Volume Ii Part 9 (1/2)
As for the women, they never look the thing they are reputed to be, save in fas.h.i.+on, and sometimes in beauty. A woman who goes to public meetings and makes speeches on all kinds of subjects, tough as well as doubtful, presents herself in society with the look of an old maid and the address of a shy schoolgirl. A sour kind of essayist, who finds everything wrong and nothing in its place, has a face like the full moon and looks as if she fed on cream and b.u.t.ter. A novelist who sails very near the wind, and on whom the critics are severe by principle, is as quiet as a Quakeress in her conversation and as demure as a nun in her bearing; while a writer of religious tracts has her gowns from Paris and gives small suppers out of the proceeds. The public character and the private being of almost every person in the world differ widely from each other; and the hero of history who is also the hero to his valet has yet to be found.
Some people call this difference inconsistency, and some manysidedness; to some it argues unreality, to others it is but the necessary consequence of a complex human nature, and a sign that the mind needs the rest of alternation just as much as the body. We cannot be always in the same groove, never changing our att.i.tude nor object.
Is it inconsistency or supplement, contradiction or compensation? The sterner moralists, and those whose minds dwell on tares, say the former; those who look for wheat even on the stony ground and among thorns a.s.sert the latter. Anyhow, it is certain that those who desire ideals and who like to wors.h.i.+p heroes would do well to content themselves with adoration at a long range. Distance lends enchantment, and ignorance is bliss in more cases than one. Heroism at home is something like the delicacy of Brobdingnag, or the grandiosity of Lilliput; and the undress of the domestic hearth is more favourable to personal comfort than to public glory. To keep our ideals intact we ought to keep them unknown. Our G.o.ddesses should not be seen eating beefsteaks and drinking stout; our poets are their best in print, and social small-talk does not come like truths divine mended from their tongue; our sages and philanthropists gain nothing, and may lose much, by being rashly followed to their firesides. Yet a man's good work and brave word are, in any case, part of his real self, though they may not be the whole; and even if he is not true metal all through, his gold, so far as it goes, counts for more than its alloy, and his public heroism overtops his private puerility.
_SEINE-FIs.h.i.+NG._
Few braver or hardier men are to be found in England than the Cornish fishermen. Their business, at all times hazardous, is doubly so on a coast so dangerous as theirs, where the charm of scenery is bought at the expense of security. Isolated rocks which are set up like teeth close round the jagged cliffs and far out from sh.o.r.e, cropping up at intervals anywhere between Penzance and Scilly; sunken rocks which are more perilous because more treacherous; strong currents which on the calmest day keep the sea where they flow in perpetual turmoil; a singularly tumultuous and changeable sea, where the ground-swell of the Atlantic sweeps on in long waves which break into a surf that would swamp any boat put out, even when there is not a breath of surface-wind stirring; for the most part a very narrow channel to the coves, a mere water-path as one may call it, beset by rocks which would break the boats to splinters if they were thrown against them--all these circ.u.mstances make the trade of the Cornish fishermen exceptionally dangerous; but they also make the men themselves exceptionally resolute and daring. They are true fighters with nature for food; and, like the miners, they feel when they set out to their work that they may never come back from it alive.
No man can predict what the sea will be an hour or two hence. Its character changes with each fluctuation of the tide; and a calm and halcyon lake may have become fierce and angry and tempest-tossed when the ebb turns and the flow sets in. There are times too, when a boat caught by the wind and drifted into a current would be as helpless as a cork in a mill-race; and when a whole fleet of fis.h.i.+ng-boats might be blown out to sea, with perhaps half their number capsized. But, as a rule, having learnt caution with their hardihood from the very magnitude of the dangers which surround them, these Cornish men suffer as little by s.h.i.+pwreck as do the fishermen of safer bays; and though each cove has its own sad story, and every rock its victim, the worst cases of wreck have been those of larger vessels which have mistaken lights, or steered too close in sh.o.r.e, or been lost in the fogs that are so frequent about the Land's End. Or they may have been caught by the wind and the tide and driven dead on to a lee sh.o.r.e; as so often happens in the bay between Hartland and Padstow Points.
But the more cautious the men are the less money they make; and though life is certainly more than meat, life without meat at all, or with only an insufficient quant.i.ty, is rather a miserable affair. The material well-being of the poor fellows who live in those picturesque little coves which are the delight and the despair of artists is not in a very satisfactory condition. By the law of aggregation, unification, whatever we like to call it--the law of the present day by which individuals are absorbed into bodies that work for wages for one master, instead of each man working for himself for his own hand--the independent fishermen are daily becoming fewer. Save at Whitesand Bay, where there is a 'poor man's seine' and 'a rich man's seine,' almost all the seine nets belong now to companies or partners.h.i.+ps of rich men; and in very few have the men themselves any share.
