CHAPTER XXI

THE FOX AND FIDDLE

Three dirty children with blue eyes, fair locks, and round, chubby faces, deepened by a warm peach-like tint beneath the skin, such as are to be seen in plenty along our southern seaboard, were busily engaged building a grotto of shells opposite their home, at the exact spot where its construction was most in the way of pedestrians passing through the narrow ill-paved street. Their shrill cries and blooming looks denoted the salubrious influence of sea air, while their nationality was sufficiently attested by the vigour with which the eldest, a young lady less than ten years of age, called out “Frenchie! Frenchie! Froggie! Froggie!” after a foreign-looking man with a pale face and dark eyes, who stepped over the low half-door that restrained her infant brothers and sisters from rolling out into the gutter, as if he was habitually a resident in the house. He appeared, indeed, a favourite with the children, for while they recalled him to assist their labours, which he did with a good-nature and address peculiarly winning to architects of that age, they chanted in his praise, and obviously with the intention of doing him high honour, a ditty of no particular tune, detailing the matrimonial adventures of an amphibious animal, supposed in the last century to bear close affinity to all Frenchmen, as related with a remarkable chorus by one Anthony Rowley; and the obliging foreigner, suspecting neither sarcasm nor insult, but only suffering torture from an utter absence of tune, hummed lustily in accompaniment.

Over the heads of these urchins hung their paternal sign-board, creaking and swinging in the breeze now freshening with an incoming tide. Its representation of a fox playing the fiddle was familiar to seafaring men as indicating a favourite house of call for the consumption of beer, tobacco, and that seductive compound known to several generations by the popular name of punch.

The cheerful fire, the red curtains, the sanded floor, the wooden chairs, and liberal measures of their jovial haunt, had been present to the mind’s eye of many an honest tar clinging wet and cold to a slippery yard, reefing topsails in a nor’-wester, or eating maggoty biscuit and sipping six-water grog, on half rations, homeward bound with a headwind, but probably none of them had ever speculated on the origin of the sign they knew so well and thought of so often. Why a fox and fiddle should be found together in a seaport town, what a fox had to do with a fiddle, or, however appropriate to their ideas of jollity the instrument might appear, wherefore its player should be represented as the cunning animal whom destiny had already condemned to be hunted by English country gentlemen, was a speculation on which they had no wish to embark. Neither have I. It is enough to know that the Fox and Fiddle sold loaded beer, strong tobacco, and scalding punch, to an extent not even limited by the consumer’s purse; for when Jack had spent all his _rhino_, the landlord’s liberality enabled him to run up a score, hereafter to be liquidated from the wages of a future voyage. The infatuated debtor, paying something like two hundred _per cent._ on every mouthful for this accommodation, by a farther arrangement, that he should engage with any skipper of the landlord’s providing, literally sold himself, body and soul, for a nipperkin of rum and half-a-pound of tobacco.

Nevertheless, several score of the boldest hearts and readiest hands in England were to be bought at this low price, and Butter-faced Bob, as his rough-spoken customers called the owner of the Fox and Fiddle, would furnish as many of them at a reasonable tariff, merchant and man-of-war’s men, as the captain wanted or the owners could afford to buy. It was no wonder his children had strong lungs, and round, well-fed cheeks.

“That’s a good chap!” observed a deep hoarse voice, which made the youngest grotto-builder start and shrink behind its sister, while a broad elderly figure rolled and lurched after the obliging foreigner into the house. It would have been as impossible to mistake the new-comer for a landsman as Butter-faced Bob himself for anything but a publican. His gait on the pavement was that of one who had so thoroughly got his _sea-legs_ that he was, to the last degree, incommoded by the uneven though stable surface of the shore; and while he trod the passage, as being planked, with more confidence, he nevertheless ran his hand, like a blind man, along tables and other articles of furniture while he passed them, seeming, in every gesture, to be more ready with his arms than his legs.

Broad-faced, broad-shouldered, broad-handed, he looked a powerful, and at the same time a strong-constitutioned man, but grizzled hair and shaggy eyebrows denoted he was past his prime; while a reddened neck and tanned face, with innumerable little wrinkles round the eyes, suggested constant watchfulness and exposure in hard weather afloat, no less than swollen features and marked lines told of deep drinking and riotous living ashore.

The seamen of that period, though possessing an undoubted claim to the title, were far more than to-day a class distinct and apart from their fellow-countrymen. The standing army, an institution of which our parliaments had for generations shown themselves so jealous, could boast, indeed, a consolidation and discipline under Marlborough which made them, as the Musketeers of the French king allowed, second to no troops in Europe. But their triumphs, their organisation, even their existence, was comparatively of recent date. The navy, on the other hand, had been a recognised and constitutional force for more than a century, and had enjoyed, from the dispersion of the Spanish Armada downwards, a series of successes almost uninterrupted. It is true that the cannonade of a Dutch fleet had been heard in the Thames, but few of the lowest seamen were so ignorant as to attribute this national disgrace to want of courage in their officers or incapacity in themselves.

