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$Unique_ID{bob00617}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Message From The Sea
Chapter I}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{captain
young
little
jorgan
village
name
am
come
himself
fisherman
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{}
$Log{See Captain Jorgan's Ship*0061701.scf
}
Title: (A) Message From The Sea
Author: Dickens, Charles
Chapter I
The Village
"And a mighty sing'lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the
days of my life!" said Captain Jorgan, looking up at it.
Captain Jorgan had to look high to look at it, for the village was built
sheer up the face of a steep and lofty cliff. There was no road to it, there
was no wheeled vehicle in it, there was not a level yard in it. From the
sea-beach to the cliff-top two irregular rows of white houses, placed opposite
to one another, and twisting here and there, and there and here, rose, like
the sides of a long succession of stages of crooked ladders, and you climbed
up the village or climbed down the village by the staves between, some six
feet wide or so, and made of sharp irregular stones. The old pack-saddle,
long laid aside in most parts of England as one of the appendages of its
infancy, flourished here intact. Strings of pack-horses and pack-donkeys
toiled slowly up the staves of the ladders, bearing fish, and coal, and other
such cargo as was unshipping at the pier from the dancing fleet of village
boats, and from two or three little coasting traders. As the beasts of burden
ascended laden, or descended light, they got so lost at intervals in the
floating clouds of village smoke, that they seemed to dive down some of the
village chimneys, and come to the surface again far off, high above others.
No two houses in the village were alike, in chimney, size, shape, door,
window, gable, roof-tree, anything. The sides of the ladders were musical
with water, running clear and bright. The staves were musical with the
clattering feet of the pack-horses and pack-donkeys, and the voices of the
fishermen urging them up, mingled with the voices of the fishermen's wives and
their many children. The pier was musical with the wash of the sea, the
creaking of capstans and windlasses, and the airy fluttering of little vanes
and sails. The rough, sea-bleached boulders of which the pier was made, and
the whiter boulders of the shore, were brown with drying nets. The red-brown
cliffs, richly wooded to their extremest verge, had their softened and
beautiful forms reflected in the bluest water, under the clear North
Devonshire sky of a November day without a cloud. The village itself was so
steeped in autumnal foliage, from the houses lying on the pier to the topmost
round of the topmost ladder, that one might have fancied it was out a
birds'-nesting, and was (as indeed it was) a wonderful climber. And
mentioning birds, the place was not without some music from them too; for the
rook was very busy on the higher levels, and the gull with his flapping wings
was fishing in the bay, and the lusty little robin was hopping among the great
stone blocks and iron rings of the breakwater, fearless in the faith of his
ancestors, and the Children in the Wood.
Thus it came to pass that Captain Jorgan, sitting balancing himself on
the pier-wall, struck his leg with his open hand, as some men do when they are
pleased - and as he always did when he was pleased - and said, -
"A mighty sing'lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the days
of my life!"
Captain Jorgan had not been through the village, but had come down to the
pier by a winding side-road, to have a preliminary look at it from the level
of his own natural element. He had seen many things and places, and had
stowed them all away in a shrewd intellect and a vigorous memory. He was an
American born, was Captain Jorgan, - a New Englander, - but he was a citizen
of the world, and a combination of most of the best qualities of most of its
best countries.
For Captain Jorgan to sit anywhere in his long-skirted blue coat and blue
trousers, without holding converse with everybody within speaking distance,
was a sheer impossibility. So the captain fell to talking with the fishermen,
and to asking them knowing questions about the fishery, and the tides, and the
currents, and the race of water off that point yonder, and what you kept in
your eye, and got into a line with what else when you ran into the little
harbour; and other nautical profundities. Among the men who exchanged ideas
with the Captain was a young fellow, who exactly hit his fancy, - a young
fisherman of two or three-and-twenty, in the rough seadress of his craft, with
a brown face, dark curling hair, and bright modest eyes under his Sou'wester
hat, and with a frank, but simple and retiring manner, which the Captain found
uncommonly taking. "I'd bet a thousand dollars," said the Captain to himself,
"that your father was an honest man!"
