Stephen Sydney Reynolds

“ FISHERMEN'S SKILL
The greatest charm of sailing lies in this: that it is the art of making a boat move by dodging, by taking advantage of, a score of possible dangers. Except when running before the wind, it is the capsizing-power of the wind which propels the boat. The fisherman is an artist none the less because his skill seems partly inborn; because he sails his boat airily and carelessly, yet grimly—for life and the bread and cheese of it. ”

“ Across the saucepan we ledged a sooty swivel, and on the swivel a black tin kettle which leaked slowly into the flame. Tony and myself lay with our four feet cocked along the edge of the box for warmth. The smoke stank in our nostrils, but the flame was cheery. By that flickering light the boat looked a great deep place, full of lumber and the blackest shadows. The herring scales glittered and the worn-out varnish was like rich brown velvet. And how good the tea, though it tasted of nothing but sugar, smoke, paraffin and herring. ”

“ Here, a man wonders if in the strong moorland air some slight non-incapacitating ailment will leave him: illness is inconvenient and disappointing, but not ruinous. There, Tony wonders if the exposure and continual boat-hauling are not taking too much out of him; if he is not ageing before his time; if he will not be past earning before the younger children are off his hands. Here, they laugh at trifles, keeping what is serious behind a veil of conventional manners, lest, appearing in broad daylight, it should damp their spirits. ”

“ I felt my way up the Gut and out, sliding one foot before the other so as not to fall over the sea-wall. John Widger bumped into me, and together we crept along to the capstan. A white shadow of surf was just visible. We dropped gingerly off the wall to the beach, trusting there was no iron gear there to smash our ankles. Then for an hour we fumbled our way about; pushed, hauled, disentangled, slid and swore; grasping sometimes the right rope and sometimes the wrong one with hands almost too cold and stiff, too painful, to grasp anything at all. ”

“ How many men whose pluck and courage I have admired so much, have deceived me as I deceived Tony? And what combination of pluck and courage is it which enables these fishermen to follow their constantly dangerous occupation with equable mind; which, indeed, enables so many working men to follow their dangerous trades? For it is one thing to approach danger by way of sport, and another to work for a livelihood in danger. ”

“ When one is steering instead of hauling, the getting-in of nine forty-fathom nets seems interminable. One net, two nets, three nets—a third of nine,—four, five—more than half the fleet,—six—two-thirds of nine,—seven, eight—nine all but one;—and so on, with an occasional wave coming inboard, until the very last square buoy comes bobbing towards the boat; hand over hand, buoy by buoy, net by net, holding fast when the pull of the tide is too strong, and pausing irritably to pick out the fish. We stepped the great mast, shifted all the ballast to wind'ard. ”

“ Their talk lingered on the water; small voices that yet sounded strong. By the light of the moon I counted twenty-seven drifters, some of them great harbour craft from Cornwall, carrying fifteen or more nets. It seemed as if not a herring on that little fishing ground could escape the long fleets of nets.
We lighted the paraffin flare; supped on sandwiches and oily tea. We stamped about the stern-sheets to try and warm our feet. We sat awhile beneath the cutty. We thought we smelt fish, but it might have been only the smoke from our oil fire and the herring roe plastered about the boat. ”

“ Extreme thrift, like extreme cleanliness, has often a singularly dehumanising effect. It hardens the nature of its votaries, just as gaining what they have not earned most frequently makes men flabby. Thrift, as highly recommended, leads the poor man into the spiritual squalor of the lower middle-class. It is all right as a means of living, but lamentable as an end of life. If a penny saved is a penny earned, then a penny earned by work is worth twopence.
The Courage to Live is the blossom of the Will to Live—a flower far less readily grown than withered. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One night, Tony and myself broke into her cottage, locked the door behind us and helped ourselves to what supper we could find—which was pickled beetroot and raw eggs. Grannie Pinn climbed in upon us through the little window, and afterwards, to gain breath, she sat down to her lace pillow. Her dexterity was marvellous. She threw the bobbins about. I could not follow them with my eyes. She makes stock patterns only; refuses to be taught fresh patterns at her time of life, and cannot read them up for herself because she has never learned to read. The butterfly is her masterpiece. ”

“ And if the mackerel will not bite at all we invent a score of reasons and blame a dozen people and things. But there we are—ourselves, the sea, and the heavenly dawn—the sea heaving up to us, and ourselves ever heaving higher, up and over the lop. ”

“ One understands the evolution of the primitive self-preservative and race-preservative passions. How has this latent daredevilry become so implanted in us that it rises from the bottom depths of one's nature; and how has it become ordinarily so hidden?
Above all what is the effect of this passion on seafaring men? To say that familiarity breeds contempt is—even if it be correct—to beg the question. What is the effect of that familiarity? It might be said that they are the subjects of a sub-acute, persistent form of the daredevilry which uprose in me unexpectedly and acutely. ”

“ When one hears Luscombe 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 ashore 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. ”

“ The greatest courage might go farther than the greatest pluck, but for occasions on which either can be used, pluck, the more spontaneous, is also the superior. Most of us are irregularly, erratically plucky; one man with horses, who funks the sea; another man at sea who is afraid of horses. One man who fears live fists may think nothing of watching by the dead. Another who stands up pluckily in a fight, refuses to go near a corpse. One of the pluckiest men I know 'don't like dogs.' Pluck runs in streaks, but courage, to whatever degree a man possesses it, runs through him from top to bottom. ”

