Mrs Pinn has put aside her respectful defiance, has ceased addressing me as sir, and turns out to be a most jolly old woman, possessed of any amount of laughing camaraderie. She frankly explains the change thus: "I used to think yu was reeligious. Yu du look a bit like a passon [parson] sometimes. Do 'ee know 't?—No, not now; be blow'd if yu du! Yu'm so wicked as the rest of 'em, I believe, but yu ben't like they ol' passons. I'll 'llow yu'm better'n they." My own recollection, however, runs back to the evening when she brought her damped-down washing round, and I turned the mangle for her. It is hardish work. 'Tis a wonder how she, an old woman, can do it when, if births are scarce, she is reduced to taking in washing for a week or two. Tony calls her the Tough Old Stick. Excellent name! I can picture her in her cottage up on land, bringing up her long family with much shouting, much hard common sense, some swearing and a deal of useful prejudice. Now, in her second youth—not second childhood—she is mainly a lace-worker and midwife. One night, Tony and myself broke into her cottage, locked the door behind us and helped ourselves to what supper we could find—which was pickled beetroot and raw eggs. Grannie Pinn climbed in upon us through the little window, and afterwards, to gain breath, she sat down to her lace pillow. Her dexterity was marvellous. She threw the bobbins about. I could not follow them with my eyes. She makes stock patterns only; refuses to be taught fresh patterns at her time of life, and cannot read them up for herself because she has never learned to read. The butterfly is her masterpiece. Working from early morning till evening's gossip-time, she can earn no less than nine pennies a day. What the lace-selling shop makes out of her, the lace-selling shop does not state.
As a midwife, no doubt, she earns more. She must be full of tonic sayings. I am told that when her patients are dying, she takes away the pillow 'so that they can die more proper like,' and also in order that they may get the dying over quicker. What scenes the Tough Old Stick have must been present at! Yet she is spryer by far than those who keep clear of tragedy. When I ask her to tell me truly how many patients she has killed off in her professional career, her eyes glitter and she bursts out: "Aw, yu! What chake yu got, to be sure!"
She has her share of professional pride, but nevertheless I should like to know how many corpses she really has laid out for burial—and what she thought the while.
Usually she comes in just before supper-time:
"Ain't yu gone yet? I know; yu got some mark or other to Seacombe. Come on! which o' the young ladies is't? Out wi' it! Which on 'em is't?" When I tell her that she is the best girl in Seacombe and that I won't give her the chuck until she finds me a mark as youthful as herself and a hundred times as rich, she says:
"Then yu'm done! her won't hae nort still, 'cause I an't got nort, an' a hundred times nort be nothing—he-he-he! I knaws thiccy."
The jokes, 'tis true, are poor. But the Tough Old Stick's enjoyment franks them all. You may fling a stinging fact in her face; tell her, if you like, that she could find plenty of marks for herself because, being old, she will have to die soon and then the poor fellow would be free again. "I know't!" she says, and flings you back another stinging fact. Admirable Old Stick! She never flinches at a fact, howsoever grisly it be.
Above all, she revels in a little mild blasphemy; hardly blasphemy—imaginary details, say, about hell, in the manner of Mark Twain. "Aw, my dear soul!" she exclaims. "How yu du go on! Aw, my dear soul! Yu'm going to hell, sure 'nuff yu be!"
AGNOSTICISM
But her horror is only a pretence. She does not take such matters seriously. Indeed, few things have surprised me so much as the thoroughgoing agnosticism that prevails here. Uncle Jake is the religious member of the Widger family. For the rest, religion is the business of the clergy who are paid for it and of those who take it up as a hobby, including the impertinent persons who thrust hell-fire tracts upon the fisherfolk. "Us can't 'spect to know nort about it," says Tony. "'Tain't no business o' ours. May be as they says; may be not. It don't matter, that I sees. 'Twill be all the same in a hunderd years' time when we'm a-grinning up at the daisy roots."