"Might you be married now?" asked the captain, when he had had some talk
with this new acquaintance.
"Not yet."
"Going to be?" said the captain.
"I hope so."
The captain's keen glance followed the slightest possible turn of the
dark eye, and the slightest possible tilt of the Sou'wester hat. The captain
then slapped both his legs, and said to himself,
"Never knew such a good thing in all my life! There's his sweetheart
looking over the wall!"
There was a very pretty girl looking over the wall, from a little
platform of cottage, vine, and fuchsia; and she certainly did not look as if
the presence of that young fisherman in the landscape made it any the less
sunny and hopeful for her.
Captain Jorgan, having doubled himself up to laugh with that hearty
good-nature which is quite exultant in the innocent happiness of other people,
had undoubled himself, and was going to start a new subject, when there
appeared coming down the lower ladders of stones, a man whom he hailed as "Tom
Pettifer, Ho!" Tom Pettifer, Ho, responded with alacrity, and in speedy course
descended on the pier.
"Afraid of a sun-stroke in England in November, Tom, that you wear your
tropical hat, strongly paid outside and paper-lined inside, here?" said the
captain, eyeing it.
"It's as well to be on the safe side, sir," replied Tom.
"Safe side!" repeated the captain, laughing. "You'd guard against a
sun-stroke, with that old hat, in an Ice Pack. Wa'al! What have you made out
at the Post Office?"
"It is the Post-office, sir."
"What's the Post-office?" said the captain.
"The name, sir. The name keeps the Post-office."
"A coincidence!" said the captain. "A lucky hit! Show me where it is.
Good-by, shipmates, for the present! I shall come and have another look at
you, afore I leave, this afternoon."
This was addressed to all there, but especially the young fisherman; so
all there acknowledged it, but especially the young fisherman. "He's a
sailor!" said one to another, as they looked after the captain moving away,
That he was; and so outspeaking was the sailor in him. that although his
dress had nothing nautical about it, with the single exception of its colour,
but was a suit of a shoregoing shape and form, too long in the sleeves and too
short in the legs, and too unaccommodating everywhere, terminating earthward
in a pair of Wellington boots, and surmounted by a tall, stiff hat, which no
mortal could have worn at sea in any wind under heaven: nevertheless, a
glimpse of his sagacious, weatherbeaten face, or his strong, brown hand, would
have established the captain's calling. Whereas Mr. Pettifer - a man of a
certain plump neatness, with a curly whisker, and elaborately nautical in a
jacket, and shoes, and all things correspondent - looked no more like a
seaman, beside Captain Jorgan, than he looked like a sea-serpent.
The two climbed high up the village, - which had the most arbitrary turns
and twists in it, so that the cobbler's house came dead across the ladder, and
to have held a reasonable course, you must have gone through his house, and
through him too, as he sat at his work between two little windows, with one
eye microscopically on the geological formation of that part of Devonshire,
and the other telescopically on the open sea, - the two climbed high up the
village, and stopped before a quaint little house, on which was painted, "Mrs.
Raybrock, Draper"; and also "Post-Office." Before it, ran a rill of murmuring
water and access to it was gained by a little plank-ridge.
"Here's the name," said Captain Jorgan, "sure enough. You can come in if
you like, Tom."
The captain opened the door, and passed into an odd little shop, about
six feet high, with a great variety of beams and bumps in the ceiling, and,
besides the principal window giving on the ladder of stones, a purblind little
window of a single pane of glass, peeping out of an abutting corner at the
sun-lighted ocean, and winking at its brightness.
"How do you do, ma'am?" said the captain. "I am very glad to see you. I
have come a long way to see you."
"Have you, sir? Then I am sure I am very glad to see you, though I don't
know you from Adam."