“ Tony and John would go out to-night, to-morrow, every night. But I have slept so dead (not from bodily tiredness) that, the door being bolted against the children, they were unable to waken me for dinner, and in the end Tony told them to 'let the poor beast bide.' Of what nature was that passion, so exultant and so tiring? Are these fishermen so used to it that they 'don't take much note o'it'? For they feel it. I have seen it in their faces. One can always tell. The eyes widen and brighten; hasty movements become so desperately cool. ”

“ It is not that I buy the children bananas or give them an infrequent ha'penny. When bananas and ha'pence are scarce, their love is no less. It is not that I am always good-tempered and jolly. Sometimes I snap unmercifully, so that they look at me with scared, inquiring eyes. It is not that they are always well-behaved. Frequently they are very naughty indeed. The causes of our sympathy lie deeper.
They are more naïve than the children who are in process of being well-educated; more independent and also more dependent. They feel more keenly any separation from those they love ”

“ To lay out on home and family the earnings of a workman who is regularly paid, calls for skill and care enough on the part of a wife who has no reserve fund and must make the weekly accounts balance to within a few ha'pence. But successfully to lay out, and to lay by, the earnings of a man like Tony, whose family is large and whose money comes in with extreme irregularity, requires a combination of forethought and self-control which falls little short of genius. ”

“ Coming here is like passing from a birth and death chamber into a theatre, where, if the actors have lives of their own, apart from mummery, it is their business not to show them. It is like watching a game from the grand stand, instead of playing it; betting on a race instead of running it. The transition hither is hard to make. Retired athletes, we know, suffer from fatty degeneration of the heart; retired men of affairs decay. I have walked lately at five miles an hour with the Widgers, and I do not relish dawdling at the rate of two with these people here. ”

“ Would it were possible to check by ever so little the class-conceit of those people who think that they can manage the poor man's life better than he can himself; who would take advantage of their education to play ducks and drakes with his personal affairs. For it is my firm belief that in the present phase of national evolution, and as regards the things that really matter, the educated man has more to learn of the poor man than to teach him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Among working people nothing so smartens a young man and so quickly sets him on his own feet as a little traffic with the maidens; especially when he can't get his own way too easily. George, I gather, is paying attention to two or three.
Whereas his toilet used to consist of dragging on trousers, guernsey and boots, and lacing up the last-named aboard his boat, if at all, it is now a function delightful to witness as he stumps backwards and forwards between the kitchen looking-glass and the scullery-sink. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sensible when she grasps a thing, she is often a bit mazed. She has the figure of an old woman—bent, screwed—and the toughness of a young one. Her words, spoken pell-mell in a high strained voice which oscillates between laughter and tears, seem to be tumbling down a hill one after another. Spite of all her household difficulties, she retains the usual table of ornaments just inside the front door. Last summer she reclaimed from the roadway a tiny triangular garden, about five inches long in the sides, by wedging a piece of slate between the doorstep and the wall. ”

“ Life, lived with a will, is play enough, and closer acquaintance with life's sterner realities renders one singularly impatient with the literature of life's frillings. I do not notice, however, that it makes one less susceptible to the really fine and strong things of literature and art.
It is true that one drops into dialect when excited; that one's manners suffer in conventional correctness. I suppose I know how to behave fairly correctly; I was well taught at all events; but my manners never have been and never will be so good, so considerate as Tony's. ”

“ I have found that to grow acquainted with the class that is the chief object of social legislation is to see more plainly the room for improvement, and also to see how much better, how much sounder, that class is than it appeared to be from the outside: how much might be gained, of material advantage especially, and at the same time how much there is to be lost of those qualities of character which have been acquired through long training and by infinite sacrifice. ”

“ Tony has always been a man for the girls; so much so, and so naively, that whatever he might do would seem quite innocent; as innocent as the love-play of animals. Along the Front, of an evening, he calls out, "How be 'ee, my dear?" to any girl he chooses, and perhaps takes her arm for a few steps. Given half a chance, he snatches a playful kiss. They never seem to turn rusty with him. He has the primitive quality of knocking their conventionality to bits at one blow. ”

“ Obsolete has come hereto from the Navy, through sons who are bluejackets. Now, when Tony wishes to sum up in one word the two facts that he is older and also less vigorous than formerly, he says: "Tony's getting obsolete, like." A soulless word, borrowed from official papers, has acquired for us a poetic wealth of meaning in which the pathos of the old ship, of declining years, and of Tony's own ageing, are all present with one knows not what other suggestions besides. And when obsolete is fully domesticated here, the like will be struck off. ”

“ Middle-class life runs smoother than the poor man's, it is more arranged and in many ways 'better done,' and it is chillier precisely because, for smooth running, the warmer human impulses, both good and bad, must be repressed. 'Something with a little love and a little murder' in it, was what the illiterate old woman wanted to learn to read. It is what we all want in our hearts, much more than smooth running and impenetrable uniform politeness.
Down at Seacombe we warm our hands, so to speak, at the fire of life; hunger lurks outside, and the fire is dusty and needs looking after ”

“ He is become very like his beloved rocks and cliffs. He is, as one might say, a voice for them, and his words and deeds are what one would expect their words and deeds to be, did they not stand there, warm, sunny and graciously coloured, or dark and stern, fronting the sea immovably, as Uncle Jake fronts life. ”

“ Tony knows. At places like Seacombe every boat, returning from sea, must run ashore 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 ashore. 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. ”