Marjorie Read online

  CHAPTER III

  THE ALEHOUSE BY THE RIVER.

  Three years after I went to learn under Mr. Davies, of Cliff Street, myfather died.

  I remember with a kind of terror still, through all these years, whendeath of every kind has been so familiar to me, how the news of thatdeath came upon me. I had no realisation of what death meant till then.I had heard of people dying, of course; had watched the blackprocessions creeping, plumed and solemn, along the streets to thechurchyard; had noted how in any circle of friends now one and nowanother falls away and returns to earth. I knew that all must die, thatI must die myself, as I knew a lesson got by heart which has littlemeaning to the unawakened ear. But now it came on me with such astabbing knowledge that for a little while I was almost crazy with thegrief and the fear.

  But the sorrow, like all sorrows, lessened with time. There was mymother to cheer; there was my schooling to keep; there was the shop tolook after.

  My father had thriven well enough to lay by a small store, but my motherkept the shop on, partly for the sake of my father, whose pride it was,partly because it gave her something to occupy her widowed life, andpartly because, as Mr. Davies pointed out to her, there would be abusiness all ready for me when I was old enough to step into it. In themeantime my life was simple enough. When I was not taking my schoolingwith Lancelot I was tending the shop with mother; and when I was doingneither of these things I was free to wander about the town much as Ipleased.

  Our town was of a tidy size, running well back from the sea up a gentleand uneven acclivity, which made all the streets that stemmed from theborder slightly steep, and some of them exceedingly so. Upon the coastline, naturally enough, lay the busiest part of the hive; a comelystretch of ample docks and decent wharves along the frontage of thetown, and, straggling out along the horns of the harbour, a maze ofpoorer streets, fringed at the waterside with boozing-kens, low inns,sailors' lodging-houses, and crimperies of all kinds. There wereticklish places for decent folk to be found in lying to right and leftof the solemn old town--aye, and within ten minutes' walk of the solemnold market-square, where the effigy of Sir William Wallet, the goodlyand godly Mayor of many years back, smiled upon the stalls of thehucksters and the fine front of the town-hall. If you strayed but alittle way from the core of the town you came into narrow, kinkledstreets, where nets were stretched across from window to window drying;and if you persevered you came, by cobbly declivities, to the bay shore,and to all the odd places that lay along it, and all the odd people thatdwelt therein.

  Of course, with the inevitable perversity of boyhood, it was thisdegenerate quarter of the town which delighted me. I cared nothing, I amsorry to say, for the fine-fronted town-hall, nor for the solemn effigyof Sir William Wallet. I had not the least desire ever to be afunctionary of importance in the building, ever to earn the smugimmortality of such a statue. I am sorry to say the places I cared forwere those same low-lived, straggling, squalid, dangerous regions whichhung at one end of respectable little Sendennis like dirty lace upon ademure petticoat. In the early days of my acquaintance with thoseregions I must confess that I entered them with a certain degree offear and trembling; but after a while that feeling soon wore off, when Ifound that no one wanted to do me any harm. Indeed, the dwellers inthose parts were generally too much occupied in drinking themselvesdrunk and sleeping themselves sober to note an unremarkable lad like me.As for their holiday time, they passed it so largely in quarrellingsavagely, and occasionally murderously, amongst themselves that they hadscant leisure to pay any heed to me. For the rest, these Sendennis slumswere not conspicuously evil. You will find just the same places in anyseaport town, great or little, in the kingdom. But there was one spot inSendennis which I do not think that it would be easy to match in anyother town, although, perhaps to say this may be but a flash ofprovincial pride on my part.

  A good way from the town, and yet before the river fairly widens into anestuary, there stood a certain hostel, or inn, which it was my joy andmy sorrow to haunt. It stood by the water's edge in a kind of littlegarden of its own; a dreary place, where a few sickly plants tried tohold their own against neglect and the splashings of rinsed glasses.There was a wooden terrace at the back of this place--the backoverlooked the river, while the front was on the by-road--and here thehabitual revellers, the haunters, whose scored crosses lent the creakingshutters an unnatural whiteness over their weather-beaten surface, darkwith age and dirt, loved to linger of a summer evening, and ply thenoggin and fill the pipe.

  There was an old fiddler, a kind of Orpheus of the slums, who wouldsometimes creep in there and take his post in a corner and begin toplay, happy if the mad lads threw him halfpence, or thrust ahalf-drained tankard under his tearful old nose: happy, too, if they didnot--as they often did--toss the cannikin at him out of mere lightnessof heart and drunkenness of wit. He used to play the quaintest oldtunes, odd border-side ballad airs, that seemed to go apace with blithecountry weddings and decent pastoral merry-makings of all kinds, and tobe strangely out of suits with that brotherhood of rakehells, smugglers,and desperadoes who gambled and drank, and swore and quarrelled, whilethe poor old fellow worked his catgut.

