Part 9
And so, as you may see, we men of the Suffolk and Norfolk coast need the stiff backbone that we have as our birthright for the sea-fighting that is our life-work; and it is not to be wondered at that our life of sea-fighting makes us still more set and stubborn in our ways.
II
My little Tess came to me, a sea upcast, after one of our great northeast gales. I myself found her: lying where the waves had landed her on the shingle, and where they had left her with the fall of the tide.
I was but a bit of a lad myself, then, going on to be eight years old. Storms had no fright in them for me in those days. What I most was thinking about when one was blowing--while my poor mother, if my father was out in his boat, would be looking wild-eyed seaward, or in the bed-room praying for him on her knees--was what I'd be picking up on the shingle when the gale was over and the sea gone down. Later on, when I came to know that at the gale's end I might be lying myself on the shingle, along with the other wreckage, I got to looking at storms in a different way.
That blow that brought my Tess to me had no fears in it for my poor mother, seeing that it came in the night time and my father safe at home. The noise of my father getting up wakened me; and in a sleepy way I watched him from my little bed, when he had the lamp lighted, hurrying his clothes on that he might go down to where his boat was hauled up on the shingle and heave her with the capstan still higher above the on-run of the waves. And as I lay there, very drowsy, watching my father drag his big boots on and hearing the roar of the wind and feeling the shaking that it was giving to our house-walls, there came suddenly the sharp loud bang of a gun.
My father stopped as he heard it--with one leg in the air and his hands gripping the boot-straps, I can see him now. "That's from close by!" he said. "God help them--they must be ashore on the Barnard Bank!" Then he jammed his other boot on, jumped into his sou'wester, and was gone on a run. My mother ran to the door--I know now, having myself helped to get men ashore from wrecked ships at my life's peril, what her fear was--and called after him into the darkness: "Don't thou go to putting thy life in danger, George May!" What she said did no good. The wind swallowed her words before they got to him. For a minute or two she stood in the doorway, all blown about; then, putting her weight on it, she got the door shut and came back into the bed-room and knelt by the bedside praying for him. I still was very drowsy. Presently I went off to sleep again, thinking--God forgive me for it!--that if a ship had stranded on the Barnard I'd find some pretty pickings when morning came and the storm was over and I could get down to the shore.
And that was my first thought when I wakened, and found the sun shining and the wind blowing no more than a gentle breeze. My father was home again, and safe and sound. There had been no chance for a rescue, he said--the ship being deep down in the sands, and all her people swept out of her, by the time that daylight came. And so I bolted my breakfast, and the very minute that I had it inside of me I was off down the cliff-path and along the beach northward to find what I could find. All the other Southwold boys were hurrying that way too; but our house being up at the north end of the village gave me the start of all of them but John Heath, who lived close by us, and he came down the cliff-path at my heels.
The Barnard Bank lies off shore from Covehithe Ness, and under the Ness our pickings would be most like to be. At the best they would be but little things--buckets and baskets and brooms and odd oars, and such like--the coast guard men seeing to it that we got no more; but things, all the same, that any boy would jump for: and so away John and I ran together, and we kept together until we were under the Ness--and could see the broken stern-post of the wreck, all that was left to see of her, sticking up from the Barnard going bare with the falling tide. There I passed him--he giving a shout and stopping to pick up a basket that I missed seeing because on my side weed covered it--and so was leading him as we rounded the Ness by a dozen yards. And then it was I who gave a shout--and made a dash for a big white bundle that was lying in a nook of the shingle just above the lap of the waves.
John saw the bundle almost as soon as I did, and raced me for it. But I did see it first, and I touched it first, and so it fairly was mine. A white sheet was the outside of it; and at one corner, under the sheet, a bit of a blanket showed. I would have none of John's help as I unwrapped it. He stood beside me, though, and said as I opened it that even if I had touched it first we had seen it together--which wasn't so--and that we must go share and share. I did not answer him, being full of wonder what I was like to come to when I had the bundle undone. In a good deal of a hurry I got the sheet loose, it was knotted at the corners, and then the blanket, and then still another blanket that was under the first one: and when that inner wrapping was opened there was lying--a little live baby! It looked up into my face with its big black eyes, and it blinked them for a minute--having been all shut up in the dark and the sunlight bothering it--and then it smiled at me as if I'd just waked it up not from the very edge of death in the sea but from a comfortable nap in its cradle on land!
John Heath burst out laughing. "You can have my share of it, George," said he; "we've got babies enough of our own at home." And with that he ran away and began to look again for brooms and buckets along the shore.
