The harbour smells at low water, and the town children yell and scream, and it isn’t poetical then. So Ariadne and I like to go away on the Scaur and put our fingers in anemones’ mouths, and pop seaweed purses, and pretend we are lovers cut off by the tide, as they are in novels. In the afternoons when the harbour is full we sit on the mound above the Khyber Pass, and watch the water filling up the hole between the opposite cliff and the cliff ladder. It is all quite quiet then. We don’t hear any town cries, for the children that make the noise are turned out of their playground, and their mothers out of their good drying-ground, and the boats begin to go out of the harbour in a long, soft, slow procession—
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill.
I am sure Tennyson meant Whitby when he wrote that.
One night we could not sleep because the woman next door had had her “man” drowned, and cried and moaned for hours. He was a fisherman, and we had seen his boat go out third in the row the day before. He is supposed to have fallen overboard in the night? Next day, Mother went in and gave her five shillings and she stopped crying.
Mr. Aix had a try to paint the view in front of our windows. At least he said there was no such thing in nature as a “view,” and left out the Church and the Abbey, because they “conventionalized” things so. He belongs, he said, to the Impressionist School, if any. He got quite excited about his drawing, and at last went and borrowed a station truck to sit on; it raised him a little. One day a chance lady sat down on one of the handles, and over he went. It served him right for leaving out the two best things in Whitby.
When George came, Ariadne and I used to take turns to go and lunch with him at his breakfast, where we had French cookery. There were leathery omelets that bounced up like the stick in the boys’ game when you touched the end of them with a spoon, and fillets that you wouldn’t have condescended to have for a pillow, but still, it was French.
We were dressed nicely and took our clean gloves in our hands, and George wasn’t ashamed of us, and introduced us to his friends. Lady Fylingdales’ Mr. Sidney Robinson said I was like George—that I had his nose. I went to bed that night with a clothes-peg out of the yard on it, to improve its shape. But the old lady was half blind, and all made of manner. I also saw the Lord Aunt Gerty might have led astray, and he hadn’t a manner of any sort, and his nose wanted to run away with his chin.
George had no fault whatever to find with the arrangements Mother had made for his comfort, and he told her so, the first time he saw her, in Baxter Gate, coming out of the Post Office. The first place George flies to in a town is the Post Office, to send telegrams. He corresponds entirely by telegram with some people; he says it is paying five-pence more for the privilege of saying less. We had been shopping. George spotted us, and Mother thought he had rather not be recognized, but he was good that day and he actually left Mr. Sidney Robinson—a commoner, married to a countess, and that exactly describes him, Aunt Gerty says—to say a word to his own wife. It was market day, and we had bought several things in the Hall across the water. A pound of blackberries and a cream cheese, and a chicken and a cabbage, each from a different old woman with a covered basket. Mother had a net and I a basket to put them in. I was glad that George did not offer to “relieve” us of them, like the young men Aunt Gerty picks up here; but he stopped and talked to us quite nicely for a long time. He and Mother seemed to have a great deal to say to each other, and the basket-handle began to cut my arm in half. Also it was a very hot day. George had on a white linen suit, and a straw hat from Panama. He looked quite cool, and like Lohengrin or the Baker’s man. Mother didn’t. She looked hot. I touched her elbow, not so much because of my arm that ached, but because she looked like that, nor did I think it looks well to stand talking in the street to gentlemen, even if it is your own husband.
“Well, George,” she said, taking my hint at once, “we must be going on. The butter is melting and the chicken grilling and the cabbage wilting while I stand here talking to you.”
“Charming!” said George, but he wasn’t thinking of us, but of Mr. Robinson, who was champing a few yards away. We said “Good-bye” without shaking hands. George, I think, might have lifted his hat. I have read of fine gentlemen who lifted their hat to an apple-woman, let alone their wife and child.