the matter.

That, he said, was the whole story of how he went fishing and caught a mackerel, and what came of it. But it was not quite all, for he went on to tell us that he still visited Bristol regularly to receive big and ever bigger orders from that same old customer of his, whose business had gone on increasing ever since; and invariably after finishing their business his friend remarks in a casual sort of way: "By the way, old man, do you remember that mackerel you caught at Weymouth which you had for tea, and were charged two shillings for?" "Then he laughs just as heartily as if it had only happened yesterday, and I leave him in a good humour, and say to myself: 'Now, I'll hear no more about that blessed mackerel till I go round to Bristol again in three months'

time.'"

"How long ago did you say it was since you caught the mackerel?" I inquired.

"About forty years."

"Then," I said, "it was a very lucky fish for you--worth more perhaps than if a big diamond had been found in its belly. The man had got his joke--the one joke of his life perhaps--and was determined to stick to it, and that kept him faithful to you in spite of his wife's wish to distribute their orders among a lot of travellers."

He replied that I was perhaps right and that it had turned out a lucky fish for him. But his old customer, though his business was big, was not so important to him now when he had big customers in most of the large towns in England, and he thought it rather ridiculous to keep up that joke so many years.

x.x.x

STRANGERS YET

The man who composed that familiar delightful rhyme about blue eyes and black, and how you are to beware of the hidden knife in the one case and of a different sort of danger which may threaten you in the other, must have lived a good long time ago, or else be a very old man. Oh, so old, thousands of years, thousands of years, if all were told. And he, when he exhibited such impartiality, must have had other-coloured eyes himself. Most probably the sheep and goat eye, one which no person in his senses--except an anthropologist--can cla.s.sify as either dark or light. It is that marmalade yellow, excessively rare in this country, but not very uncommon in persons of Spanish race. For who at this day, this age, after the mixing together of the hostile races has been going on these twenty centuries or longer, can believe that any inherited or instinctive animosity can still survive? If we do find such a feeling here and there, would it not be more reasonable to regard it as an individual antipathy, or as a prejudice, imbibed early in life from parents or others, which endures in spite of reason, long after its origin had been forgotten?

Nevertheless, one does meet with cases from time to time which do throw a slight shadow of doubt on the mind, and of several I have met I will here relate one.

At an hotel on the South Coast I met a Miss Browne, which is not her name, and I rather hope this sketch will not be read by anyone nearly related to her, as they might identify her from the description. A middle-aged lady with a brown skin, black hair and dark eyes, an oval face, fairly good-looking, her manner lively and attractive, her movements quick without being abrupt or jerky. She was highly intelligent and a good talker, with more to say than most women, and better able than most to express herself. We were at the same small table and got on well together, as I am a good listener and she knew-- being a woman, how should she not?--that she interested me. One day at our table the conversation happened to be about the races of men and the persistence of racial characteristics, physical and mental, in persons of mixed descent. The subject interested her. "What would you call me?" she asked.

"An Iberian," I returned.

She laughed and said: "This makes the third time I have been called an Iberian, so perhaps it is true, and I'm curious to know what an Iberian is, and why I'm called an Iberian. Is it because I have something of a Spanish look?"

I answered that the Iberians were the ancient Britons, a dark-eyed, brown-skinned people who inhabited this country and all Southern Europe before the invasion of the blue-eyed races; that doubtless there had been an Iberian mixture in her ancestors, perhaps many centuries ago, and that these peculiar characters had come out strongly in her; she had the peculiar kind of blood in her veins and the peculiar sort of soul which goes with the blood.

"But what a mystery it is!" she exclaimed. "I am the only small one in a family of tall sisters. My parents were both tall and light, and the others took after them. I was small and dark, and they were tall blondes with blue eyes and pale gold hair. And in disposition I was unlike them as in physique. How do you account for it?"

It was a long question, I said, and I had told her all I could about it. I couldn't go further into it; I was too ignorant. I had just touched on the subject in one of my books. It was in other books, with reference to a supposed antagonism which still survives in blue-eyed and dark-eyed people.

She asked me to give her the t.i.tles of the books I spoke of. "You imagine, I daresay," she said, "that it is mere idle curiosity on my part. It isn't so. The subject has a deep and painful interest for me."

That was all, and I had forgotten all about the conversation until some time afterwards, when I had a letter from her recalling it. I quote one pa.s.sage without the alteration of a syllable:

"Oh, why did I not know before, when I was young, in the days when my beautiful blue-eyed but cruel and remorseless mother and sisters made my life an inexplicable grief and torment! It might have lifted the black shadows from my youth by explaining the reason of their persecutions--it might have taken the edge from my sufferings by showing that I was not personally to blame, also that nothing could ever obviate it, that I but wasted my life and broke my heart in for ever vain efforts to appease an hereditary enemy and oppressor."

Cases of this kind cannot, however, appear conclusive. The cases in which mother and daughters unite in persecuting a member of the family are not uncommon. I have known several in my experience in which respectable, well-to-do, educated, religious people have displayed a perfectly fiendish animosity against one of the family. In all these cases it has been mother and daughters combining against one daughter, and so far as one can see into the matter, the cause is usually to be traced to some strangeness or marked peculiarity, physical or mental, in the persecuted one. The peculiarity may be a beauty of disposition, or some virtue or rare mental quality which the others do not possess.

It would perhaps be worth while to form a society to investigate all these cases of persecution in families, to discover whether or not they afford any support to the notion of an inherited antagonism of dark and light races. The Anthropological, Eugenic and Psychical Research Societies might consider the suggestion.

x.x.xI

THE RETURN OF THE CHIFF-CHAFF