CHAPTER I

The experience of great officials who have laid down their dignities

before death, or have had the philosophic mind to review themselves while

still wielding the deputy sceptre, teaches them that in the exercise of

authority over men an eccentric behaviour in trifles has most exposed

them to hostile criticism and gone farthest to jeopardize their

popularity. It is their Achilles' heel; the place where their mother

Nature holds them as she dips them in our waters. The eccentricity of

common persons is the entertainment of the multitude, and the maternal

hand is perceived for a cherishing and endearing sign upon them; but

rarely can this be found suitable for the august in station; only,

indeed, when their sceptre is no more fearful than a grandmother's birch;

and these must learn from it sooner or later that they are uncomfortably

mortal.

When herrings are at auction on a beach, for example, the man of chief

distinction in the town should not step in among a poor fraternity to

take advantage of an occasion of cheapness, though it be done, as he may

protest, to relieve the fishermen of a burden; nor should such a

dignitary as the bailiff of a Cinque Port carry home the spoil of

victorious bargaining on his arm in a basket. It is not that his conduct

is in itself objectionable, so much as that it causes him to be popularly

weighed; and during life, until the best of all advocates can plead

before our fellow Englishmen that we are out of their way, it is prudent

to avoid the process.

Mr. Tinman, however, this high-stepping person in question, happened to

have come of a marketing mother. She had started him from a small shop to

a big one. He, by the practice of her virtues, had been enabled to start

himself as a gentleman. He was a man of this ambition, and prouder behind

it. But having started himself precipitately, he took rank among

independent incomes, as they are called, only to take fright at the

perils of starvation besetting one who has been tempted to abandon the

source of fifty per cent. So, if noble imagery were allowable in our time

in prose, might alarms and partial regrets be assumed to animate the

splendid pumpkin cut loose from the suckers. Deprived of that prodigious

nourishment of the shop in the fashionable seaport of Helmstone, he

retired upon his native town, the Cinque Port of Crikswich, where he

rented the cheapest residence he could discover for his habitation, the

House on the Beach, and lived imposingly, though not in total disaccord

with his old mother's principles. His income, as he observed to his

widowed sister and solitary companion almost daily in their privacy, was

respectable. The descent from an altitude of fifty to five per cent.

cannot but be felt. Nevertheless it was a comforting midnight bolster

reflection for a man, turning over to the other side between a dream and

a wink, that he was making no bad debts, and one must pay to be addressed

as esquire. Once an esquire, you are off the ground in England and on the

ladder. An esquire can offer his hand in marriage to a lady in her own

right; plain esquires have married duchesses; they marry baronets'

daughters every day of the week.

Thoughts of this kind were as the rise and fall of waves in the bosom of

the new esquire. How often in his Helmstone shop had he not heard titled

ladies disdaining to talk a whit more prettily than ordinary women; and

he had been a match for the subtlety of their pride--he understood it. He

knew well that at the hint of a proposal from him they would have spoken

out in a manner very different to that of ordinary women. The lightning,

only to be warded by an esquire, was in them. He quitted business at the

age of forty, that he might pretend to espousals with a born lady; or at

least it was one of the ideas in his mind.

And here, I think, is the moment for the epitaph of anticipation over

him, and the exclamation, alas! I would not be premature, but it is

necessary to create some interest in him, and no one but a foreigner

could feel it at present for the Englishman who is bursting merely to do

like the rest of his countrymen, and rise above them to shake them class

by class as the dust from his heels. Alas! then an--undertaker's pathos

is better than none at all--he was not a single-minded aspirant to our

social honours. The old marketing mother; to whom he owed his fortunes,

was in his blood to confound his ambition; and so contradictory was the

man's nature, that in revenge for disappointments, there were times when

he turned against the saving spirit of parsimony. Readers deep in Greek

dramatic writings will see the fatal Sisters behind the chair of a man

who gives frequent and bigger dinners, that he may become important in

his neighbourhood, while decreasing the price he pays for his wine, that

he may miserably indemnify himself for the outlay. A sip of his wine

fetched the breath, as when men are in the presence of the tremendous

elements of nature. It sounded the constitution more darkly-awful, and

with a profounder testimony to stubborn health, than the physician's

instruments. Most of the guests at Mr. Tinman's table were so constructed

that they admired him for its powerful quality the more at his

announcement of the price of it; the combined strength and cheapness

probably flattering them, as by another mystic instance of the national

energy. It must have been so, since his townsmen rejoiced to hail him as

head of their town. Here and there a solitary esquire, fished out of the

bathing season to dine at the house on the beach, was guilty of raising

one of those clamours concerning subsequent headaches, which spread an

evil reputation as a pall. A resident esquire or two, in whom a

reminiscence of Tinman's table may be likened to the hook which some old

trout has borne away from the angler as the most vivid of warnings to him

to beware for the future, caught up the black report and propagated it.