Fishermen's seines are not well regarded by the wealthy leaseholders of the cove and foresh.o.r.e; and the leaseholder has very large legal rights and powers which it would be idle to blame him for exercising.
The cots are his, and the capstan is his, and the right of landing is his; thus he can put on the screw when he wants to have things his own way, and can threaten evictions, and the withdrawal of the right to the capstan and to the landing-place, if the men will not go on his seine, but choose either a united one of their own or independent drift or trawl nets. Some, it is said, even object to the men fis.h.i.+ng at all, at any rate during the seine season; some have raised the annual rent per boat for cove rights to three or four times its old rate; and some go through a round of surly suspicion and irritating supervision during the 'bulking' days, and higgle jealously over the small share allowed to the hands in the catch. So that, on the whole, the Cornish fisherman of the smaller coves has not much to boast of beside his courage and good heart, and a st.u.r.dy independence and honesty specially noticeable.
We know of no more animated scene than seine-fis.h.i.+ng. From the first act to the last there is a quaint old-world flavour about it inexpressibly charming to people used to the prosaic life of modern cities. The 'huers' who stand on the hills watching for the first appearance of the 'school,' and who make known what they see either by signals or calling through a huge metal trumpet, the sound of which no one who has once heard it can ever forget; the smartness of the men dressing the seine-boats which carry the huge net with all its appurtenances; their quiet but eager watching for the school to come within practicable distance--that is, into sufficiently shoal water, and where the bottom is fairly level (else the fish all escape from under the net); the casting or shooting of the seine enclosing the school, and then the 'tucking' or lifting the fish from the sea to the boats--every stage is full of interest; but this last is the prettiest of all.
Imagine a moonlight night--low water at midnight--when the tucking begins. The boat cannot come up to the ordinary landing, which is only a roughly-paved causeway dipping by a gradual descent into the sea; so those who would share in the sport are fain to take the fisherman's path along the cliff and drop into the boat off the rocks. These rocks are never very safe. Even the men themselves, trained to them as they are from boyhood, sometimes slip on their slanting, broken, seaweed-covered surfaces, when, if they cannot swim and are not helped, all is over for them in this life; and for strangers they are difficult at the best of times. But on an obscurely lighted night, and after heavy rain, they are doubly risky. The incoming wave lifts the boat a few inches higher and nearer; and you must catch the exact moment and make a spring before she drifts off again with the ebb. The row across the little bay is beautiful. The grey cliffs look solemn and majestic in the pale light of the moon; the shadows are deep and unfathomable; everywhere you see black rocks standing out from the steely sea, and little lines of breakers mark the place of the sunken rocks. In the distance s.h.i.+ne the magnificent Lizard Lights, and the red and white revolving light of the terrible Wolf Rock flashes on the horizon; the moon touches the sea with silver, and the waves as they rise and fall seem like molten metal in the heavy sluggish rhythm of their flow. Only round the foot of the cliffs and about the rocks they break into spray that serves as high lights against the sombre grey and black of the landscape. You pull across to the opposite point, and then round into another smaller bay where the cliffs rise sheer, and the seine net is cast. You come into a little fleet of fis.h.i.+ng-boats set round on the outside of a circle of corks, within which is the master-boat, where all hands are a.s.sembled pulling at the net, to draw it closer. It is a stirring sight. Some dozen or more stalwart fellows are hauling on the lines with the sailors' cheery cry and the sailors'
exuberant goodwill. Every now and then the master's voice cries out 'Break! break my sons!' when they shorten hold and go over to the other side of the boat, pulling themselves gradually aslant again, till the same order of 'Break! break!' shows that their purchase is too slack. At last the net is hauled up close enough, and then the fun begins.
All the boats engaged form a close circle round the inner line of corks, which is now a little sea of silver where the imprisoned pilchards beat and flutter, producing a sound for which we have no satisfactory onomatopoetic word. In moonlight this little sea is silver; in torchlight it is of fire with varied colours flas.h.i.+ng through the redder gleams; and in the dark it is a sea of phosph.o.r.escent light, each mesh of the net, each fish, each seaweed illuminated as if traced in flame. Every one is now busy. The men dip in baskets, or maunds, expressly made for this purpose, and ladle out the quivering fish by hundreds into the boats. In a few moments they are standing leg-deep in pilchards. Every one on the spot is pressed into the service, and even a boat manned by nothing more stalwart than one or two half-sick and half-frightened women receives its orders; and 'Hold on ladies! all hands hold on to the boat,' serves to keep one of the busiest of the tucking-boats in equilibrium.
