She's All the World to Me

by Sir Hall Caine

The "Jolly Herrings" was perhaps the most ludicrous and incongruous house of entertainment of which history records any veracious record. It was a very gargoyle on the fair fabric of the earth, except that it served the opposite uses of attracting rather than banishing the evil spirits about it. Thirty-five years ago it was to be found near the bottom of the narrow, crabbed little thoroughfare that winds and twists and descends to that part of the quay which overlooks the ruins of the castle. The gloomy pothouse was entered by a little porch. Two steps down led you into a room that was half parlor and half bar, and where only the fumes of tobacco-smoke were usually visible. Two more steps led you to an inner and much larger room, that was practically kitchen, living room, and room of special entertainment. This was the apartment in which the herring supper was always given. What a paradox the place was! All that belonged to the room itself was of the rudest and meanest kind. The floor was paved with stones, the walls were sparsely plastered, the ceiling was the bare wood hewn straight from the tree. But over these indications of poverty there was an extraordinary display of curious wealth. The little window behind Christian in his "elber-chair" was glazed with a rich piece of stained glass that had the Madonna and child for subject. The elbow-chair itself was of old oak deeply carved and bound with clamps of engraved brass. Bill Kisseck, who by virtue of his office sat at the opposite end of the table, occupied a small settee covered with gorgeous crimson velvet. On the mantelpiece were huddled in luxurious confusion sundry brass censers, medieval lamps, and an ivory crucifix. On the wall, and beside a piece of marble carved with a medallion, hung a skate that had been cut open to dry. A pair of bellows lay on an antique chest in the ingle. Into the mouth of the censers a bundle of pipe-lights had been methodically arranged. A ponderous silver watch hung round the arms of the crucifix, and a frying-pan was suspended in the recess of the window that was consecrated to the Madonna.

Such was the kitchen and stateroom of the "Jolly Herrings"; end no apartment ever spoke more plainly to those who had ears to hear of the character and habits of its owners. The house was kept by a woman who was thin, wrinkled, and blear-eyed; and by a man who was equally thin and no less wrinkled, but had quick, suspicious eyes, and a few spiky gray hairs about the chin that resembled the whiskers of a cat. As husband and wife this couple hold the little pot-house; but long years after the events now being narrated, it was discovered that husband and wife had both been women.

What sport! What noisy laughter! What singing and rollicking cheers! The men stood neither on the order of their coming nor their going, their sitting nor their standing. They wore their caps or not as pleased them, they sang or talked as suited them, they laughed or sneezed, they sulked or snarled, were noisy or silent precisely as the whim of the individual prescribed the Individual rule of manners. The chair at the "Jolly Herrings" was a position of more distinction than duty, and it was numbered among Christian's virtues that he had never attempted to exercise an arbitrary control over the liberties of free-born Manxmen. Jest or jeer, fun or fight, were alike free of the gathering where he presided; but everything had to be in conscience and reason, for Christian drew the line rigidly at marline-spikes and belaying pins.

Tommy-Bill-beg was there, and a fine scorn sat on his face. The reason of this was that, as a mistaken tribute to music, Jemmy Balladhoo had also been invited, and was sitting with his fiddle directly in front of the harbor-master, though that worthy disdained to take notice of the humiliating proximity. Danny Fayle was there. The lad sat quietly and meekly on a form near the door.

The supper was lifted direct on to the table from the pans and boilers that simmered on the hearth. First came the broth well loaded with barley and cabbage, but not destitute of the flavor of two sheep's heads. Then the suet pudding, round as a well-fed salmon and as long as a twenty-pound cod. After this came three legs of boiled mutton and a square block of roast beef. Last of all the frying-pan was taken from the niche of the Madonna, and two or three dozen of fresh herrings were made to frizzle and crackle and bark and sputter over the fire.

Away went the dishes, away went the cloth, an oil lamp with its open mouth—a relic, perhaps, of some monkish sanctuary of the Middle Ages—was lifted from the mantelpiece and put on the table for the receipt of customs; the censer with the spills was placed beside it, pipes emerged from the waistcoat pockets, and pots of liquor with glasses and bottles came in from the outer bar.

"Is it heavy on the beer you're going to be, Bill?" said Davy Cain.

Kisseck replied with a superior smile and the lifting up of a whisky bottle from which he had just drawn the cork.

Then came the toasts. The chairman rose, amid "Hip, hip, hooraa," to give "Life to man and death to fish." Kisseck gave "Death to the head that never wore hair," Tommy-Bill-beg responded to loud requests for "The Ladies." He reminded the company then, with some pardonable discursiveness, he said he was "terrible glad" to have the fleet around Peel, and not away in those outlandish foreign parts, Kinsale and Scotland; for when they were there he felt like the chairman's namesake, Christian, in the "Pilgrim's Progress." "And what is it he is saying in the good ould Book?" exclaimed Tommy?—"'My occipation's gone!'"