Their leaders, indeed, were usually more remarkable for valour than discretion, nor was this surprising under the system by which captains were appointed to their ships.

A regiment and a three-decker were considered by the Government equivalent and convertible commands. The cavalry officer of to-day might find himself directing the manœuvres of a fleet to-morrow. The relics of so untoward an arrangement may be detected in certain technical phrases not yet out of use. The word “squadron” is even now applied alike to a handful of horse and a powerful fleet, numbering perhaps a dozen sail of the line. Raleigh, himself, began his fighting career as a soldier, and Rupert finished his as a sailor.

With such want of seamanship, therefore, amongst its commanders, our navy must have possessed in its construction some great preponderating influence to account for its efficiency. This compensating power was to be found in its masters, its petty-officers, and its seamen.

The last were thoroughly impregnated with the briny element on which they passed their lives. They boasted themselves a race apart. “Land-lubber” was for them a term conveying the utmost amount of derision and contempt. To be an “old salt” was the ideal perfection at which alone it was worth while for humanity to aim. The seaman, exulting in his profession, was never more a seaman than when rolling about on shore, swearing strange oaths, using nautical phrases, consuming vast quantities of beer and tobacco, above all, flinging his money here and there with a profuse and injudicious liberality especially distinctive of his kind.

The popularity of such characters amongst the lower classes may be readily imagined; for, with the uneducated and unreflecting, a reckless bearing very generally passes for courage; a tendency to dissipation for manliness; and a boastful expenditure for true generosity of heart. Perhaps, to the erroneous impressions thus disseminated amongst the young, should be attributed the inclination shown towards a service of which the duties entailed continual danger, excessive hardship, and daily privation. Certainly at a period when the worst provision was made, both physical and moral, for the welfare of men before the mast, there never seems to have been found a difficulty in keeping up the full complement of the British navy.

They were, indeed, a race apart, not only in their manners, their habits, their quaint expressions, their simple modes of thought, but in their superstitions and even their religious belief. They cultivated a rough, honest kind of piety, well illustrated in later years by Dibdin, himself a landsman, when he sang of

“The sweet little cherub that sits up aloft To take care of the life of poor Jack.”

But it was overloaded and interspersed with a thousand strange fancies not more incongruous than unreasonable and far-fetched.

No power would induce them to clear out of port, or, indeed, commence any important undertaking on a Friday. Mother Carey’s chickens were implicitly believed to be messengers sent express from another world to warn the mariner of impending storm, and bid him shorten sail ere it began to blow. Carlmilhan, the famous pirate, who, rather than be taken alive, had in default of gunpowder scuttled his own ship and gone down with it, all standing, was still to be heard giving notice in deep unearthly tones from under her very keel when the ship approached shoal water, shifting sands, or treacherous coral reefs in the glittering seas beneath the tropics. That phantom Dutchman, who had been provoked by baffling winds about the Cape to speak “unadvisedly with his lips,” was still to be seen in those tempestuous latitudes careering through the storm-drift under a press of sail, when the best craft that swam hardly dared show a stitch of canvas. The speaking-trumpet was still to be heard from her deck, shouting her captain’s despairing request to take his letters home, and the magic ship still disappeared at half-a-cable’s length and melted into air, while the wind blew fiercer and the sea rose higher, and sheets of rain came flashing down from the black squall lowering overhead.

Nor was it only in the wonders of this world that the tar professed his unaccountable belief. His credulity ran riot in regions beyond the grave, or, to use his own words, after he had “gone to Davy Jones.” A mystical spot which he called Fiddler’s Green was for him both the Tartarus and Elysium of the ancients—a land flowing, not indeed with milk and honey, but with rum and limejuice; a land of perpetual music, mirth, dancing, drinking, and tobacco; a land in which his weary soul was to find an intervening spell of enjoyment and repose, ere she put out again for her final voyage into eternity.

In the meantime, the new arrival at the Fox and Fiddle, seating himself at a small table in the public room, or tap as it would now be called, ordered a quart of ale and half-a-pint of rum. These fluids he mingled with great care, and sipped his beverage in a succession of liberal mouthfuls, dwelling on each with an approving smack as a man drinks a good bottle of claret. Butter-faced Bob, who waited on him, remarked that he pulled out but one gold piece in payment, and knowing the ways of his patrons, concluded it was his last, or he would have selected it from a handful. The landlord remembered he had a customer in the parlour who wanted just such articles as this burly broad-shouldered seaman, with pockets at low water.

