To the Lights

“As chairman of one of the largest of the Billingsgate wholesale fish-dealing companies, I can assure your correspondent that the cause for the current high prices does not rest with the dealers. Your correspondent, who is evidently ignorant of basic facts, asserts that although it is the fishermen themselves who actually catch the fish, they—the fishermen—do not receive a commensurate share of the price which the people ultimately pay for a staple article of food. I must therefore correct him, and insist that they do.

“Contrary to your correspondent’s mere surmise, I may say that the hardships of a trawlerman’s life are enormously exaggerated. It must be borne in mind that these men are brought up from childhood to regard their ships as their homes, that there they are most comfortable and in their element, that they are bountifully fed, that they are in a measure independent because all work without wage, but share on a well-adjusted proportion of the price which the fish command at auction (and I may add that our buyers on the spot are invariably and sometimes uncomfortably liberal in their bids), and that they do neither toil immoderately nor run any very serious risks.

“It stands to reason that these men when in fear of storms can always run to shelter, and that they do. There is no serious hardship or stress in the lives of the trawlermen. If your correspondent were to suggest such a thing to a fisherman, he would be laughed at. No, they get much for little, and it is we men of business who, by the investment of capital and brains, fluctuations in price, etc., run all the risk.”

(Extract from a letter in the London Daily Market Scrutineer.)

Captain Joshua Fairley was pulling on the thick woolen stockings that would protect his ordinary socks and his trousers-legs from the harshness and oiliness of his great sea-boots. He sat on the edge of his bed in his cottage on Brixham hillside and stared out of the window thoughtfully at the sea whose surface was nearly two hundred feet below. He felt all of his seventy-five years, as if each had hammered him and battered him, and contemplated the hard truth that after a bitter venture that had failed, he was about to start life over again.

He pulled on his short “jack boots” absent-mindedly, and then disgusted with his own mistake, jerked them off, stood them in the corner and picked up and drew on the huge and hulking ones. He crossed one leg over the other and inspected a new half-sole and muttered: “Old Gamble be the best cobbler in Brixham yet! Still doing his work. And he bean’t growlin’ at it, or at Providence, or anything else. When I went to get the boot, he was whistlin’ like one of them skylarks. So—I’ll whistle too.”

He puckered his lips beneath the white beard and mustache and tried, “Abide with Me,” which to his mind was second only to “Rock of Ages,” and reached for his faded blue jersey and pulled it over his head, still bravely trying to be melodious and cheerful.

“Father, be anything the matter witfc ’ee?” a voice hailed him as he cleared his head and touseled white hair from the clinging embrace of the knitted folds.

He appreciated, then, that for many months he had not attempted to whistle a melody, and that the mere fact that he had made such attempt was proof to other ears that he was endeavoring to put a cheerful face upon some trying predicament.

“Not a thing in the world, lass,” he declared, turning to meet the troubled eyes of his widowed daughter.

“You’re worrited,” she said, coming swiftly across to him and putting work-hardened hands on his broad, bent shoulders.

“Not too much,” he said, still making gallant pretense. “Us has still got the I’ll Try. Come here and look at her.” He pulled her over to the window set into the deep cob-walls built more than a hundred years before, and with a gnarled finger pointed through the leaded panes at the outer harbor below. “There she be. Look at her. I was a fool, Nettie, an old fool! I tried to get rich by puttin’ in they petrol motors, and hangin’ screw astarn. I thought they newfangled boats were the thing; but—it cost so much to run ’em they didn’t pay. So us has sold they engines, and had ’em hauled out, and—the I’ll Try be just the same as she was when I built her, livin’ by her sails and the winds of the Lord Almighty. Just as she was! No, not quite, because she’s got a wheel instead of the big clumsy tiller, and—I was a fool. All I should have done to her was to put in a boiler and a steam winch to handle the trawl. That was a mistake. But—there her be, waitin’ for us, all our own, and mebbe her’ll be glad to have they dirty engines out of her again.

Everything considerin’,” he announced, almost triumphantly, “us be doin’ right well. Us owns this house. Us owns the I’ll Try. Us don’t owe a farthing, and us has more than nine and twenty pound in the bank to—” his voice halted, lowered a trifle, and then finished—“to start over again. Us’ll use the wind, hereafter, and make money so that when I have to quit the sea, our two nippers’ll have a fine start. A proper good start!”

