To the lights

Captain Joshua Fairley was pulling on the thick woolen stockings that would protect his ordinary socks and his trousers-legs from the harshness and oiliness of his great sea-boots. He sat on the edge of his bed in his cottage on Brixham hillside and stared out of the window thoughtfully at the sea whose surface was nearly two hundred feet below. He felt all of his seventy-five years, as if each had hammered him and battered him, and contemplated the hard truth that after a bitter venture that had failed, he was about to start life over again.

He pulled on his short “jack boots” absent-mindedly, and then disgusted with his own mistake, jerked them off, stood them in the corner and picked up and drew on the huge and hulking ones. He crossed one leg over the other and inspected a new half-sole and muttered: “Old Gamble be the best cobbler in Brixham yet! Still doing his work. And he bean’t growlin’ at it, or at Providence, or anything else. When I went to get the boot, he was whistlin’ like one of them skylarks. So--I’ll whistle too.”

He puckered his lips beneath the white beard and mustache and tried, “Abide with Me,” which to his mind was second only to “Rock of Ages,” and reached for his faded blue jersey and pulled it over his head, still bravely trying to be melodious and cheerful.

“Father, be anything the matter witfc ’ee?” a voice hailed him as he cleared his head and touseled white hair from the clinging embrace of the knitted folds.

He appreciated, then, that for many months he had not attempted to whistle a melody, and that the mere fact that he had made such attempt was proof to other ears that he was endeavoring to put a cheerful face upon some trying predicament.

“Not a thing in the world, lass,” he declared, turning to meet the troubled eyes of his widowed daughter.

“You’re worrited,” she said, coming swiftly across to him and putting work-hardened hands on his broad, bent shoulders.

“Not too much,” he said, still making gallant pretense. “Us has still got the I’ll Try. Come here and look at her.” He pulled her over to the window set into the deep cob-walls built more than a hundred years before, and with a gnarled finger pointed through the leaded panes at the outer harbor below. “There she be. Look at her. I was a fool, Nettie, an old fool! I tried to get rich by puttin’ in they petrol motors, and hangin’ screw astarn. I thought they newfangled boats were the thing; but--it cost so much to run ’em they didn’t pay. So us has sold they engines, and had ’em hauled out, and--the I’ll Try be just the same as she was when I built her, livin’ by her sails and the winds of the Lord Almighty. Just as she was! No, not quite, because she’s got a wheel instead of the big clumsy tiller, and--I was a fool. All I should have done to her was to put in a boiler and a steam winch to handle the trawl. That was a mistake. But--there her be, waitin’ for us, all our own, and mebbe her’ll be glad to have they dirty engines out of her again. Everything considerin’,” he announced, almost triumphantly, “us be doin’ right well. Us owns this house. Us owns the I’ll Try. Us don’t owe a farthing, and us has more than nine and twenty pound in the bank to--” his voice halted, lowered a trifle, and then finished--“to start over again. Us’ll use the wind, hereafter, and make money so that when I have to quit the sea, our two nippers’ll have a fine start. A proper good start!”

She fathomed his anxieties as well as his brave dissimulation, and shook her head sadly, and stared up at him affectionately.

“Listen, lass,” he said, knowing that his pretense had failed. “After all, naught matters but the harbor lights. I doan’t mean they lights out there on Berry Head, and at the end of the breakwater, or the pier. I mean the lights that should shine for all of us when we come home from sea after all v’yages be done. Them’s the lights that count. The ones that finally brings us home. So--nothin’ else matters much to us, because us has done our best. Bean’t it so? You’m been a good darter to me! And us has got all this, and I be good for ten years more, and--” Again he stopped, scratched his white head with his fingers, seemed distracted, and worried, and ended with: “And so what the hell’s there to bother about? Tell me that!”

She was not shocked by his abrupt reversion to seaman’s speech. The turbid exclamations of his everyday life had nothing in common with his sincere convictions. As she had once warned a meddlesome but well-intentioned and well-shocked visiting curate, there was an unrecognized line of division between Captain Joshua’s faith, reverence and devoutness, and his use of words when in mental or physical action.

