All the way into Seatown he was baffled and irritated by this little conversation. It seemed that you could not disregard people by simply determining to disregard them. All the time behind you and them some force was insisting on places being taken, connections being formed. One was simply a bally pawn...a bally pawn....
But what was his mother thinking? Had some one been talking to her? Perhaps already she knew about Annie. But what could she know? Girls like Annie were outside her ken. What could his mother know about life? The day did not help his dissatisfaction. The fog had not descended upon the town, but it had sent as its forerunner a wet sea mist, dim and intangible, depressing because it removed all beauty and did not leave even challenging ugliness in its place.
On the best of days Seatown was not beautiful. I have read in books romantic descriptions of Glebeshire coves, Glebeshire towns with the romantic Inn, the sanded floor, fishermen with gold rings in their ears and strange oaths upon their lips. In one book I remember there was a fine picture of such a place, with beautiful girls dancing and mysterious old men telling mysterious tales about ghosts and goblins, and, of course, somewhere in the distance some one was singing a chanty, and the moon was rising, and there was a nice little piece of Glebeshire dialect thrown in. All very pretty.... Seatown cannot claim such prettiness. Perhaps once long ago, when there were only the Cathedral, the Castle, the Rock, and a few cottages down by the river, when, at night-tide, strange foreign ships came up from the sea, when the woods were wild forest and the downs were bare and savage, Seatown had its romance, but that was long ago. Seatown, in these latter days, was a place of bad drainage, bad drinking, bad living and bad dying. The men who haunted its dirty, narrow little streets were loafers and idlers and castaways. The women were, most of them, no better than they should be, and the children were the most slatternly and ill-bred in the whole of Glebeshire. Small credit to the Canons and the Town Councillors and the prosperous farmers that it was so, but in their defence it might be urged that it needed a very valiant Canon and the most fearless of Town Councillors to disturb that little nest. And the time came when it was disturbed....
Even the Pol, a handsome river enough out beyond the town in the reaches of the woods, was no pretty sight at low tide when there was nothing to see but a thin, sluggish grey stream filtering through banks of mud to its destination, the sea. At high tide the river beat up against the crazy stone wall that bordered Pennicent Street; and on the further side there were green fields and a rising hill with a feathery wood to crown it. From the river, coming up through the green banks, Seatown looked picturesque, with its disordered cottages scrambling in confusion at the tail of the rock and the Cathedral and Castle nobly dominating it. That distant view is the best thing to be said for Seatown.
To-day, in the drizzling mist, the place was horribly depressing. Falk plunged down into Bridge Street as into a damp stuffy well. Here some of the houses had once been fine; there were porticoes and deep-set doors and bow-windows, making them poor relations of the handsome benevolent Georgian houses in Orange Street. The street, top-tilting down to the river, was slovenly with dirt and carelessness. Many of the windows were broken, their panes stuffed with paper; washing hung from house to house. The windows that were not broken were hermetically sealed and filled with grimy plants and ferns, and here and there a photograph of an embarrassed sailor or a smiling married couple or an overdressed young woman placed face outward to the street. Bridge Street tumbled with a dirty absent- mindedness into Pennicent Street. This, the main thoroughfare of Seatown, must have been once a handsome cobbled walk by the river-side. The houses, more than in Bridge Street, showed by their pillared doorways and their faded red brick that they had once been gentlemen's residences, with gardens, perhaps, running to the river's edge and a fine view of the meadows and woods beyond. To-day all was shrouded in a mist that was never stationary, that seemed alive in its shifting movement, revealing here a window, there a door, now a chimney-pot, now steps that seemed to lead into air, and the river, now at full tide and lapping the stone wall, seemed its drunken bewildered voice.
"Bally pawns, that's what we are," Falk muttered again. It seemed to be the logical conclusion of the thoughts that had worried him, like flies, during his walk. Some one lurched against him as he stayed for a moment to search for the inn. A hot spasm of anger rose in him, so sudden and fierce that he was frightened by it, as though he had seen his own face in a mirror. But he said nothing. "Sorry," said a voice, and shadow faded into shadow.
He found the "Dog and Pilchard" easily enough. Just beyond it the river was caught into a kind of waterfall by a ridge of stone that projected almost into mid-stream. At high tide it tumbled over this obstruction with an astonished splash and gurgle. Even when the river was at its lowest there was a dim chattering struggle at this point. Falk always connected this noise with the inn and the power or enchantment of the inn that held him--"Black Enchantment," perhaps. He was to hear that struggling chatter of the river until his dying day.
He pushed through the passage and turned to the right into the bar. A damp day like this always served Hogg's trade. The gas was lit and sizzled overhead with a noise as though it commented ironically on the fatuity of the human beings beneath it. The room was full, but most of the men-- seamen, loafers, a country man or two--crowded up to the bar. Falk crossed to a table in the corner near the window, his accustomed seat. No one seemed to notice him, but soon Hogg, stout and smiling, came over to him. No one had ever seen Samuel Hogg out of temper--no, never, not even when there had been fighting in the place and he had been compelled to eject men, by force of arms, through the doors and windows. There had not been many fights there. Men were afraid of him, in spite of his imperturbable good temper. Men said of him that he would stick at nothing, although what exactly was meant by that no one knew.
He had a good word for every one; no crime or human failing could shock him. He laughed at everything. And yet men feared him. Perhaps for that very reason. The worst sinner has some kind of standard of right and wrong. Himself he may not keep it, but he likes to see it there. "Oh, he's deep," was Seatown's verdict on Samuel Hogg, and it is certain that the late Mrs. Hogg had not been, in spite of her husband's good temper, a happy woman.
He came up to Falk now,--smiling, and asked him what he would have. "Nasty day," he said. Falk ordered his drink. Dimly through the mist and thickened air the Cathedral chimes recorded the hour. Funny how you could hear them in every nook and corner of Polchester.