Thus a comely elderly woman, short of stature, plump of form, sparkling
and dark of eye, who, perfectly clean and neat herself, stood in the midst of
her perfectly clean and neat arrangements, and surveyed Captain Jorgan with
smiling curiosity. "Ah! but you are a sailor, sir," she added almost
immediately, and with a slight movement of her hands, that was not very unlike
wringing them; "then you are heartily welcome."
"Thank'ee, ma'am," said the captain. "I don't know what it is, I am
sure, that brings out the salt in me, but everybody seems to see it on the
crown of my hat and the collar of my coat. Yes, ma'am, I am in that way of
life."
"And the other gentleman, too," said Mrs. Raybrock.
"Well now, ma'am," said the captain, glancing shrewdly at the other
gentleman, "you are that nigh right, that he goes to sea, - if that makes him
a sailor. This is my steward, ma'am, Tom Pettifer; he's been a'most all
trades you could name, in the course of his life, - would have bought all your
chairs and tables once, if you had wished to sell 'em, - but now he's my
steward. My name's Jorgan, and I'm a ship-owner, and I sail my own and my
partner's ships, and have done so this five-and-twenty year. According to
custom I am called Captain Jorgan, but I am no more a captain, bless my heart!
than you are."
[See Captain Jorgan's Ship: Similar to that in which Dickens crossed to
America.]
"Perhaps you'll come into my parlour, sir, and take a chair?" said Mrs.
Raybrock.
"Ex-actly what I was going to propose myself, ma'am. After you."
Thus replying, and enjoining Tom to give an eye to the shop, Captain
Jorgan followed Mrs. Raybrock into the little, low back-room, - decorated with
divers plants in pots, tea-trays, old china teapots, and punch-bowls, which
was at once the private sitting-room of the Raybrock family and the inner
cabinet of the post-office of the village of Steepways.
"Now, ma'am," said the captain, "it don't signify a cent to you where I
was born, except - " But here the shadow of some one entering fell upon the
captain's figure, and he broke off to double himself up, slap both his legs,
and ejaculate, "Never knew such a thing in all my life! Here he is again!
How are you?"
These words referred to the young fellow who had so taken Captain
Jorgan's fancy down at the pier. To make it all quite complete he came in
accompanied by the sweetheart whom the captain had detected looking over the
wall. A prettier sweetheart the sun could not have shone upon that shining
day. As she stood before the captain, with her rosy lips just parted in
surprise, her brown eyes a little wider open than was usual from the same
cause, and her breathing a little quickened by the ascent (and possibly by
some mysterious hurry and flurry at the parlour door, in which the captain had
observed her face to be for a moment totally eclipsed by the Sou'-wester hat),
she looked so charming, that the captain felt himself under a moral obligation
to slap both his legs again. She was very simply dressed, with no other
ornament than an autumnal flower in her bosom. She wore neither hat nor
bonnet, but merely a scarf or kerchief folded squarely back over the head, to
keep the sun off, - according to a fashion that may be sometimes seen in the
more genial parts of England as well as of Italy, and which is probably the
first fashion of headdress that came into the world when grasses and leaves
went out.
"In my country," said the captain, rising to give her his chair, and
dexterously sliding it close to another chair on which the young fisherman
must necessarily establish himself, - "in my country we call Devonshire beauty
first-rate!"
Whenever a frank manner is offensive, it is because it is strained or
feigned; for there may be quite as much intolerable affectation in plainness
as mincing nicety. All that the captain said and did was honestly according
to his nature; and his nature was open nature and good nature; therefore, when
he paid this little compliment, and expressed with a sparkle or two of his
knowing eye, "I see how it is, and nothing could be better," he had
established a delicate confidence on that subject with the family.
"I was saying to your worthy mother," said the captain to the young man,
after again introducing himself by name and occupation, - "I was saying to
your mother (and you're very like her) that it didn't signify where I was
born, except that I was raised on question-asking ground, where the babies as
soon as ever they come into the world, inquire of their mothers, 'Neow, how
old may you be, and wa'at air you a goin' to name me?' - which is a fact."
