A Poor Man's House

by Stephen Sydney Reynolds

Only a yarn about a man's first wife.... If so, why did I go to bed feeling I had been privileged beyond the ordinary? Wives die every day; worn out, most of them. There came into my mind's eye with these thoughts a picture of the open sea; yet hardly a picture, for I was there in the midst of it. On the waves and low-lying clouds, and through the murk, was the glimmer of a light which, I felt, would make everything plain, did it but increase. For a moment it flickered up—and there, over the stormy sea, I saw death as a kindly illusion. I do not understand the wherefore of my little vision, nor why it made my heart give one curious great thump....

A cats' courtship beneath my window broke it off.

6

THE "MOONDAISY"

Five or six years ago, when I was ill and left Seacombe, as I thought, for good, I did not relish selling the Moondaisy. I was too fond of her. So I gave her to the two men who had asked for the first and second refusals of her, and neither of whom possessed a small sailing boat. But I reckoned without those superficial beach jealousies which overlie the essential solidarity of the fishermen. Neither man used her much. Neither man looked after her. She was a bone of contention that each feared to gnaw. While the poor little craft lay on the beach, or in the gutter above the sea-wall, the mice ate holes into her old sail and her gear was distributed half-way over Under Town.

Granfer, however, had in his cottage an old dinghy sail that fits the Moondaisy. Her yard and boom were in his linhay, the sheet and downhaul in Tony's. One oar, the tholepins, and the ballast bags have not yet been found. I bent on the sail, spliced the sheet to the boom; borrowed tholepins from Uncle Jake,[⁷] ballast bags and a mackerel line with a very rusty hook from Tony, an oar from John—and, at last, put to sea.

The wind—westerly, off land—was too puffy for making the sheet fast. I held it with one hand and tried to fish with the other. In order not to stop the way of the boat and risk losing the lead on the sea-bottom, I wore her round to lew'ard, instead of tacking to wind'ard. A squall came down, the sail gybed quickly, and the boom slewed over with a jerk, just grazing the top of my head. Had that boom been a couple of inches lower, or my head an inch or two higher.... I should have been prevented from sailing the Moondaisy home, pending recovery from a bashed skull. Everything aboard that was loose, myself included, scuttled down to lew'ard with a horrid rattle. A malicious little gush of clear green water, just flecked with foam, spurted in over the gun'l amidships. I wondered whether I could have swum far with a cracked skull: the Moondaisy's iron drop-keel would have sunk her, of course. Why I was fool enough to wear the boat round so carelessly, I don't know.

Anyhow, I wound up the mackerel line; my catch, nil. Such an occurrence makes one very respectful towards the fisherman who singlehanded can sail his boat and manage five mackerel lines at once—one on the thwart to lew'ard and one to wind'ard; a bobber on the mizzen halyard and two bobbers on poles projecting from the boat. He must keep his hands on five lines, the tiller and the sheet; his eyes on the boat's course, the sea, the weather and the luff of the sail. Probably I know rather more of the theory of sailing than he does; but, when a squall blackens the sea to wind'ard, whilst I am thinking whether to run into the wind or ease off the sheet; whilst by doing neither or both, I very nearly capsize, or else stop the boat's way and lose my mackerel leads on the bottom—he, almost without thinking, does precisely what is needful, and another mackerel is hooked long before I should have brought the boat up into the wind again.

FISHERMEN'S SKILL

The greatest charm of sailing lies in this: that it is the art of making a boat move by dodging, by taking advantage of, a score of possible dangers. Except when running before the wind, it is the capsizing-power of the wind which propels the boat. The fisherman is an artist none the less because his skill seems partly inborn; because he sails his boat airily and carelessly, yet grimly—for life and the bread and cheese of it. The 'poor fisherman' for whom appeals to charity are made, as if he were a hardworking, chance-fed, picturesque but ignorant and helpless creature, is more than a trader, more than a skilled labourer in a factory. To a peculiar extent he sells himself as well as his skill and his goods. He lives contingently on his own life.