all day but sit here and talk.
The harbour lies below me, with, on the far side, one long
granite wall stretching out into the sea, with a curve outwards at
the end of it, in the middle of which is a lighthouse. A heavy
seawall runs along outside of it. On the near side, the seawall
makes an elbow crooked inversely, and its end too has a lighthouse.
Between the two piers there is a narrow opening into the harbour,
which then suddenly widens.
It is nice at high water, but when the tide is out it shoals
away to nothing, and there is merely the stream of the Esk, running
between banks of sand, with rocks here and there. Outside the
harbour on this side there rises for about half a mile a great
reef, the sharp of which runs straight out from behind the south
lighthouse. At the end of it is a buoy with a bell, which swings in
bad weather, and sends in a mournful sound on the wind.
They have a legend here that when a ship is lost bells are heard
out at sea. I must ask the old man about this. He is coming this
way …
He is a funny old man. He must be awfully old, for his face is
gnarled and twisted like the bark of a tree. He tells me that he is
nearly a hundred, and that he was a sailor in the Greenland fishing
fleet when Waterloo was fought. He is, I am afraid, a very
sceptical person, for when I asked him about the bells at sea and
the White Lady at the abbey he said very brusquely,
"I wouldn't fash masel' about them, miss. Them things be all
wore out. Mind, I don't say that they never was, but I do say that
they wasn't in my time. They be all very well for comers and
trippers, an' the like, but not for a nice young lady like you.
Them feet-folks from York and Leeds that be always eatin'cured
herrin's and drinkin' tea an' lookin' out to buy cheap jet would
creed aught. I wonder masel' who'd be bothered tellin' lies to
them, even the newspapers, which is full of fool-talk."
I thought he would be a good person to learn interesting things
from, so I asked him if he would mind telling me something aboutfrom, so I asked him if he would mind telling me something about
the whale fishing in the old days. He was just settling himself to
begin when the clock struck six, whereupon he laboured to get up,
and said,
"I must gang ageeanwards home now, miss. My granddaughter
doesn't like to be kept waitin' when the tea is ready, for it takes
me time to crammle aboon the grees, for there be a many of `em, and
miss, I lack belly-timber sairly by the clock."
He hobbled away, and I could see him hurrying, as well as he
could, down the steps. The steps are a great feature on the place.
They lead from the town to the church, there are hundreds of them,
I do not know how many, and they wind up in a delicate curve. The
slope is so gentle that a horse could easily walk up and down them.
I think they must originally have had something to do with the
abbey. I shall go home too. Lucy went out, visiting with her
mother, and as they were only duty calls, I did not go.
1 August.—I came up here an hour ago with Lucy, and we had a
most interesting talk with my old friend and the two others who
always come and join him. He is evidently the Sir Oracle of them,
and I should think must have been in his time a most dictatorial
person.
He will not admit anything, and down faces everybody. If he
can't out-argue them he bullies them, and then takes their silence
for agreement with his views.
Lucy was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock. She has
got a beautiful colour since she has been here.
I noticed that the old men did not lose any time in coming and
sitting near her when we sat down. She is so sweet with old people,
I think they all fell in love with her on the spot. Even my old man
succumbed and did not contradict her, but gave me double share
instead. I got him on the subject of the legends , and he went off
at once into a sort of sermon. I must try to remember it and put it
down.
"It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel, that's what it be
and nowt else. These bans an' wafts an' boh-ghosts an' bar-guestsand nowt else. These bans an' wafts an' boh-ghosts an' bar-guests
an' bogles an' all anent them is only fit to set bairns an' dizzy
women a'belderin'. They be nowt but air-blebs. They, an' all grims
an' signs an' warnin's, be all invented by parsons an' illsome
berk-bodies an' railway touters to skeer an' scunner hafflin's, an'
to get folks to do somethin' that they don't other incline to. It
makes me ireful to think o' them. Why, it's them that, not content
with printin' lies on paper an' preachin' them ou t of pulpits,
does want to be cuttin' them on the tombstones. Look here all
around you in what airt ye will. All them steans, holdin' up their
heads as well as they can out of their pride, is acant, simply
tumblin' down with the weight o' the lies wrote on them, `Here lies
the body' or `Sacred to the memory' wrote on all of them, an' yet
in nigh half of them there bean't no bodies at all, an' the
memories of them bean't cared a pinch of snuff about, much less
sacred. Lies all of them, nothin' but lies of one kind or another!
My gog, but it'll be a quare scowderment at the Day of Judgment
when they come tumblin' up in their death-sarks, all jouped
together an' trying' to drag their tombsteans with them to prove
how good they was, some of them trimmlin' an' dithering, with their
hands that dozzened an' slippery from lyin' in the sea that they
can't even keep their gurp o' them."
I could see from the old fellow's self-satisfied air and the way
in which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he
was "showing off," so I put in a word to keep him going.
"Oh, Mr. Swales, you can't be serious. Surely these tombstones
are not all wrong?"
"Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin' where
they make out the people too good, for there be folk that do think
a balm-bowl be like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole
thing be only lies. Now look you here. You come here a stranger,
an' you see this kirkgarth."
I nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did not