She fathomed his anxieties as well as his brave dissimulation, and shook her head sadly, and stared up at him affectionately.

“Listen, lass,” he said, knowing that his pretense had failed. “After all, naught matters but the harbor lights. I doan’t mean they lights out there on Berry Head, and at the end of the breakwater, or the pier. I mean the lights that should shine for all of us when we come home from sea after all v’yages be done. Them’s the lights that count. The ones that finally brings us home. So—nothin’ else matters much to us, because us has done our best. Bean’t it so? You’m been a good darter to me! And us has got all this, and I be good for ten years more, and—” Again he stopped, scratched his white head with his fingers, seemed distracted, and worried, and ended with: “And so what the hell’s there to bother about? Tell me that!”

She was not shocked by his abrupt reversion to seaman’s speech. The turbid exclamations of his everyday life had nothing in common with his sincere convictions. As she had once warned a meddlesome but well-intentioned and well-shocked visiting curate, there was an unrecognized line of division between Captain Joshua’s faith, reverence and devoutness, and his use of words when in mental or physical action.

“His grandsons, my boys,” she stoutly asserted, “says bad things sometimes. Their gran-f’ur may be careless in front of them sometimes; but he have put great arms over they two lads shoulders at night when they all knelt, and taught them proper respect for God Almighty. That be enough! Thou could’st do no more by they lads than he—Captain Joshua! I think it’s better that ’ee go, now, and—please don’t ’ee ever come back, lest the good Lord knows thou wastest time! Such men as Captain Joshua be a lot better, I do reckon, than be you.”

That the well-meaning curate came no more did not perturb her. They say he never did.

Captain Joshua trudged down the steep and devious ways of the Overgang, with a bundle under his arm. To him the quaint roofs, the narrow street, the occasional stretches of gray stone wall were of no interest. He rolled past a wandering artist who, with easel and paints, was enraptured with a view, and under his breath grunted a derisive: “Humph! Loafin’ lout! If I could get him aboard the I’ll Try for a month, I’d make a useful man out of nothing. Playing with pretty things, he be. No use!”

He could not resist the temptation to stand in front of a ship-chandler’s show-window and stare therein at a compact steam winch scarcely larger than a sewing machine, and the brass-bound boiler beside it.

“Wish to the Lord I’d a bought you instead of that blamed motor-engine,” he thought. “The I’ll Try be one of the last ships left that has to hoist trawls by hand-winch and—great dollops, it do be hard work!”

A long, troubled sigh slipped out before he could check it, and he had turned to hasten away lest the sin of envy creep through his mind, when the voice of the chandler stopped him.

“Morning, Captain Josh. See you looking at that winch. I had expected you’d be in to buy that lot for the I’ll Try. You should have it. It does more work than two men aboard. Wouldn’t you like it?”

“I’d like it, all right, John,” said the skipper, “but what with bad catches and bad markets, and that fool experiment with motors, I haven’t the money, and—”

The ship-chandler laughed as if immensely amused.

“Since when has any man in Brixham town asked anything more than the word of Captain Josh? Why, you can have my shop on your word!”

“Nope,” said the veteran. “I’ll never buy anything more I can’t pay for. I’m too old now to take any chance on debts. When my time comes, those up there on the hill—you know,”—and he jerked a heavy thumb over his shoulder in the direction of his home,—“they’ll have no debts of mine to meet. Not one! Not a damned farthing!”

“I’ll risk your living to be a hundred, unless, of course, the sea gets you,” insisted the dealer; but the old mariner smiled and shook his head.

“Of course, John, it aint got me yet; but I dare say that some time it and me’ll have a tussle when I’ll come off second best. But I’ll not have the steam winch till I can pay cash for it.”

