Old Junk

by H. M. Tomlinson

There was the Mona, Yeo's boat, below the quay wall; but I could not see her owner. The unequal stones of that wall have the weathered appearance of a natural outcrop of rock, for they were matured by the traffic of ships when America was a new yarn among sailors. They are the very stones one would choose to hear speak. Yet the light of early morning in that spacious estuary was so young and tenuous that you could suppose this heavy planet had not yet known the stains of night and evil; and the Mona, it must be remembered, is white without and egg-blue within. Such were the reflections she made, lively at anchor on the swirls of a flood-tide bright enough for the sea-bottom to have been luminous, that I felt I must find Yeo. The white houses of the village, with shining faces, were looking out to sea.

Another man, a visitor from the cities of the plains, was gazing down with appreciation at the Mona. There was that to his credit. His young wife, slight and sad, and in the dress of the promenade of a London park, was with him. She was not looking on the quickness of the lucent tide, but at the end of a parasol, which was idly marking the grits. I had seen the couple about the village for a week. He was big, ruddy, middle-aged, and lusty. His neck ran straight up into his round head, and its stiff prickles glittered like short ends of brass wire. It was easy to guess of him, without knowing him and therefore unfairly, that, if his wife actually confessed to him that she loved another man, he would not have believed her; because how was it possible for her to do that, he being what he was? His aggressive face, and his air of confident possession, the unconscious immodesty of the man because of his important success at some unimportant thing or other, seemed an offence in the ancient tranquillity of that place, where poor men acknowledged only the sea, the sun, and the winds.

I found Yeo at the end of the quay, where round the corner to seaward open out the dunes of the opposite shore of the estuary, faint with distance and their own pallor, and ending in the slender stalk of a lighthouse, always quivering at the vastness of what confronts it. Yeo was sitting on a bollard, rubbing tobacco between his palms. I told him this was the sort of morning to get the Mona out. He carefully poured the grains into the bowl of his pipe, stoppered it, glanced slowly about the brightness of the river mouth, and shook his head. This was a great surprise, and anybody who did not know Yeo would have questioned him. But it was certain he knew his business. There is not a more deceptive and difficult stretch of coast round these islands, and Yeo was born to it. He stood up, and his long black hair stirred in the breeze under the broad brim of a grey hat he insists on wearing. The soft hat and his lank hair make him womanish in profile, in spite of a body to which a blue jersey does full justice, and the sea-boots; but when he turns his face to you, with his light eyes and his dark and leathery face, you feel he is strangely masculine and wise, and must be addressed with care and not as most men. He rarely smiles when a foolish word is spoken or when he is contradicted boldly by the innocent. He spits at his feet and contemplates the sea, as though he had heard nothing.

The visitor came up, followed reluctantly by his wife. "Are you Yeo? How are you, Yeo? What about a sail? I want you to take us round to Pebblecombe."

That village is over the bar and across the bay. Yeo looked at the man, and shook his head.

"Why not?" asked the visitor sharply, as though he were addressing the reluctance of the driver of his own car.

The sailor pointed a stern finger seawards, to where the bar is shown in charts, but where all we could make out was the flashing of inconstant white lines.

"Well?" questioned the man, who glanced out there perfunctorily. "What of it?"

"Look at it," mildly insisted the sailor, speaking for the first time. "Isn't the sea like a wall?" The man's wife, who was regarding Yeo's placid face with melancholy attention, turned to her husband and placed a hand of nervous deprecation on his arm. He did not look at her.

"Oh, of course, if you don't want to go, if you don't want to go...." said the visitor, shaking his head as though at rubbish, and rising several times on his toes. "Perhaps you've a better job," he added, with an unpleasant smile.