  Lord, Lord, how the memory of it all comes back upon me while I write! Ihave but to close my eyes, and my fancy brings me back to that alehouseby the river, to a summer's eve with its golden shafts falling on thedingy woodwork and lending it a pathetic glory, upon the shining spaceof dwindled water in the middle of its banks of glistening mud, andthere in the corner the pinched old rogue in his ragged bodygearscraping away at 'Barbara Allen,' or 'When first I saw thy face,' or'The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington,' while the leering rascals in thepilot coats and the flap-eared caps huddled together over their filthytables, and swigged their strong drink and thumbed their greasy cardsand swore horribly in all the lingoes of Babel.

  One such summer evening surges up before me with a crimson smear acrossits sunlight. There was a Low Country fellow there, waist deep inschnapps, and a Finlander sucking strong beer like a hog. Meinheer andthe Finn came to words and blows, and I, who was sitting astride of therailing staring, heard a shrill scream from the old man and a rattle ashe dropped his fiddle, and then a flash and a red rain of blood on thetable as my Finn fell with a knife in him, the Hollander's knife,smartly pegged in between the left breast and the shoulder. I declarethat, even in my excitement at that first sight of blood drawn in feud,my boyish thought was half divided between the drunken quarrel and thepoor old fiddler, all hunched together on the ground and sobbingdry-eyed in a kind of ecstasy of fear and horror. I heard afterwardsthat he had a son knifed to his death in a seaman's brawl, and never gotover it. As for the Finn, they took him home and kept it dark, and herecovered, and may be living yet for all I know to the contrary, and aperfect pattern to the folk in Finland.

  That inn had a name, stranger I have never heard; and a sign, stranger Ihave never seen; though I have wandered far and seen more than oldUlysses in the school-book ever dreamt of. It was called the Skull andSpectacles; and if its name was at once horrible and laughable, its signwas more devilish still. For instead of any painted board, swingingpleasantly on fair days and creaking lustily on foul, there stood outover the inn door a kind of bracket, and on that bracket stood a humanskull, so parched and darkened by wind and weather that it looked morefearful than even a _caput mortuum_ has a right to look.

  On the nose of this grisly reminder of our mortality some wag--or so Isuppose, but perhaps he was a cynic--had stuck a great pair of glasslessbarnacles or goggles. It was a loathly conceit, and yet it added vastlyto the favour of the inn in the minds of those wildings that haunted it.Must I add that it did so in mine too, who should have known better? Ifit had not been for the fascination of that sign, perhaps I might havekept better company, and never done what I did do, and never writtenthis history.

  When first I happened upon the Skull and Spectacles it attracted me atonce. Its situation, in the middle of that wilderness of moulderingwharves, decaying gard
ens, and tumble-down cottages, was in itself aninvitation to the eye. Then the devilish mockery of its sign was anallurement. It looked like some fantastical tavern in a dream, and not athing of real timber.

  The oddness of the place tickled my adventurous palate, theloathsomeness of the sign gripped me hardly by the heart and made myblood run icily for an instant. Who does not recall to mind moments andplaces when he seems to have stepped out of the real living world intosome grey, uncanny land of dreams, where the very air is thick andhaunted with some quality of unknown fear and unknown oppression? So itseemed to me when I first saw the Skull and Spectacles with itsdeath's-head smirking welcome and the river mud oozing about itstimbers. But the place piqued me while it frightened me, and I pulled mycourage together like a coat, buttoned it metaphorically about me, andentered.

  Like many another enterprise upon which we enter with a beating heart,the preface was infinitely more alarming than the succeeding matter.There was no one in the bar-parlour when I entered save a sailor, whowas sleeping a drunken, stertorous sleep in a corner. From the privateparlour beyond, when I entered, a man came out, a burly seafaring man,who asked me shortly, but not uncivilly, what I wanted. I called for ajug of ale. He brought it to me without a word, together with a hunch ofbread, set them before me, and left me alone again, going into hissnuggery at the back, and drawing the door after him jealously.

  I sat there for some little time, sipping my ale and munching mybread--and indeed the ale was excellent; I have never tasted better--andlooking at the grimy wall, greasy with the rubbings of many heads andshoulders, scrawled all over with sums, whose addition seemed to havemightily perplexed the taproom arithmeticians, and defiled withinscriptions of a foul, loose-witted, waterside lubricity that made meblush and feel qualmish. But I found a furtive enjoyment in the oddplace, and the snoring sailor, and the low plashing of the estuaryagainst the decaying timbers, and the silence of solitude all around.

  Presently the door was pushed open; but before anyone could come in Iwas made to jump from my seat in a kind of terror, for a voice sang outsharply just above my head and startled me prodigiously.

  'Kiss me--kiss me--kiss me--kiss me!' the strange voice screamed out.'Kiss me on the lips and eyes and throat! kiss me on the breast! kissme--kiss me--kiss me!'