Here he slapped his leg. "Such being the case, I may be excused for asking
you if your name's Alfred?"
"Yes, sir, my name is Alfred," returned the young man.
"I am not a conjurer," pursued the captain, "and don't think me so, or I
shall right soon undeceive you. Likewise don't think, if you please, though I
do come from that country of the babies, that I am asking questions for
question-asking's sake, for I am not. Somebody belonging to you went to sea?"
"My elder brother, Hugh," returned the young man. He said it in an
altered and lower voice, and glanced at his mother, who raised her hands
hurriedly, and put them together across her black gown, and looked eagerly at
the visitor.
"No! For God's sake, don't think that!" said the captain, in a solemn
way; "I bring no good tidings of him."
There was a silence, and the mother turned her face to the fire and put
her hand between it and her eyes. The young fisherman slightly motioned
toward the window, and the captain, looking in that direction, saw a young
widow, sitting at a neighbouring window across a little garden, engaged in
needle-work, with a young child sleeping on her bosom. The silence continued
until the captain asked of Alfred,
"How long is it since it happened?"
"He shipped for his last voyage better than three years ago."
"Ship struck upon some reef or rock, as I take it," said the captain,
"and all hands lost?"
"Yes."
"Wa'al!" said the captain, after a shorter silence, "here I sit who may
come to the same end, like enough. He holds the seas in the hollow of His
hand. We must all strike somewhere and go down. Our comfort, then, for
ourselves and one another is to have done our duty. I'd wager your brother
did his!"
"He did!" answered the young fisherman. "If ever man strove faithfully
on all occasions to do his duty, my brother did. My brother was not a quick
man (anything but that), but he was a faithful, true, and just man. We were
the sons of only a small tradesman in this country, sir; yet our father was as
watchful of his good name as if he had been a king."
"A precious sight more so, I hope, - bearing in mind the general run of
that class of crittur," said the captain. "But I interrupt."
"My brother considered that our father left the good name to us, to keep
clear and true."
"Your brother considered right," said the captain; "and you couldn't take
care of a better legacy. But again I interrupt."
"No; for I have nothing more to say. We know that Hugh lived well for
the good name, and we feel certain that he died well for the good name. And
now it has come into my keeping. And that's all."
"Well spoken!" cried the captain. "Well spoken, young man! Concerning
the manner of your brother's death," - by this time the captain had released
the hand he had shaken, and sat with his own broad, brown hands spread out on
his knees, and spoke aside, - "concerning the manner of your brother's death,
it may be that I have some information to give you; though it may not be, for
I am far from sure. Can we have a little talk alone?"
The young man rose; but not before the captain's quick eye had noticed
that, on the pretty sweetheart's turning to the window to greet the young
widow with a nod and wave of the hand, the young widow had held up to her the
needle-work on which she was engaged, with a patient and pleasant smile. So
the captain said, being on his legs,
"What might she be making now?"
"What is Margaret making, Kitty?" asked the young fisherman, - with one
of his arms apparently mislaid somewhere.
As Kitty only blushed in reply, the captain doubled himself up as far as
he could, standing, and said, with a slap of his leg,
"In my country we should call it wedding-clothes. Fact! We should, I do
assure you."
But it seemed to strike the captain in another light too; for his laugh
was not a long one, and he added, in quite a gentle tone,
"And it's very pretty, my dear, to see her - poor young thing, with her
fatherless child upon her bosom - giving up her thoughts to your home and your
happiness. It's very pretty, my dear, and it's very good. May your marriage
be more prosperous than hers, and be a comfort to her too. May the blessed sun
see you all happy together, in possession of the good name, long after I have
done ploughing the great salt field that is never sown!"
Kitty answered very earnestly, "Oh! Thank you, sir, with all my heart!"
And, in her loving little way, kissed her hand to him, and possibly by
implication to the young fisherman, too, as the latter held the parlour door
open for the captain to pass out.