“All right! Go it, you stubborn old shell-back!” laughed the chandler; and then as Captain Josh continued his rolling, clumping way down the narrow street, smiled at his obstinacy, and discovering that his new assistant, who had but recently arrived from Bristol, was at his side said garrulously: “There he goes, white of head and clean of heart. Unbending! And I can remember, as a boy, when he was six feet two tall, and the broadest-shouldered man in all the port. Admiral of the fleet, for more than twenty years. As good a sailorman as ever cleared from Brixham. Fight as well as he can pray. One time, about twenty years ago, when he was nigh on to fifty-five, there was a free-for-all ruction down on the quay. He tried to be a peacemaker and quoted the Bible at ’em; but when that didn’t work, he sailed in; and Lord, love me, boy! He gave ’em more fight than they’d ever seen in all their lives! He made ’em sick of fightin’ in about three minutes. When he got through, they was layin’ about like dog-fish, gaspin’ and wrigglin’ like mad. All the

fight was gone out of ’em; but they do say that the language he used while things was hot indicated that for the time being he’d forgotten all the scripture ever he knew. You’re from Bristol, young fellow, but take a look at that old feller, so’s you’ll know him again, because, I tell you, you’re lookin’ at a man!”

And the new assistant, to please his employer, looked, and—smothered a derisive grin!

The ships in the harbor rocked and swayed, lifted and fell in the rhythmic upheave and downfall of the swell that pushed in and out of Torbay. They seemed a part of that splendid beauty of gray or red cliffs that reared themselves about it, a part of the sea that in lazy mood merely rippled its shores, or in sou’easterly tempests tore in fury inward as if to rip the red and gray cliffs from their foundations and obliterate the encircling earth. But the red and gray cliffs invariably won.

The ships in the harbor, ketch-rigged, red-sailed, able to live in seas where huge liners perished, were eager to be liberated from their moorings. Their crews, clumsy, awkward, inept on land, but dexterous, apt and graceful on sea-washed decks, breathed deeply, freely, once they stepped aboard the dinghies that they must row from the placidity of the inner harbor out into the surge. The battered, ugly hands, torn perpetually by the gash of rope and trawl, tarred to blackness, thick-fingered, huge-knuckled, that ashore swung aimlessly and ungainly, seemed now to be endowed with power, decision and skill. The feet that, incased in the high leather boots, stumbled over the cobbles of the village streets, now deftly adapted themselves to the roll of the sea.

The land was not their element. It was foreign. It was sometimes distasteful. It was too hard. It did not yield and sway and give. It had no life in itself. It was a dead thing that never moved and never met their tread, and when it lay inert beneath them, they sustained a subconscious distrust of its solidity. To these men who throughout all their years had been habituated to the great, comforting roll of the sea, or the petulant unrest of it when like an angry child it had stormed as if at restraint, the land was stagnant, uncomfortable, unnatural, a sullen thing without soul or spirit of its own.

The dinghies rocked and rolled and tossed when they left the pier; but in each one man sat and pulled at a heavy oar that was of feather’s weight in his time-trained hands, while another stood, faced the bow and pushed, ever keeping an eye on destination. And ever he balanced as delicately and as surely as a Circus-rider on the bare back of a horse, yielding, taking, but adroitly maintaining his mastery. The men in the boats passed comments that might sound strange to the ears of the land-accustomed. They shouted their comments. And always the interchanges were relative to the sea, for to them it was paramount.

As if each boat had mastered a puzzle of action, each came eventually to the side of a ship, and its men climbed aboard. Always, when they felt the familiar deck beneath their feet, they glanced around, their eyes sweeping over the homely objects in scrutiny of which most of their lives were passed—here the winch, there the end of the warp, here the trawl-beam with its iron heads, there the rigging that swept upward in a maze of tarred ropes and shrouds to stay the high and swaying masts. And always the final look was at the vane, that tiny thing at the peak of the mainmast, from forty to sixty feet overhead, where fluttered the gay emblem showing whether the wind was fair or foul. That was invariably the immediate solicitude, for it told the tale of toil—whether they must beat against head-winds, handling and hauling sail, straining muscles to gain way, or lounging in luxurious idleness and content when, with a fair breeze, the ship put out to sea.

Captain Joshua stood longest of all, thinking of the change. He sniffed the air, and thought he still detected the smell of gasoline.

“I can smell that damn’d stuff yet, Bill,” he growled to his mate or “second hand,” who was nearly as white-headed and sea-scarred as himself.