The Lieutenant of the Coastguard, hearing the latest conscious victim, or

hearing of him, would nod his head and say he had never dined at Tinman's

table without a headache ensuing and a visit to the chemist's shop;

which, he was assured, was good for trade, and he acquiesced, as it was

right to do in a man devoted to his country. He dined with Tinman again.

We try our best to be social. For eight months in our year he had little

choice but to dine with Tinman or be a hermit attached to a telescope.

"Where are you going, Lieutenant?" His frank reply to the question was,

"I am going to be killed;" and it grew notorious that this meant Tinman's

table. We get on together as well as we can. Perhaps if we were an

acutely calculating people we should find it preferable both for trade

and our physical prosperity to turn and kill Tinman, in contempt of

consequences. But we are not, and so he does the business gradually for

us. A generous people we must be, for Tinman was not detested. The

recollection of "next morning" caused him to be dimly feared.

Tinman, meanwhile, was awake only to the Circumstance that he made no

progress as an esquire, except on the envelopes of letters, and in his

own esteem. That broad region he began to occupy to the exclusion of

other inhabitants; and the result of such a state of princely isolation

was a plunge of his whole being into deep thoughts. From the hour of his

investiture as the town's chief man, thoughts which were long shots took

possession of him. He had his wits about him; he was alive to ridicule;

he knew he was not popular below, or on easy terms with people above him,

and he meditated a surpassing stroke as one of the Band of Esq., that had

nothing original about it to perplex and annoy the native mind, yet was

dazzling. Few members of the privileged Band dare even imagine the thing.

It will hardly be believed, but it is historical fact, that in the act of

carrying fresh herrings home on his arm, he entertained the idea of a

visit to the First Person and Head of the realm, and was indulging in

pleasing visions of the charms of a personal acquaintance. Nay, he had

already consulted with brother jurats. For you must know that one of the

princesses had recently suffered betrothal in the newspapers, and

supposing her to deign to ratify the engagement, what so reasonable on

the part of a Cinque Port chieftain as to congratulate his liege

mistress, her illustrious mother? These are thoughts and these are deeds

>which give emotional warmth and colour to the ejecter members of a

population wretchedly befogged. They are our sunlight, and our brighter

theme of conversation. They are necessary to the climate and the Saxon

mind; and it would be foolish to put them away, as it is foolish not to

do our utmost to be intimate with terrestrial splendours while we have

them--as it may be said of wardens, mayors, and bailiffs-at command.

Tinman was quite of this opinion. They are there to relieve our dulness.

We have them in the place of heavenly; and he would have argued that we

have a right to bother them too. He had a notion, up in the clouds, of a

Sailors' Convalescent Hospital at Crikswich to seduce a prince with, hand

him the trowel, make him "lay the stone," and then poor prince! refresh

him at table. But that was a matter for by and by.

His purchase of herrings completed, Mr. Tinman walked across the mound of

shingle to the house on the beach. He was rather a fresh-faced man, of

the Saxon colouring, and at a distance looking good-humoured. That he

should have been able to make such an appearance while doing daily battle

with his wine, was a proof of great physical vigour. His pace was

leisurely, as it must needs be over pebbles, where half a step is

subtracted from each whole one in passing; and, besides, he was aware of

a general breath at his departure that betokened a censorious assembly.

