24
LUSCOMBE
I have been up the coast to have dinner and a chat with my old coastguard friend, Ned Luscombe, the man who taught me knots and splices during the night watches when I was a visitor here years ago. To go to his house now is very pleasant. For a long time after their first baby died on the day they entered a new house, before even the beds were up, it seemed as if Mrs Luscombe, a gentle, delicate woman, 'with the deuce of a will of her own,' Luscombe says, was going to decline and die too. The new baby, which was to have killed her, has put new life into her instead. They are touchingly proud of it, and very happy altogether. I do like to see married couples happy.
Luscombe himself is rather an extraordinary man; short, vivacious and solid; full of generous impulses, yet very well able to look after his own interests. It was he who dared the neighbourhood, and caused his wife to invite often to their house a crippled girl that had been raped by a scoundrel and then given the cold-shoulder by everyone else. Something of a sea-lawyer, he is one of the sharpest-brained—I don't say deepest-thinking—men I have ever come across. Hardly educated at all as a boy, he races through books (he read my Cary's Dante in a week), extracts the main gist of them, and is always learning some new thing, from shorthand to cooking, though he has no need to do much but behave himself for a pension. Almost harshly honest, he yet brings out with pride a large edition of Pope that he 'nicked' from the second-hand bookstall of a heathen Chinee at Singapore. That little episode will not make a very big blot, I imagine, on the Book of Judgment. If I remember aright, the British Navy was then occupied in protecting land or concessions that the nation itself had 'nicked' from the heathen.
Luscombe's opinion on books, men and things, unless it has been borrowed from a newspaper, is always well worth hearing. His light of nature, by which he judges, is exceptionally powerful.
While we were smoking in his front room—furnished with a curious mixture of cheap English things and beautiful Eastern curios—a steward from one of the great liners came in. He began talking about the behaviour in a gale of a rich snobbish Jew and the behaviour of Jews generally on shipboard, and was inclined to take up the high, superior, patriotic attitude that Jews, not being Englishmen, were necessarily a nuisance in a storm. "Well," said Luscombe, "all I know is, when a man tells me he's never been afraid of anything anywhere, I tells him to his face, 'You'm a damn'd liar!' One day, in a pub at Plymouth, there was a man—a bluejacket too—boasting he'd never known what fear was, and I up and asked him, 'Eh, chum? Did you say Never?'
"'Never!' he says. 'Never in me life!'
"'You'm a liar then,' says I.
"'We'll see,' says he—goodish-sized chap.
"'You'm a bloody liar,' says I, 'and what's more, you ain't truthful.'