But I loved my little Tess from that first sight of her, and I was glad that John had said that I might have his share in her; though of course, because I first saw her and first touched her, he had no real share in her at all. So I wrapped her up again as well as I could in her blankets--leaving the wet sheet lying there--and set off for home along the shore, carrying her in my arms. Tired enough I got before I had lugged my load that long way, and up the cliff, and so to our house door. In the doorway my mother was standing, and I put the bundle in her arms. "Lord save us!" said my mother. "What's the boy got here?"
"Mother," said I, "it's a little beautiful live baby--and I found it, and it's mine!"
III
That was the way that my Tess came to me: and I know now how good my father and my mother were in letting me keep her for my own--they with only what my father could make by his fishing to live on, and the wolf never very far away from the door. But the look of those black eyes of hers and the smile in them won my mother's love to her, just as it had won mine; and my mother told me, too, long years afterward, that her heart was hungry for the girl baby that God had not given her--and she said that Tess seemed to be her very own baby from the minute that she took her close to her breast from my tired little arms.
As to where Tess came from--from what port in all the wide world the ship sailed that brought her to us--we had no way of knowing. Nothing but Tess in her bundle came ashore from the wreck; and what was left of the ship burrowed down into the sands so fast and so far that there was to be seen of her only a broken bit of her stern-post at the storm's ending. Even after the set of the currents against her sunken hull, on the next spring tide, had cut through the Barnard Bank and so made the Wreck Gat, no part of her but her broken stern-post ever showed. Tess herself, though, told us what her own name was, and so gave us a notion as to what land she belonged to; but we should have been none the wiser for her telling it--she talking in words that were the same as Greek to us--if the Vicar had not lent us a hand.
My finding the baby made a stir in the whole village, and everybody had to have a look at her. In the afternoon along came the Vicar too--smiling through his gold spectacles, as he always did, and swinging his black cane. By that time, having had all the milk she could hold, and a good nap, and more milk again, Tess was as bright as a new sixpence: just as though she had not passed that morning nearer to death than ever she was like to pass again and live. She was lying snug in my mother's arms before the fire, and in her own fashion was talking away at a great rate--and my mother's heart quite breaking because her pretty chatter was all in heathen words that nobody could get at the meaning of. But the Vicar, being very learned, understood her in a minute. "Why, it's Spanish," said he. "It's Spanish as sure as you're born! She's calling you 'madrecita,' Mrs. May--which is the same as 'motherkin,' you know. But I can't make even a guess at the rest of it. Everything ends in 'ita'--real baby-talk."
"Do kindly ask her, sir, what her blessed little name is," said my mother. "It'll bring her a deal closer to us to know her name."
"I'll try her in Latin," said the Vicar--"that's the best that I can manage--and it'll be hit or miss if she understands." And then he bent over the little tot--she being then a bit over two years old, my mother thought--and asked her what her name was in Latin words.
For a minute there was a puzzled look in the big black eyes of her and her brow puckered. And then she smiled all over her pretty face and answered, as clear as you please: "Tesita." That a baby no bigger than that understood Latin always has seemed to me most like a miracle of anything that ever I have known!
My mother looked bothered and chap-fallen. "It's not a real name at all," she said, and sighed over it.
"It's a very good name indeed, Mrs. May," said the Vicar; "only she's giving you her baby way of saying it. Her name is Theresa. 'Tesita' is the same as our 'Tess' would be, you know."
"Theresa! Tess!" cried my mother, brightening up all in a minute. "Why, that was my own dear mother's name! Her having that name seems to make her in real truth mine, sir!" And she hugged the baby close to the heart of her, and all in the same breath cried over it and laughed over it--thinking, I suppose, of her mother dead and buried, and thankful for the daughter that she so longed for that had come to her upcast by the sea.
More than what her name was, as is not to be wondered at, Tess never told us; and the only thing in the world that gave us any knowledge of her--and that no more than that her people were like to be gentlefolk--was a gold chain about her neck, under her little night gown, with a locket fast to it on which were some letters in such a jumble that even the Vicar could not make head nor tail of them, though he tried hard.
IV
Whatever part of the world Tess came from, it was plain enough by the look of her--and more and more plain as she grew up into a tall and lanky girl, and then into a tall slim woman--that Suffolk was a long way off from the land where she was born.
Our Suffolk folk, for the most part, are shortish and thickset and fair and blue eyed. We men--being whipped about by the wind and weather, and the sea-salt tanned into us--lose our fairness early and go a bun-brown; but our women--having no salt spray in their faces, and only their just allowance of sunshine--have their blue eyes matched with the red and white cheeks that they were born with; and their hair, though sometimes it goes darkish, usually is a bright chestnut or a bright brown. Also, our women are steady-going and sensible; though I must say that now and then they are a bit hard to get along with: being given to doing their thinking slowly, and to being mighty fast set in their own notions when once they have made their minds up--the same as we men. As for Tess--with her black eyes and her black hair, and her face all a cream white with not a touch of red in it--she was like none of them; and she could think more out-of-the-way things and be more sorts of a girl in five minutes than any Suffolk lass that ever I came across could think or be in a whole year!