“It hangs on worsen gin to an old woman’s breath,” growled that worthy, who was a vociferous teetotaler and never lost an opportunity for comparison. “They aint nothin’ smells wuss’n that peetrul, unless it’s one o’ they polecats what lives around with farmers because they don’t know no better. I tell ’ee, Skipper, the Lord gives us the wind, and it bean’t natural for either men or ships to try to run on alcohol.”

“Alkerhol? Hell! They bean’t no alkerhol in that peetrol,” insisted Bob Noon, the only member of the crew who ever imbibed, and was the constant source of solicitude for the mate, who strove persistently to reform him. “It looks like gin, and it smells strong, but it aint the same at all. I knows. I tried it.”

“’Course you would! You be an unreginerate soul! Oh, I know all about you,” roared the mate. “Di’n’t I hear tell how when you was at say in them windjammers what went Hawaiian-wise, you’m got drunk on cologne-water? And aint I told ’ee, scores an scores o’ times, that you’m a—”

“S’pose us stows the gab and gets to sea,” Captain Joshua interrupted, as he had done hundreds of times before when argument threatened.

The I’ll Try cast loose her mooring. Her big mains’l crawled up, traveler hoops a-creak, block and tackle singing a shrill song. She took on way and edged out into Torbay like a maiden pretending shy modesty. Her running bowsprit was loosened, slid outward, and from it sprouted more red sails. Her mizzen spread red canvas, and above it climbed another sheet. Her trim, sharp bow lifted and fell, carelessly ripping and imperiously dividing the rash waves. But the waves joined again, and were undismayed. They chuckled when they reunited at the stern, and fell together in the boiling wake. They conspired mischievously; for in that Channel, the greatest maritime artery on the whole globe, are perhaps the moodiest of waters. Fickle as the affections of a jungle-bred lioness, playful as a lioness can be and—dangerous and savage as the lioness when crossed. On that Channel a single hour of time may change the sea from the placidity of a lake to the ferocity of a tempest.

But two days had passed since the I’ll Try sailed from Brixham in the sunshine, with the Channel all aglow with turquoise lights, and over waves that seemed playfully dancing with gladness and good will; but now she lay beaten and distracted under the shortest possible canvas, cringing as if from oft-repeated blows upon her oaken ribs. On her wet, slippery and heavily rolling and bounding deck, with tarpaulins and sou’westers dripping with driven rain and spray, every man of her crew, from skipper to cabin-boy, fought doggedly, desperately at the hand-winch. For seven hours thev had labored thus, unceasingly, until now they were too wearied and spent for speech. They laid breasts, hands or shoulders to the long bars, bent their backs, planted their feet, lowered their heads like bulls in a charge and tried again to make the weary treadmill round in the hope of hoisting the trawl. The great net, held open by a forty-foot beam and towed along the bottom of the sea floor upon “trawl-heads” that were like huge steel sled-runners, had caught what the men of the I’ll Try

surmised must be a sunken wreck. A trawl, one of the most expensive pieces of gear known to the craft, could not be abandoned until all hope was gone. Time and again had the thick warp been worked in and out, by sheer stubbornness of toil and strength; time and again as the ship swung off and lurched, the tired men hopefully thought they had felt the trawl, scores of fathoms down, yield; but time and again that hope had proved fallacious. And always, as they worked, they blinked the sweat from their eyes and lifted their anxious regard to the steadily increasing storm. A heavier blast smote the ship until she lay so far over that her lea bulwark met the water, and waves swept the length of her scuppers.

“’Vast heaving!” rumbled Captain Josh, holding an end of a long winch-bar in his hand, and the others fell heavily over the ones upon which they had been exerting themselves, to catch breath. “It’s no use,” panted the beaten old skipper. “Storm’s got so high it’s dangerous to hold on any longer. Us must bend a line on the warp, rig a buoy, cut loose, and hope to find our gear another day.”

“Aye! And they be one chance in a million for that,” growled Scruggs, the “ancient” of the ship, who having never married, having no kinfolk, living forever alone, was regarded by his fellows as a pitiable old pessimist.

“It do be the devil’s own luck!” asserted the second hand.