Part 15 (2/2)
”But why shouldn't men carry creels?” I asked. ”I'm sure it is very hard work for women.”
The sailor eyed me for a moment perplexedly, and then as if it were waste of words to undertake to explain self-evident propositions, resumed,--
”He worked at it when he was a boy, with his mother; an' now he's no pride left. There's the whole village been at him to get a barrow; but he'll not do't. He's na pride aboot him.”
What an interesting addition it would be to the statistics of foods eaten by different peoples to collect the statistics of the different foods with which pride's hunger is satisfied in different countries!
Its stomach has as many and opposite standards as the human digestive apparatus. It is, like everything else, all and only a question of climate. Not a nabob anywhere who gets more daily satisfaction out of despising his neighbors than the Newhaven fishermen do out of their conscious superiority to this poor soul, who lugs his fish in a basket on his back like a woman, and has ”na pride aboot him.”
If I had had time and opportunity to probe one layer farther down in Newhaven society, no doubt I should have come upon something which even this pariah, the fish-carrying man, would scorn to be seen doing.
After the last toiling fishwife had disappeared in the distance, and the wharf and the village had quieted down into sombre stillness, I drove to ”The Peac.o.c.k,” and ate bread and milk in a room which, if it were not the very one in which Christie and her lover supped, at least looked out on the same sea they looked upon. And a very gray, ugly sea it was, too; just such an one as used to stir Christie's soul with a heat of desire to spin out into it, and show the boys she was without fear. On the stony beach below the inn a woman was spreading linen to dry. Her motions as she raised and bent, and raised and bent, over her task were graceful beyond measure. Scuds of rain-drops swept by now and then; and she would stop her work, and straightening herself into a splendid pose, with one hand on her hip, throw back her head, and sweep the whole sky with her look, uncertain whether to keep on with her labor or not; then bend again, and make greater haste than before.
As I drove out of the village I found a knot of the women gossiping at a corner. They had gathered around a young wife, who had evidently brought out her baby for the village to admire. It was dressed in very ”braw attire” for Newhaven,--snowy white, and embroidery, and blue ribbons. It was but four weeks old, and its tiny red face was nearly covered up by the fine clothes. I said to a white-haired woman in the group,--
”Do you recollect when it was all open down to the sea here,--before this second line of newer cottages was built?”
She shook her head and replied, ”I'm na so auld 's I luik; my hair it went.i.t white--” After a second's pause, and turning her eyes out to sea as she spoke, she added, ”A”t once it went.i.t white.”
A silence fell on the group, and looks were exchanged between the women. I drove away hastily, feeling as one does who has unawares stepped irreverently on a grave. Many grief-stricken queens have trod the Scottish sh.o.r.es; the centuries still keep their memory green, and their names haunt one's thoughts in every spot they knew. But more vivid to my memory than all these returns and returns the thought of the obscure fisherwoman whose hair, from a grief of which the world never heard, ”a' 't once went.i.t white.”
CHESTER STREETS.
If it be true, as some poets think, that every spot on earth is full of poetry, then it is certainly also true that each place has its own distinctive measure; an indigenous metre, so to speak, in which, and in which only, its poetry will be truly set or sung.
The more one reflects on this, in connection with the spots and places he has known best in the world, the truer it seems. Memories and impressions group themselves in subtle co-ordinations to prove it.
There are surely woods which are like stately sonnets, and others of which the truth would best be told in tender lyrics; brooks which are jocund songs, and mountains which are Odes to Immortality. Of cities and towns it is perhaps even truer than of woods and mountains; certainly, no less true. For instance, it would be a bold poet who should attempt to set pictures of Rome in any strain less solemn than the epic; and is it too strong a thing to say that only a foolish one would think of framing a Venice glimpse or memory in anything save dreamy songs, with dreamiest refrains? Endless vistas of reverie open to the imagination once entered on the road of this sort of fancy,--reveries which play strange pranks with both time and place, endow the dreamer with a sort of _post facto_ second sight, and leave him, when suddenly roused, as lost as if he had been asleep for a century. For sensations of this kind Chester is a ”hede and chefe cyte.” Simply to walk its streets is to step to time and tune of ballads; the very air about one's ears goes lilting with them; the walls ring; the gates echo; choruses rollic round corners,--ballads, always ballads, or, if not a ballad, a play, none the less lively,--a play with pageants and delightful racket.
Such are the measure and metre to-day of ”The Cyte of Legyons, that is Chestre in the marches of Englonde, towards Wales, betwegne two armes of the see, that bee named Dee and Mersee. Thys cyte in tyme of Britons was hede and chefe cyte of Venedocia, that is North Wales.
Thys cyte in Brytyshe speech bete Carthleon, Chestre in Englyshe, and Cyte of Legyons also. For there laye a wynter, the legyons that Julius Caesar sent to wyne Irlonde. And after, Claudius Caesar sent legyons out of the cyte for to wynn the Islands that bee called Orcades. Thys cyte hath plenty of cyne land, of corn, of flesh, and specyally of samon.
Thys cyte receyveth grate marchandyse and sendeth out also.
Northumbres destroyed this cyte but Elfleda Lady of Mercia bylded it again and made it mouch more.”
This is what was written of Chester, more than six hundred years ago, by one Ranulph Higden, a Chester Abbey monk,--him who wrote those old miracle plays, except for which we very like had never had such a thing as a play at all, and William Shakspeare had turned out no better than many another Stratford man.
All good Americans who reach England go to Chester. They go to see the cathedral, and to buy old Queen Anne furniture. The cathedral is very good in its way, the way of all cathedrals, and the old Queen Anne furniture is now quite well made; but it is a marvel that either cathedral or shop can long hold a person away from Chester streets.
One cannot go amiss in them; at each step he is, as it were, b.u.t.ton-holed by a gable, an arch, a pavement, a door-sill, a sign, or a gate with a story to tell. A story, indeed? A hundred, or more; and if anybody doubts them, or has by reason of old age, or over-occupation with other matters, got them confused in his mind, all he has to do is to step into a public library, which is kept in a very private way, in a by-street, by two aged Cestrian citizens and a parish boy. Here, if he can convince these venerable Cestrians of his respectability, he may go a-junketing by himself in that delicious feast of an old book, the ”Vale-Royale” of England, published in London in 1656, and written, I believe, a half-century or so earlier.
Never was any bit of country more praised than this beautiful Chester County, ”pleasant and abounding in plenteousness of all things needful and necessary for man's use, insomuch that it merited and had the name of the Vale-Royale of England.”
The old writer continues:--
”The ayr is very wholesome, insomuch that the people of the Country are seldome infected with Diseases or Sicknesses; neither do they use the help of the Physicians nothing so much as in other countries. For when any of them are sick they make him a Posset and tye a kerchief on his head, and if that will not amend him, then G.o.d be merciful to him!”
And of the river Dee,--
<script>