Tess was unlike our girls in another matter: she had a mighty hot spit-fire temper of her own. Our girls, the same as our men, are easy-going and anger slowly; but when they do anger they are glowing hot to their very finger-tips, and a long while it takes them to cool off. But Tess would blaze up all in a minute--and as often as not with no real reason for it--and be for a while such an out-and-out little fury that she would send everything scudding before her; and then would pull up suddenly in the thick of it, and seem to forget all about it, and like enough laugh at the people around her looking scared! Somehow, though, it was seldom that she let me have a turn of her tantrums; and when she did they'd be over in no time, and she'd have her arms around me and be begging me to kiss her and to tell her that I didn't mind. I suppose that she was that way with me because for my part--having from the very first so loved her that quarreling with her was clean impossible--I used just to stand and stare at her in her passions; and like enough be showing by the look in my eyes the puzzled sorrow that I was feeling in my inside. As to answering her anger with my anger, it never once crossed my mind.
With John Heath things went differently. He would go ugly when she flew out at him--and would keep his anger by him after hers long was over and done with, and would show it by putting some hurt upon her in a dirty way. A good many thrashings I gave John Heath, at one time or another, for that sort of thing; and the greatest piece of unreasonableness that Tess ever put on me, which is saying much for it, was on that score: she being then ten years old, or thereabouts, and John and I well turned of sixteen.
Some trick that he played on her--I don't know what it was--set her in a rage against him, and he made her worse by laughing at her, and she ended by throwing sand in his eyes. Then his anger got up, and he caught her--being twice the size of her--and boxed her ears. I came along just then, and I can see the look of her now. She was not crying, as any ordinary child would have been--John having meant to hurt her, and hit hard. She was standing straight in front of him with her little hands gripped into fists as if she meant to fight him, that cream white face of hers gone a real dead white, a perfect blaze of passion in her big black eyes. In another second or so she'd have been flying at him if I'd given her the chance. But I didn't--I sailed right in and myself gave him what he needed; and when I had finished with him I had so well blackened the two eyes of him that he forgot about the sand. But after it all was over, so far from being obliged to me, what did Tess do but fall to crying because I'd hurt him, and to saying that he'd only given her what she deserved! For a week and more she would not speak to me, and all that time she was trotting about sorrowfully at John's heels. It seemed as though all of a sudden she had got to loving him because he had played the man and the master to her; and I'm sure that his love for her had its beginning then too.
John's folks and my folks, as I have said, lived up at the north end of the village, a bit apart, and that made us three keep most together while we were little; but Tess never had much to do with the other children, even when she got big enough to be with them at school. They did not get along with her, being puzzled by her whims and fancies and set against her by her spit-fire ways. And she did not get along with them because she was quick about everything and all of them were slow. When she began to grow up, though, matters changed a good deal. The boys--she being like nobody else in the village--picked her out to make love to, and that set the girls by the ears. Tess liked the love-making a deal more than I liked her to like it; and she didn't mind what the girls said to her because her wits were nimbler than their wits and she always could give them better than they could send.
So things went while the years went till Tess was turned of seventeen, and was shot up into a tall slim woman in all ways so beautiful as to be, I do believe, the most beautiful woman that God ever made. And then it was that Grace Gryce, damn her for it, found a whip that served to lash her; and so cruel a whip that she was near to lashing the life out of her with it at a single blow.
V
According to our Suffolk notions, Grace Gryce was a beauty: being strongly set up and full built and well rounded, with cheeks as red as strawberries, and blue eyes that for any good looking man had a smile in them, and over all a head of bright-brown hair. Had Tess been out of the way she'd have had things all as she wanted them, not another girl in the village for looks coming near her; and so it was only human nature, I suppose, that she hated Tess for crossing her--making her always go second, and a bad second, with the men.
It was about John Heath, though, that the heart of the matter was. All the village knew that Grace fancied him, and that he half fancied her--and would have fancied her altogether had Tess been out of the way. Making up his mind between them--John always was a thick thinker--did not seem to come easy to him. The whims and the ways of Tess--that made a dozen different sorts of girl of her in five minutes--seemed to set him off from her a-most as much as they set him on: being a sort of puzzle, I'm free to say, that other men beside John couldn't well understand. With Grace it was different. She might blow hot or she might blow cold with him; or she might show her temper--she had a-plenty of it--and give him the rough side of her tongue: but what she meant and what she wanted always was plain and clear. To be sure, this is only my guess why he hung in the wind between them. Maybe he set too little store on Tess's love because it came to him too easily; maybe he thought that by seeming to love her lightly he best could hold her fast.