The man did not, however, count his change when it was brought him, but shovelled it into his seal-skin tobacco pouch, a coin or two short, without looking at it. He then filled carefully, drank, and pondered with an air of grave and imposing reflection. Long before his measure was finished a second guest entered the tap-room, whose manners, gait, and gestures were an exact counterpart of the first. He was taller, however, and thinner, altogether less robust and prosperous-looking, showing a sallow face and withered skin, that denoted he had spent much of his life in hot climates. Though he looked younger than the other, his bearing was more staid and solemn, nor did he at once vociferate for something to drink. Beer seemed his weakness less than ’baccy, for he placed a small copper coin on a box ingeniously constructed so that, opening only by such means, it produced exactly the money’s worth of the fragrant weed, and loading a pipe with a much-tattooed hand, proceeded to puff volumes of smoke through the apartment.

Butter-faced Bob, entering, cheerfully proffered all kinds of liquids as a matter of course, but was received with surly negatives, and retired to speculate on the extreme of wealth or poverty denoted by this abstinence. A man, he thought, to be proof against such temptations must be either so rich, and consequently so full of liquor that he was unable to drink any more, or so poor that he couldn’t afford to be thirsty.

So the last comer smoked in silence at a little table of his own, which he had drawn into a corner, and his predecessor drank at _his_ table, looking wiser and wiser, while each glanced furtively at the other without opening his lips. Presently the eyes of the elder man twinkled: he had got an idea—nay, he actually launched it. Filling his glass, and politely handing it to the smoker, but reserving the jug to drink from himself, he proposed the following comprehensive toast—

“All ships at sea!”

They both drank it gravely and without farther comment. It was a social challenge, and felt to be such; the smoker pondered, put out the glass he had drained to be refilled, and holding it on a level with his eyes, enunciated solemnly—

“All ships in port!”

When equal justice had been done to this kindred sentiment, and the navies of the world were thus exhausted, they came to a dead-lock and relapsed into silence once more.

This calm might have remained unbroken for a considerable time but for the entrance of a third seaman, much younger than either of the former, whose appearance in the passage had been received by a round of applause from the children, a hearty greeting from the landlady—though that portly woman, with her handsome face, would not have left her arm-chair to welcome an admiral—and a “good-morrow,” louder, but not more sincere, from Bob himself. It appeared that this guest was well known and also trusted at the Fox and Fiddle, for, entering the public room with a sea-bow and a scrape of his foot on its sanded floor, he called lustily for a quart of strong ale and a pipe, while he produced an empty purse, and shook it in the landlord’s face with a laugh of derision that would have become the wealthiest nobleman in Great Britain.

“Ay, lad,” said Bob, shaking his head, but setting before his customer the beer and tobacco as desired. “’Tis well enough to begin a fresh score when the old one’s wiped out; but I saw that purse, with my own eyes, half full of broad pieces at the ebb. See now; you’ve gone and cleared it out—not a blessed groat left—and it’s scarce high-water yet!”

“What o’ that, old shiney?” laughed the other. “Isn’t there plenty more to be yarned when them’s all gone? Slack water be hanged! I tell you I’ll have a doubloon for every one of these here rain-drops afore a month’s out. I know where they grows, old man; I know where they grows. My sarvice to ye, mates! Here’s ‘Outward bound and an even keel!’”

While he spoke he whirled the rain-drops off his shining hat upon the floor, and nodding to the others, took a long pull at his ale, which nearly emptied the jug; then he filled a pipe, winked at the retiring landlord, and smoked in silence. The others scanned him attentively. He was an active, well-built young fellow of two or three-and-twenty, with foretopman written on every feature of his reckless, saucy, good-looking face—in every gesture of his wiry, loose, athletic limbs. He was very good-looking; his eyes sparkled with fun and his teeth were as white as a lady’s; his hair too might have been the envy of many a woman, clustering as it did in a profusion of curls over a pair of real gold earrings—a fashion now beginning to find considerable favour amongst the rising generation of seamen, though regarded with horror by their seniors as a new and monstrous affectation, proving, if indeed proof were needed for so self-evident a fact, that, as in all previous and subsequent ages, “the service was going to the devil.”

Even his joviality, however, seemed damped by the taciturnity of his comrades. He too smoked in silence and gave himself up to meditation. The rain pattered outside, and gusts of wind dashed it fitfully against the window-pane. The tide moaned sullenly, and a house-dog, chained in the back-yard, lifted up his voice to howl in unison. The three seamen smoked and drank and brooded, each occasionally removing his pipe from his mouth as if about to break the silence, on which the others looked in his face expectant, and for a time this was the whole extent of the conversation.