Some far-off touch
Of greatness, to know well I am not great.
The local house-agent anticipated no difficulty in letting Malabar Cottage, furnished, at a good weekly rental; and in due course a dreamy clergyman, with a wife who was anything but dreamy, came and saw and hired. The wide-awake wife was so interested in Eve that she forgot to settle several details which came to her mind afterwards. Her curiosity was so aroused that the special cupidity belonging to the wife of the dreamy clergyman was for the moment allayed, and she forgot to drive a hard bargain.
Moreover, Eve’s manner was not exactly encouraging to the would-be bargainer. A stupendous ignorance of the tricks of furnished house-letting, combined with a certain lofty contempt for details, acquired in Spain, where such contempt is thoroughly understood, completely baffled the clergyman’s wife. She concluded that Eve was a very stupid and ignorant girl, a poor housekeeper, and an incompetent woman of the world; and yet she was afraid of her, simply because she did not understand her. Jews, poor men’s wives, and other persons who live by haggling, have a subtle fear of those who will not haggle.
So Malabar Cottage was let; and in due time the sad day arrived when Captain Bontnor had to bid farewell to his “bits of things.” These “bits of things” were in reality bits of his life - and a human life is not so long nor so interesting an affair that we can afford lightly to break off any portion, to throw it away, or even to let it out on hire.
Captain Bontnor wandered rather disconsolately round the rooms after breakfast, and as Eve was with him he gave her a short inventory of these pieces of his life.
“That there harpoon,” he said, pointing to a rusty relic on the wall above the mantelpiece, “was given to me by the finest whaling captain that ever found his way into the North water. When I first went to sea I thought I’d like to be a whaler; but two voyages settled that fancy. I’m told they shoot their harpoons out of a gun nowadays--poor sport that! And there’s no sport like whalin’. Two thousand pounds at one end of a line and your own life at the other--that’s finer sport than these Cockney partridge-shooters know of.
“And that’s my seal-pick--many a seal have I killed with that. That there’s the portrait of the True Love, three-masted schooner, built at Littlehampton by Harvey. Sailed second mate, first mate, and master in her, I did. Then she was sold; and a lubber went and--and threw her on the Kentish Knock in a south-easterly gale. She was a pretty ship! I felt the loss as if she’d been my sweetheart--the pretty little True Love!
“That string of shells was given to me by a shipmate--old Charlie Sams--to bring home for his wife. He picked ’em up on the beach above James Town. Took yellow Jack, he did, and died in my arms--and he only had the shells to send to his young wife and a bit of a baby he was always botherin’ and talkin’ about. I did two cross voyages, and one of them round the Horn, before I got home, and I couldn’t find the woman, she having moved. So when I left the sea, I just hung them up in case she happened to come along by chance and see them with his portrait underneath. That’s Charlie Sams--a bit brown and faded. She won’t come along now, I suppose. It is a matter of fifty-five years since Charlie died.”
As he wandered round the house, so he wandered on in his reminiscences, until Eve led him out of the front door. He took his hat from the peg which he had been intending to unship and refix at a lower level for the last fifteen years, and followed her meekly into the garden. He paused to pick up some yellow jasmine leaves which had withered in the warmth of the May sun and fallen on the doorstep. Then he looked back longingly.
“You see,” said Eve cheerfully, “it is only for a few months. We can always let it in the summer like this, and live luxuriously on our rent in the winter.”