Why should he not market for himself? He threw dignity into his

retreating figure in response to the internal interrogation. The moment

>was one when conscious rectitude =pliers man should have a tail for its

just display. Philosophers have drawn attention to the power of the human

face to express pure virtue, but no sooner has it passed on than the

spirit erect within would seem helpless. The breadth of our shoulders is

apparently presented for our critics to write on. Poor duty is done by

the simple sense of moral worth, to supplant that absence of feature in

the plain flat back. We are below the animals in this. How charged with

language behind him is a dog! Everybody has noticed it. Let a dog turn

away from a hostile circle, and his crisp and wary tail not merely

defends him, it menaces; it is a weapon. Man has no choice but to surge

and boil, or stiffen preposterously. Knowing the popular sentiment about

his marketing--for men can see behind their backs, though they may have

nothing to speak with--Tinman resembled those persons of principle who

decline to pay for a "Bless your honour!" from a voluble beggar-woman,

and obtain the reverse of it after they have gone by. He was sufficiently

sensitive to feel that his back was chalked as on a slate. The only

remark following him was, "There he goes!"

He went to the seaward gate of the house on the beach, made practicable

in a low flint wall, where he was met by his sister Martha, to whom he

handed the basket. Apparently he named the cost of his purchase per

dozen. She touched the fish and pressed the bellies of the topmost, it

might be to question them tenderly concerning their roes. Then the couple

passed out of sight. Herrings were soon after this despatching their

odours through the chimneys of all Crikswich, and there was that much of

concord and festive union among the inhabitants.

The house on the beach had been posted where it stood, one supposes, for

the sake of the sea-view, from which it turned right about to face the

town across a patch of grass and salt scurf, looking like a square and

scornful corporal engaged in the perpetual review of an awkward squad of

recruits. Sea delighted it not, nor land either. Marine Parade fronting

it to the left, shaded sickly eyes, under a worn green verandah, from a

sun that rarely appeared, as the traducers of spinsters pretend those

virgins are ever keenly on their guard against him that cometh not. Belle

Vue Terrace stared out of lank glass panes without reserve, unashamed of

its yellow complexion. A gaping public-house, calling itself newly Hotel,

fell backward a step. Villas with the titles of royalty and bloody

battles claimed five feet of garden, and swelled in bowwindows beside

other villas which drew up firmly, commending to the attention a decent

straightness and unintrusive decorum in preference. On an elevated meadow

to the right was the Crouch. The Hall of Elba nestled among

weather-beaten dwarf woods further toward the cliff. Shavenness,

featurelessness, emptiness, clamminess scurfiness, formed the outward

expression of a town to which people were reasonably glad to come from

London in summer-time, for there was nothing in Crikswich to distract the

naked pursuit of health. The sea tossed its renovating brine to the

determinedly sniffing animal, who went to his meals with an appetite that

rendered him cordially eulogistic of the place, in spite of certain frank

whiffs of sewerage coming off an open deposit on the common to mingle

with the brine. Tradition told of a French lady and gentleman entering

the town to take lodgings for a month, and that on the morrow they took a

boat from the shore, saying in their faint English to a sailor veteran of

the coastguard, whom they had consulted about the weather, "It is better

zis zan zat," as they shrugged between rough sea and corpselike land. And

they were not seen again. Their meaning none knew. Having paid their bill

at the lodging-house, their conduct was ascribed to systematic madness.

English people came to Crikswich for the pure salt sea air, and they did

not expect it to be cooked and dressed and decorated for them. If these

things are done to nature, it is nature no longer that you have, but

something Frenchified. Those French are for trimming Neptune's beard!

Only wait, and you are sure to find variety in nature, more than you may

like. You will find it in Neptune. What say you to a breach of the

sea-wall, and an inundation of the aromatic grass-flat extending from the

house on the beach to the tottering terraces, villas, cottages: and

public-house transformed by its ensign to Hotel, along the frontage of

the town? Such an event had occurred of old, and had given the house on

the beach the serious shaking great Neptune in his wrath alone can give.

But many years had intervened. Groynes had been run down to intercept him

and divert him. He generally did his winter mischief on a mill and salt

marshes lower westward. Mr. Tinman had always been extremely zealous in

promoting the expenditure of what moneys the town had to spare upon the

protection of the shore, as it were for the propitiation or defiance of

the sea-god. There was a kindly joke against him an that subject among

brother jurats. He retorted with the joke, that the first thing for

Englishmen to look to were England's defences.

But it will not do to be dwelling too fondly on our eras of peace, for

which we make such splendid sacrifices. Peace, saving for the advent of a

German band, which troubled the repose of the town at intervals, had

imparted to the inhabitants of Crikswich, within and without, the

likeness to its most perfect image, together, it must be confessed, with

a degree of nervousness that invested common events with some of the

terrors of the Last Trump, when one night, just upon the passing of the

vernal equinox, something happened.