"Then I broked down, an' I said they was bruised ones what I'd a-took. Father, he wer working to Mr Cloade's then, fishing being bad, an' the master called he. He walloped me—walloped me with a rope's end. An' I swore as I'd never go back no more, an' I didn't. Every time Father tried to make me, I up an' said as I'd go to sea.
OUT DRIFTING ALL NIGHT
"Ay! for all I'm a man now, I 'ouldn't like to work like I did then—more'n a man's work an' less'n a boy's pay, an' hardly a penny for meself. I tells John he don't know what 'tis to work like I did then. I'ouldn't du it no more."
But, with his father's boat, Tony did work far harder—hooking mackerel at dawn, in with a catch and out to sea again, or up on land hawking them round; out drifting all night; crabbing, lobster-potting, shrimping,[4] wrinkling,[5] or taking out frights,[6] wet and dry, rough and calm, day and night. "Aye, an' I be suffering from it now. Thees yer bellyache what thins me every summer an' wears a fellow out, don't come from nothing but tearing about then. I wer al'ays on the tear, day an' night, in from sea to meals an' out again 'fore I'd had time to bolt down two mouthfuls. Often I wer so tired that Father'd hae to call me a dozen times afore I cude wake up, an' then I'd cry, cry, if I wer ten minutes laate to work—when I had summut to du on land, that was. Half the day I wer more asleep than awake, wi' bein' out fishing all night. But I didn' let 'em see it. Not I! Rather'n that, I'd go up to the closet an' catch off there for five minutes, before they shude see I wern't fit to du me work. An' I never had nort o' me own for years, for all I done. Whether I earned two pound, or thirty shillings, or nothing at all, I never had so much as a penny for pocket-money, to call me own. I had to take it all in house—aye! an' tips too, when I got 'em. Father, he wern't doing much then, an' ther were seven younger'n me. That's where my earnings went. An' me, as did the work, was wearing Mother's boots an' Father's jacket."
When Tony was indisputably grown up, one half of what he earned went, according to custom, to the boat-owner, in this case his father, frequently had be thu to pay for repairs and new gear. That went on for years after he was married—'hauling an' rowing an' slaving an' pulling me guts out wi't!'—until, in fact, the present Mrs Widger insisted on his buying boats of his own.
THE DEAD NOT WHOLLY SO
Our talk shifted to Tony's first wife, who died (and Tony almost died too) as the result of the landlord's taking up the drains, and leaving them open, in the height of a hot summer. Tony told me about her people and her native place, a fishing village along the coast. He showed me photographs of her, and a framed, pathetically ugly, imitation cameo memorial, which is getting very dirty now. I knew he loved her very much. He nearly went out of his mind when she died, leaving him with four young children. The untidy little kitchen, with its bright fire, its deep shadows and its white clothes hung along the line; Tony's drooping figure, bent over the hearth in an old blue guernsey: the contrasting redness of his face, and the beam of light from a cracked lamp-shade falling across his wet, memory-stuck blue eyes.... The kitchen seemed full of the presence of the long-dead woman whom Tony was still grieving for in some underpart of his mind. "Iss, her was a nice woman," he said, "a gude wife to me; a gude wife: I hadn't no complaint to make against she."
The one shabby sentence hit into me all his sorrow, that which remains and that which has sunk into time.
The Mrs Widger that is, returned from the Dutch auction with an elaborate badly-plated cruet. "Al'ays using up my saxpinces what I has to slave for," said Tony.