The men, for all their hearty work, are like a party of schoolboys at play. Their humour may be rough, but it is never meant to be rude; their goodwill is sincere, for they have a share, however small, in the success of the catch; and the more they tuck, the more they will have for their wives and families to live on through the winter. It is their harvest-time; and they are as jocund as harvesters proverbially are. There is no stint of volunteer labour either. Men who have been working hard all day on their own account go out at midnight to lend a hand to their mates at the seine. Even though the take is for a hard-fisted master who would count fins if he could, and who would refuse his men a head apiece if he thought his orders would be carried out, they are all honestly glad. They remember the time when a rich school was the wealth of the whole cove, and when a string of fresh pilchards would be given freely to any one coming to the cove at the time of bulking, or, as we should call it, storing.
Still, whatever of economic value there may be in this exploitation of labour, it has its mournful side in the loss of individual value which it includes. And no one can help feeling this who listens to the talk of the elder fishermen, sorrowfully comparing the old days of personal independence and generous lords.h.i.+p with the present ones of wages and a wide-awake lessees.h.i.+p, conscious of its legal rights and determined to act on them.
When all the fish have been tucked there is nothing for it but to row home again in the freshening morning air. The tide is rising now, and the moon is waning. The rocks look blacker, the grey moss-grown cliffs more solemn, more mysterious, the white surf breaking about them is higher and sharper than when you set out; and the boom of the sea thundering through cave and channel has a sound in it that makes you feel as if land and your own bed would be preferable to an open boat at the mercy of the Atlantic surges. The tide has so far risen that you can land nearer to the paved causeway than before; but even now you have to wait for the flow of the wave, then make a spring on to the black and slimy rocks, which would be creditable to trained gymnastic powers. So you go home, under the first streaks of dawn, wet through and scaly, and smelling abominably of fish dashed with a streak of tar for a richer kind of compound.
The whole place however, will smell of fish to-morrow and for many to-morrows. When the tucking-boats are brought in, then the women take their turn, and pack the pilchards in the fish-cellars or salting-houses. Here they are said to be in 'bulk,' all laid on their sides with their noses pointing outwards; layers of salt alternating with layers of fish. Their great market is Italy, where they serve as favourite Lenten fare. The Italians believe them to be smoked, and hence call them _fumados_. This word the dear thick-headed British sailor has caught up, according to his wont, and translated into 'fair maids;' and 'fair maids'--p.r.o.nounced firmads--is the popular name of salted pilchards all through Cornwall.
The pilchard fishery begins as early as June or July; but then it is further out to sea, sometimes twenty miles out. According to the old saying,
When the corn is in the shock The fish are at the rock;
harvest-time, which means from August to the end of October, being the main season for pilchard-fis.h.i.+ng in shoal-water close at home. There are some choice bits of picturesque life still left to us in faraway places where the ordinary tourist has not penetrated; but nothing is more picturesque than seine-fis.h.i.+ng in one of the wilder Cornish coves, when the tucking goes on at midnight, either by moonlight or torchlight, or only by the phosph.o.r.escent illumination of the sea itself. No artist that we can remember at this moment has yet painted it; but it is a subject which would well repay careful study and loving handling.
_THE DISCONTENTED WOMAN._
The discontented woman would seem to be becoming an unpleasantly familiar type of character. A really contented woman, thoroughly well pleased with her duties and her destiny, may almost be said to be the exception rather than the rule in these days of tumultuous revolt against all fixed conditions, and vagrant energies searching for interest in new spheres of thought and action. It seems impossible to satisfy the discontented woman by any means short of changing the whole order of nature and society for her benefit. And even then the chances are that she would get wearied of her new work, and, like Alexander, would weep for more worlds to rearrange according to her liking--with the power to take or to leave the duties she had voluntarily a.s.sumed, as she claims now the power of discarding those which have been hers from the beginning. As things are, nothing contents her; and the keynote which shall put her in harmony with existing conditions, or make her ready to bear the disagreeable burdens which she has been obliged to carry from Eve's time downward, has yet to be found. If she is unmarried, she is discontented at the want of romance in her life; her main desire is to exchange her father's house for a home of her own; her pride is pained at the prospect of being left an old maid unsought by men; and her instincts rebel at the thought that she may never know maternity, the strongest desire of the average woman.
But if she is married, the causes of her discontent are multiplied indefinitely, and where she was out of harmony with one circ.u.mstance she is now in discord with twenty. She is discontented on all sides; because her husband is not her lover, and marriage is not perpetual courts.h.i.+p; because he is so irritable that life with him is like walking among thorns if she makes the mistake of a hair's-breadth; or because he is so imperturbably good-natured that he maddens her with his stolidity, and cannot be made jealous even when she flirts before his eyes. Or she is discontented because she has so many household duties to perform--the dinner to order, the books to keep, the servants to manage; because she has not enough liberty, or because she has too much responsibility; because she has so few servants that she has to work with her own hands, or because she has so many that she is at her wit's end to find occupation for them all, not to speak of discipline and good management.