Mr. Hawker, as has been already intimated, was rather peculiar in his dress. At first, soon after his induction to Morwenstow, he wore his cassock; but in time abandoned this inconvenient garb, in which he found it impossible to scramble about his cliffs. He then adopted a claret-coloured coat, with long tails. He had the greatest aversion to anything black: the only black things he would wear were his boots. These claret-coloured coats would button over the breast, but were generally worn open, displaying beneath a knitted blue fisherman’s jersey. At his side, just where the Lord’s side was pierced, a little red cross was woven into the jersey. He wore fishing-boots reaching above his knee.
The claret-coloured cassock coats, when worn out, were given to his servant-maids, who wore them as morning-dresses when going about their dirty work.
“See there! the parson is washing potatoes!” or, “See there! the parson is feeding the pigs!” would be exclaimed by villagers, as they saw his servant girls engaged on their work, in their master’s coats.
At first he went about in a college cap; but this speedily made way for a pink or plum-coloured beaver hat without a brim, the colour of which rapidly faded to a tint of pink, the blue having disappeared. When he put on coat, jersey or hat he wore it till it was worn out: he had no best suit.
Once he had to go to Hartland, to the funeral of a relative. On the way he had an accident—his carriage upset, and he was thrown out. When he arrived at Hartland, his relations condoled with him on his upset. “Do, Hawker, let me find you a new hat: in your fall you have knocked the brim off yours,” said one.
“My dear ——,” he answered, “priests of the Holy Eastern Church wear no brims to their hats; and I wear none, to testify the connection of the Cornish Church with the East, before ever Augustine set foot in Kent.” And he attended the funeral in his brimless hat. He wore one of these peculiar coloured hats, bleached almost white, at the funeral of his first wife, in 1863, and could hardly be persuaded to allow the narrowest possible band of black crape to be pinned round it.
The pink hats were, however, abandoned, partly because they would not keep their colour; and a priest’s wide-awake, claret-coloured like the coat, was adopted in its place.
“My coat,” said he, when asked by a lady why he wore one of such a cut and colour, “my coat is that of an Armenian archimandrite.” But this he said only from his love of hoaxing persons who asked him impertinent questions.
When Mr. Hawker went up to London to be married the second time, he lost his hat, which was carried away by the wind as he looked out of the window of the train, to become, perhaps, an inmate of a provincial museum as a curiosity. He arrived hatless in town after dark. He tied a large crimson silk handkerchief over his head, and thus attired paced up and down the street for two hours before his lodging, in great excitement at the thought of the change in his prospects which would dawn with the morrow. I must leave to the imagination of the reader the perplexity of the policeman at the corner over the extraordinary figure in claret-coloured clerical coat, wading-boots up to his hips, blue knitted jersey, and red handkerchief bound round his head. His gloves were crimson. He wore these in church as well as elsewhere.
In the dark chancel, lighted only dimly through the stained east window, hidden behind a close-grated screen, the vicar was invisible when performing the service, till, having shouted “Thomas,” in a voice of thunder, two blood-red hands were thrust through the screen, with offertory bags, in which alms were to be collected by the churchwarden who answered the familiar call. Or, the first appearance of the vicar took place after the Nicene Creed, when a crimson hand was seen gliding up the banister of the pulpit, to be followed by his body, painfully worming its way through an aperture in the screen, measuring sixteen inches only; “the camel getting at length through the eye of the needle,” as Mr. Hawker called the proceeding.