“His grandsons, my boys,” she stoutly asserted, “says bad things sometimes. Their gran-f’ur may be careless in front of them sometimes; but he have put great arms over they two lads shoulders at night when they all knelt, and taught them proper respect for God Almighty. That be enough! Thou could’st do no more by they lads than he--Captain Joshua! I think it’s better that ’ee go, now, and--please don’t ’ee ever come back, lest the good Lord knows thou wastest time! Such men as Captain Joshua be a lot better, I do reckon, than be you.”

That the well-meaning curate came no more did not perturb her. They say he never did.

Captain Joshua trudged down the steep and devious ways of the Overgang, with a bundle under his arm. To him the quaint roofs, the narrow street, the occasional stretches of gray stone wall were of no interest. He rolled past a wandering artist who, with easel and paints, was enraptured with a view, and under his breath grunted a derisive: “Humph! Loafin’ lout! If I could get him aboard the I’ll Try for a month, I’d make a useful man out of nothing. Playing with pretty things, he be. No use!”

He could not resist the temptation to stand in front of a ship-chandler’s show-window and stare therein at a compact steam winch scarcely larger than a sewing machine, and the brass-bound boiler beside it.

“Wish to the Lord I’d a bought you instead of that blamed motor-engine,” he thought. “The I’ll Try be one of the last ships left that has to hoist trawls by hand-winch and--great dollops, it do be hard work!”

A long, troubled sigh slipped out before he could check it, and he had turned to hasten away lest the sin of envy creep through his mind, when the voice of the chandler stopped him.

“Morning, Captain Josh. See you looking at that winch. I had expected you’d be in to buy that lot for the I’ll Try. You should have it. It does more work than two men aboard. Wouldn’t you like it?”

“I’d like it, all right, John,” said the skipper, “but what with bad catches and bad markets, and that fool experiment with motors, I haven’t the money, and--”

The ship-chandler laughed as if immensely amused.

“Since when has any man in Brixham town asked anything more than the word of Captain Josh? Why, you can have my shop on your word!”

“Nope,” said the veteran. “I’ll never buy anything more I can’t pay for. I’m too old now to take any chance on debts. When my time comes, those up there on the hill--you know,”--and he jerked a heavy thumb over his shoulder in the direction of his home,--“they’ll have no debts of mine to meet. Not one! Not a damned farthing!”

“I’ll risk your living to be a hundred, unless, of course, the sea gets you,” insisted the dealer; but the old mariner smiled and shook his head.

“Of course, John, it aint got me yet; but I dare say that some time it and me’ll have a tussle when I’ll come off second best. But I’ll not have the steam winch till I can pay cash for it.”

“All right! Go it, you stubborn old shell-back!” laughed the chandler; and then as Captain Josh continued his rolling, clumping way down the narrow street, smiled at his obstinacy, and discovering that his new assistant, who had but recently arrived from Bristol, was at his side said garrulously: “There he goes, white of head and clean of heart. Unbending! And I can remember, as a boy, when he was six feet two tall, and the broadest-shouldered man in all the port. Admiral of the fleet, for more than twenty years. As good a sailorman as ever cleared from Brixham. Fight as well as he can pray. One time, about twenty years ago, when he was nigh on to fifty-five, there was a free-for-all ruction down on the quay. He tried to be a peacemaker and quoted the Bible at ’em; but when that didn’t work, he sailed in; and Lord, love me, boy! He gave ’em more fight than they’d ever seen in all their lives! He made ’em sick of fightin’ in about three minutes. When he got through, they was layin’ about like dog-fish, gaspin’ and wrigglin’ like mad. All the fight was gone out of ’em; but they do say that the language he used while things was hot indicated that for the time being he’d forgotten all the scripture ever he knew. You’re from Bristol, young fellow, but take a look at that old feller, so’s you’ll know him again, because, I tell you, you’re lookin’ at a man!”

And the new assistant, to please his employer, looked, and--smothered a derisive grin!

The ships in the harbor rocked and swayed, lifted and fell in the rhythmic upheave and downfall of the swell that pushed in and out of Torbay. They seemed a part of that splendid beauty of gray or red cliffs that reared themselves about it, a part of the sea that in lazy mood merely rippled its shores, or in sou’easterly tempests tore in fury inward as if to rip the red and gray cliffs from their foundations and obliterate the encircling earth. But the red and gray cliffs invariably won.