G. A. Birmingham

“ The next time I saw Onnie was two years later, and she was again in pursuit of shellfish. It was a very calm summer day and I was far out in the bay in my boat. The tide was a spring tide one of those that come in a long way and go out until one thinks the sea will disappear altogether. It was at its ebb at noon.
There is in our bay, beyond the farthest of the islands, a long reef of rocks which is well covered at half tide. It is just awash at the ebb of an ordinary tide, but emerges long and brown for a couple of hours when the spring tides have gone out their farthest. ”

“ The word sport no doubt covers many things, and golf among them; but it can hardly be stretched to include the dragging of lobsters out of rocky holes along the shore.
She was never allowed to explain what her idea was. Miss Honoria Dever glanced at her. Without saying another word, without hearing one, the girl laid the dinner dress down on the chair and faded away. Such is the discipline maintained by the competent head of a department in a great store.
Then Onnie Dever Tom, no longer Honoria, turned to me with a flood of questions. ”

“ There they would be piled in street barrows, with green labels stuck on them, and sold to pallid women to be eaten as a relish—picked from their shells with a pin and poised on slices of bread and margarine.
It seemed a far cry from our sunny bay to the flare-lit market-place of Bolton on a Saturday night—a great change from the sound of the laughter of merry girls to the raucous cries of the vendors. ”

“ We went out together to look for the lobster. No man of proper feelings would allow a young lady—it was as a young lady and not as a child that I had come to think of Onnie—to wade knee-deep after a fierce shellfish while he sat dry-footed on the shore. I took off my shoes and socks and followed Onnie into the middle of the channel. I hurt my feet a good deal and got very wet. Onnie gathered her single petticoat out of reach of the water, rolled up her sleeves and plunged her arms elbow-deep among the seaweed. ”

“ The windows of the railway carriages are crowded with the faces of boys and girls, all of them weeping with the helpless abandonment of sheer despair. The engine whistles. There is a rush to the carriage windows. Faces and hands are thrust out of them. ”

“ She would have lost the fresh beauty of girlhood very speedily and ceased after a little while to care greatly that her hands were rough, her face weather-beaten and her figure ungainly. The other life, the one she has chosen, is better than that. ”

“ My reason told me that the young lady before me could not possibly be Onnie Dever; but a shadowy resemblance haunted me. I ventured back to the group round the gown and listened from a little distance to the description of its merits given in a high-pitched, far-carrying American voice—a voice the tones of which were as different as possible from the cooing murmurings of our Connaught speech. Certainly this was not Onnie Dever! ”

“ On the platform are women—old women for the most part, mothers and grandmothers—weeping without restraint. Their eyes are swollen; their cheeks are tear-stained. Every now and then one of them wails aloud, and the others, catching the sound, wail with her, their voices rising and falling in a weird melody, like the Church's ancient plain song. ”

“ I drew past the reef and sailed away reflecting on the fate of the periwinkles. Dragged from their cool and pleasant homes they would be measured out in pints and quarts, paid for by the man who bought them with sixpences and shillings, which would go to buy ribbons for Onnie and her friends. Then, boiled and packed in huge cases, they would go to Manchester and to Warrington—to any of the group of smoke-grimed Lancashire towns where cotton is spun. ”

“ Such, I reflected, are the tricks that fate plays with us in life. As is the periwinkle so is the man—a card in a pack shuffled by a sportive destiny.
Sailing on summer seas leads naturally to facile philosophy; but, lest I should sentimentalise helplessly and lose my self-respect, I put my boat about and stood back towards the reef.
The girls were crowding into their boat when I reached them. Already the rising tide had covered most of the rocks, and left only the higher ones standing up like islands in a kind of Saragasso Sea of swaying brown weed. Onnie was the last to embark ”

“ Some day Miss Honoria will do this work—will, I feel tolerably certain, be at the very head of the elect corps of those who do it; will guess more brilliantly than the others; will buy with more infallible certainty that what she buys will be sold again. ”

“ And the school register is a solemn book inspected from time to time by a Government official—a book in which no one would venture to perpetrate a slang phrase or indulge in a joke. It is with Onnie Dever Tom that I am how concerned.
The children of the two families, some eight or ten of them at a time, went to school on the mainland. John and Tom took turns in ferrying them across the channel. When the time came for their return they stood in a group on the opposite shore and shouted until either John or Tom put out in a boat and ferried them home. ”

“ There are buyers who go out from New York itself to London and Paris, crossing the Atlantic once or twice a year, who, by virtue of some strange instinct for raiment, can be trusted to guess in December what fabrics American women will want to buy in May. ”

“ The dressing of the hair is also a disturbing thing. Onnie's, even when she was in the train on her way to the steamer, hung down her back in a long, thick pigtail. The fashion of ladies' hair-doing is not to be described by any words in the English language. I suppose I must use a French word and say that the coiffure of the chief of this department puzzled me ”