A marrying man

by G. B. Stern

Gareth's eye dropped slantwise to a tin building on the quay, with the word Bethel large over its porch. And he smiled....

Men used to worship their gods more beautifully than now.

He caught sight of some heaps of pine-logs on his right, in front of the shambling line of fisher-huts that hoisted themselves so painfully half-way out of a sunken ditch; and went cautiously along the wall dropping sheer down to the slime, till he reached the broad path littered untidily by a huge crane, an old ship's-boiler, a pile of crab-pots, a rain-cask, rusty iron salvage sheds, a patch of nasturtiums flaming defiantly, blue shirts hung out to dry—jumble of domesticity and wreck-lumber. The pine-logs were oozing stickily, and gave out a pungent resinous smell in the hot sun; their sawn ends were disks of shiny pale gold against the brown encircling bark.

Gareth sat down. Behind him, the group of huts were blotched in sepia and dim greys and pools of black; shadowed always by the jutting cliff at their backs. But the gay irregular row of quayside houses and shops on the opposite side of the water were in full sunlight. With walls and roofs of vermilion beside faded orange; wine-colour, and saffron, and red picked out with green, they presented a curious illusion of some little foreign town ... striped awnings, and bright-hued syrups on the tables outside the café ... a man, skin like mahogany, gold earrings that gleamed as he pounced to snatch a kiss from a girl with vivacious eyes, and netted hair gliding down the nape of her neck; coloured cotton jacket boldly open....

Gareth rubbed his misty eyes ... murmured "Marseilles." ... With an effort abandoned word-spinning, and slipped out of his dream back to the dream-like present.

The harbour basin was now half-full, and even the trawlers had joined in the wonderful drunken dance of the incoming tide. Their masts hit and raked tipsily at the sky; little excited waves slapped at the wall of the square Georgian hotel at the corner; hotel whose chipped crown on the frontage signified haughtily that a king of England had once stayed there a night.

Cordage and canvas joined volubly with creak and strain and hum in the opera of that jolly wind-tossed morning. Presently some half-dozen small boys ran naked into the water, and swam among the boats, and leapt and splashed, and called shrilly to their comrades on the quay.... Harbour urchins, who lived always under those funny pink roofs, and saw the fisher-fleet sail out and sail home again, and saw the cargo steamers loaded and put out for a longer voyage; who paddled in the mud and sought there for treasure when the water was low, and dived shouting from the wall when the water was high; who paid no heed to the yearly influx of strangers; and never looked at the shrine on the hill—so well they knew it was there....

Harbour urchins.

Gareth watched them, idly. It struck him that one of the band was perceptibly less daring than his companions, and had continually to be urged and mocked out of the shallows.

Odd, for a child to be afraid of water, brought up with the sound of water all day long in his ears, sight of water all day long before his eyes.... Something far deeper and more elemental must account for the shrinking, in this instance, than the mere dread of unfamiliarity which so often besets the land-child.... Something which, for want of better knowledge, is called instinctive....