  I turned up my eyes and noted above my head what I had not seenbefore--a cage swinging from the rafters, and in it a small greenparrot, with fiery eyes that glowed like blazing rubies.

  It went rattling on at an amazing rate, adjuring its hearers to kiss iton all parts of the body with a verbal frankness that was appalling, andwith a distinctness which even pricked the misty senses of theslumberer, who peevishly turned in his sleep and stuttered out a curseat me to keep still.

  As the human voice called me back from my contemplation of that infernalold bird my lowered eyes looked on the doorway. The door was wide open,and a girl stood framed in the gap, gazing at me. Lord, how the bloodrushed into my face with wonder and delight, for I thought then that Ihad never seen anything before so beautiful! Indeed, I think now thatof that kind of beauty she was as perfect as a woman could wish to be,or a man could wish to have her. She smiled a little into my crimson,spell-bound face, wished me good-morning pleasantly, gave a kind oflittle whistle of recognition to the bird, who never left off screamingand yelling his vociferous desire for kisses, and then, swinging thedoor behind her, crossed the floor, and, passing into the parlour,disappeared from my gaze.

  Immediately the parrot's clamour came to a dead pause. The semi-wakenedsailor dropped into his sodden snooze again, and all was quiet. I waitedfor some little time with my eyes on the parlour door, but it did notopen again; and as no one came in from outside, and I needed no moreeither of drink or victual, I felt that I must needs be trudging. So Idrained my can to the black eyes of my beauty, clucked at the parrot,who merely swung one crimson eye round as if he were taking aim andglared ferociously, signed a farewell to the parlour door, and passedout into the world again. The Skull and Spectacles had gained a devotedcustomer.

  Ah, me! I went there a world of times after that. I am afraid my poormother thought me a sad rogue, for I would slip away from the shop for awhole afternoon together, on the plea of needing a walk; but my walkalways led me to that terrible inn. I soon became a familiar figure toits ill-favoured master and his beautiful niece. The landlord of theSkull and Spectacles had been a seaman in his youth, and told tales ofthe sea to guests who paid their score. He had a cadet brother who was aseaman still, and who drifted out of longshore knowledge for great gapsof time, and came back again liker to mahogany than he had been before,a thought more abundant in blasphemy, and a great deal richer in goldpieces with the heads of every king in Christendom stamped upon them.

  It was this wanderer's daughter who made the place my paradise. She wasa tall, largely made girl, of a dark favour, with eyes of black fire,and with a warm, Spanish kind of skin, olive-toned with rich reds under,and the whitest, wonderfullest teeth, and a bush of black hair that wasa marvel. She would let it down often enough, and it hung about her bodytill it reached the back of her knees. Lord knows who her mother was. Inever knew, and she said she never knew. Her father brought her homemuch as he had brought the parrot home, but I could never think otherthan that she was the child of some Spanish woman he had wooed, and, itis to be hoped, wedded, though I doubt if he were of that temper, on histravels in the South Americas.

  A very curious thing it was to watch that girl go in and out among thescoundrelly patrons of the Skull and Spectacles, listening to theirdevil's chatter in all the lingoes of earth, and yet in a kind offashion keeping them at a distance. She would bandy jokes with them ofthe coarsest kind, and yet there was not a man of all the following whowould dare to lay a rude hand on her or even to force a kiss from heragainst her will. Every man who clinked his can at that hostelry knewwell enough that her father, when he was ashore, or her uncle, when theother was afloat, would think nothing of knifing any man who insultedher.

  I need hardly say that my association with the Skull and Spectaclesgreatly increased in me my longing for the adventurous life. The men whofrequented the inn had one and all the most marvellous tales to tell.Their tales were not always commendable; they were tales of pirates, ofbuccaneers, of fortunes made in evil wise and spent in evil fashion. Butit was not so much the particulars as the generalities of their talkthat delighted me. I loved to hear of islands where the cocoa treesgrew, and where parrots of every hue under heaven squealed and screamedin the tropic heat; where girls as graceful as goddesses and as yellowas guineas wore robes of flaming feathers and sang lullabies in soft,impossible tongues; lands of coral and ivory and all the glories of theearth, where life was full of golden possibilities and a world away fromthe drab respectability of a mercer's life in grey Sendennis.

  I grew hungrier and thirstier for travel day after day. I had heard ofseamen in a shipwrecked craft suffering agonies of thirst and beingtaunted by the fields of water all about them, to drink of which wasmadness and death. I felt somewhat as if I were in like case, for thereI lived always in the neighbourhood, always in the companionship of thesea and of seafaring folk, and yet I was doomed to dwell at home anddance attendance upon the tinkling of the shop bell. But my word was myword all the same, and my love for my mother, I am glad to think, wasgreater after all than my longing to see far lands.