“Willie told her again to come near the fire, and then up piped Nunan in his high, eager voice. She’d do there till her man came back from Portsannet, he said (they didn’t seem to doubt that he’d gone out with the boat). I remember Willie muttered, ‘Christ rest his soul for a brave man if ...’ You see, the Portsannet boat was an old Greathead boat, nearly as old as the century, fit for chopping up for kindling any time this five-and-twenty years; but ours at South Ness was a new, thirty-three-foot boat, mahogany, double-banked, self-emptying, self-righting, nearly seven hundred pounds with belts and tackle and carriage. She’d only been out twice, and there wasn’t a scratch on her blue and white. John Broadwood was cox. I knew what John thought of their chances of getting round the Spit if they were to put out; but they were so proud of the new boat that they were eager as lads to try it. Men were watch and watch about down at the boathouse, where they could see if Reuben Ward signalled from the station on the hill; but it wasn’t our day. With the wind due north, if a boat cleared Portsannet Head she cleared the Spit too. It was Portsannet’s turn, and the old boat’s....
“The men in the ‘Dotterel’ then were talking about the boat, when suddenly I heard John Broadwood say ‘Whisht!’ Lizzie stood there in the doorway, under a model of a brig in a glass case there used to be. ‘Did some of ye call?’ she said; and the men shuffled their feet and shifted about on stools and benches.—‘We told ye not to bother, Lizzie,’ Broadwood says; ‘we’ll wait on we’rsels.’—‘It must ha’ been the babe I heard,’ says Lizzie; ‘let her bring it near th’ fire, Willie.’ But the woman said again that she’d do till Osa Couper came; and Lizzie asked Nunan if he wasn’t her husband.”
* * * * *
He paused; and when in a minute he resumed again, there was the same magisterial, slightly querulous note in his voice that we had heard before—the schoolmaster’s note.
* * * * *
“Before we go further, let’s understand one another,” he said. “When I said that Nunan had a knife, I saw some of you anticipating—making ready—saying to yourselves, Ah! knives mean stabbing; never mind your comments; come to the tale and the knife!—Well, you’re wise in your day and generation, but for all that I think you’re a little wrong too. The tale’s a good deal, but the man who tells it is also something. I could show you Willie Harverson’s house, and you’d gape round for five minutes with your caps in your hands, thinking—well, goodness knows what you’d be thinking! You’ve seen ’em, perhaps, tourists, open-mouthed, in the room where somebody was born or died. To me it would always seem stupid if it weren’t so comical. Facts are neither the most interesting nor the most important things in the world—not that sort of fact. The knife was a fact, and we’re coming to the knife; but it’s a good deal like other things in life you look forward to—nothing when you get it. One of these new writers I don’t pretend to understand says there are two tragedies in life—not getting what you want, and getting it. I know I used to think that if ever I became head of a decent grammar-school ... well, I’ve been head of a grammar-school. When I’d got that I wanted something else; and so on. And here I am, back again where I was born, with grammar-schools and suchlike all behind me. Garrulous too.... But tragedy or not, there’s little satisfaction in getting things. You see, you don’t drop dead in the perfect, glorious, fit moment when you attain ’em. Life goes on, a dull, stretched-out anti-climax; and there seems to be only one finish to it all. I’m an old man, and probably nearer it than you....
“So when Lizzie asked Nunan if he wasn’t the handsome gipsy’s husband, there was John Broadwood shaking a great fist with a blue anchor on it over Lizzie’s shoulder, and Willie making foolish shapes with his mouth without a sound, and Jemmy Wild hawking in his throat and knocking his pipe out noisily; ... but Nunan popped out with it—about Osa and the guns at Portsannet, and so on—and then he spluttered out a ‘Hey! Would ye do that, man?’ You see, Willie had clapped his hand over his mouth, and there was a wicked gleam in Nunan’s eyes, and his hand went to the small of his back where the knife was; and that’s all about the knife, except that the woman told Nunan to sit still.
“But Lizzie was trembling pitifully; and when I saw her eyes go round the men I backed away behind the settle, so that somebody else might tell her. Then her head came down on her arms and thumped on the table, while Nunan sulked. We watched her broad back heaving; and then all at once she threw up her head. ‘Oh, hear it goyling down th’ chimley!’ she cried; and I saw John Broadwood biting his pipe hard; ‘Frank—Frank o’ th’ Lizzie Martin—ye were his mates, and here ye sit—he called her after me—she were Lizzie Martin afore I were—I were Lizzie Collison o’ th’ Heights——’ ...Broadwood bade her Whisht! whisht! but she went on. ‘It were a Valentine’s day, a Thursday, and he came into th’ kitchen that morning—Jess never barked when he came courting, but she’d never let him go without I took him to th’ gate——’ ...And so on, young gentlemen. Lizzie and Frank had seen the valentine from the top of the hill, on the sea below, as if on a sheet of glass. ‘Don’t, Lizzie!’ says Broadwood, choking; ‘we can’t bide to hear ye!’...
“John Broadwood was a fine, independent, self-sufficient sort of fellow, with a good deal of John Broadwood about him altogether, but he broke down. Lizzie’s eyes, wandering wildly, fell on the gipsy woman and the babe. The gipsy’s husband, for anything we knew, was in peril too; but I think it was something else that came over Lizzie—the sight of the child: I see you understand. She sobbed something;—I didn’t hear what—and the gipsy woman turned, quite unmoved, and looked at Lizzie from head to heel. ‘I see your time’s coming,’ she said, ‘and them that lives in chambers of stone need comfort; come then.’ And with that she moved the babe in the sling, and produced an old pack of cards. Strange folk....
“They say symbols are what you take them for, or else a cross might just as well be a gallows, but those cards looked very secular to me. It was a grim, cheerless power that those were a symbol of. I think Lizzie thought so too, for the sight of them seemed to bring her round a little. She knitted her fat fingers together on the gipsy’s knee and sank to the floor. ‘Nay, woman,’ she said, ‘we’ll have a surer comfort than that, you and I;’ and the woman glanced from the cards, as she cut and cut them, to Lizzie’s head on her knee, incuriously.... I went out. I’d seen one or two of the men glancing at the door, as if they’d have liked to be on the other side of it; but I just walked out. I thought I’d take a walk—to see Reuben Ward at the station.