Hold her fast he did, and that is certain. In spite of all her whimsies, he had her love; and it was his, as I have said, from the time when he man-mastered her by boxing the little ears of her--she being only ten years old. Always after that, even when she was at her sauciest and her airiest, he had only to speak short and sharp to her and she'd come to heel to him like a dog. Sometimes, seeing her taking orders from him that way was close to setting me wild: I having my whole heart fixed on her, and ready to give the very hands of me to have from her the half of what she gave him. Not but what she loved me too, in her own fashion, and dearly. She showed that by the way that she used to come to me in all her little hurts and troubles; and the sweetness and the comfortingness of her to me and to my mother always, but most when my poor father was drowned, was beyond any words that I have to put it in. But my pain was that the love which she had for me was of the same sort that she had for my mother--and I was not wanting from her love of that kind. And so it cut to the quick of me--I who would have kissed her shoe-soles--to see her so ready always to be meek and humble at a word from John. There were times, and a good many of them--seeing her so dog-faithful to him, and he almost as careless of her as if she had been no more than a dog to him--that I saw red as I looked at him, and got burning hot in the insides of me, and was as close to murdering him as I well could be and he still go on alive.
Like enough Grace Gryce--being of the same stock that I was, and made much as I was--had the same feeling for Tess that I had for John; and Grace, being a woman, had nothing to stop her from murdering Tess in a woman's way. She would have done it sooner had her wits been quicker. Time and again they had had their word-fights together, and Tess always getting the better of her because Grace's wits, like the rest of her, were heavy and slow.
It was down by the boats, under the Gun Hill, that they fought the round out in which Grace drew blood at last. A lot of the girls were together there and Tess, for a wonder, happened to be with them. They all were saying to her what hard things they could think of; and she, in her quick way, was hitting back at them and scoring off them all. Poor sort of stuff it was that they were giving her: calling her "Miss Fine-Airs" and "Miss Maypole," and scorning the black eyes and the pale face of her, and girding at her the best they could because in no way was she like themselves.
"It's a pity I'm so many kinds of ugliness!" says Tess in her saucy way, and making it worse by laughing. "It's a true pity that I'm not pretty, like all the rest of you, and so am left lonely. If only I'd some of your good looks, you see, I might have, as the rest of you have, a lot of men at my heels."
That was a shot that hit all of them, but it hit Grace the hardest and she answered it. "It's better," said she, "to go your whole life without a man at your heels than it is to spend your whole life dog-tagging at the heels of a man."
The girls laughed at that, knowing well what Grace was driving at. But Tess was ready with her answer and whipped back with it: "Well, it's better to tag at a man's heels and he pleased with it than it is to want to tag there and he not letting you--liking a may-pole, maybe, better than a butter-tub, and caring more, maybe, for grace by nature than for Grace by name."
That turned the joke--only it was no joke--on Grace again; and as the girls had not much more liking for her than they had for Tess, seeing that she spoiled what few man-chances Tess left them, they laughed at her as hard as they could laugh.
Grace's slow anger had been getting hotter and hotter in her. That shot of Tess's, and the girls all laughing at her, brought it to a boil.
"Who be'st thou, to open thy ugly mouth to me?" she jerked out, with a squeak in her voice and her blue eyes blazing. "Who be'st thou, anyway? Who knows the father or the mother of thee? Who knows what foul folk in what foul land bore thee? Dog-tag thou may'st, but--mark my words--naught will come of it: because thou'rt not fit for John Heath or for any other honest man to have dealings with--thou rotten upcast of the sea!"
Tess was holding her head high and was scornful-looking when this speech began; but the ending of it, so Mary Benacre told my mother, seemed like a knife in her heart. Her face went a sort of a pasty white, so Mary said; and she seemed to choke, somehow, and put her hand up to her throat in a fluttering kind of way as if her throat hurt her. And then she sort of staggered, and made a grab at the boat she was standing by and leaned against it--looking, so Mary said, as if she was like to die.
"Mayhap now thou'lt keep quiet a bit," Grace said, with her hands on her fat hips and her elbows out; and with that, and a flounce at her, turned away. The other girls, all except Mary, went along with Grace; but not talking, and most of them scared-looking: feeling, like enough, as men would feel standing by at the end of a knife-fight, when one man is down with a cut that has done for him and there is a smell of blood in the air.
Mary staid behind--she was a good sort, was Mary Benacre--and went to Tess and tried to comfort her. Tess didn't answer her, but just looked at her with a pitiful sort of stare out of her black eyes that Mary said was like the look of some poor dumb thing that had no other way of telling how bad its hurt was. And then, rousing herself up, Tess pushed Mary away from her and started for home on a run. Mary did not follow her, but later on she came and told my mother just what had happened and gave her Grace Gryce's words.