I fear I must be of a somewhat gruesome turn of mind.My sympathies are always with the melancholy side of life and nature.I love the chill October days,when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden underneath your feet,and a low sound as of stifled sobbing is heard in the damp woods--the evenings in late autumn time,when the white mist creeps across the fields,making it seem as though old Earth,feeling the night air cold to its poor bones,were drawing ghostly bedclothes round its withered limbs.I like the twilight of the long grey street,sad with the wailing cry of the distant muffin man.One thinks of him,as,strangely mitred,he glides by through the gloom,jangling his harsh bell,as the High Priest of the pale spirit of Indigestion,summoning the devout to come forth and worship.I find a sweetness in the aching dreariness of Sabbath afternoons in genteel suburbs--in the evil-laden desolateness of waste places by the river,when the yellow fog is stealing inland across the ooze and mud,and the black tide gurgles softly round worm-eaten piles.
I love the bleak moor,when the thin long line of the winding road lies white on the darkening heath,while overhead some belated bird,vexed with itself for being out so late,scurries across the dusky sky,screaming angrily.I love the lonely,sullen lake,hidden away in mountain solitudes.I suppose it was my childhood's surroundings that instilled in me this affection for sombre hues.One of my earliest recollections is of a dreary marshland by the sea.By day,the water stood there in wide,shallow pools.But when one looked in the evening they were pools of blood that lay there.
It was a wild,dismal stretch of coast.One day,I found myself there all alone--I forget how it came about--and,oh,how small Ifelt amid the sky and the sea and the sandhills!I ran,and ran,and ran,but I never seemed to move;and then I cried,and screamed,louder and louder,and the circling seagulls screamed back mockingly at me.It was an "unken"spot,as they say up North.
In the far back days of the building of the world,a long,high ridge of stones had been reared up by the sea,dividing the swampy grassland from the sand.Some of these stones--"pebbles,"so they called them round about--were as big as a man,and many as big as a fair-sized house;and when the sea was angry--and very prone he was to anger by that lonely shore,and very quick to wrath;often have Iknown him sink to sleep with a peaceful smile on his rippling waves,to wake in fierce fury before the night was spent--he would snatch up giant handfuls of these pebbles and fling and toss them here and there,till the noise of their rolling and crashing could be heard by the watchers in the village afar off.
"Old Nick's playing at marbles to-night,"they would say to one another,pausing to listen.And then the women would close tight their doors,and try not to hear the sound.
Far out to sea,by where the muddy mouth of the river yawned wide,there rose ever a thin white line of surf,and underneath those crested waves there dwelt a very fearsome thing,called the Bar.Igrew to hate and be afraid of this mysterious Bar,for I heard it spoken of always with bated breath,and I knew that it was very cruel to fisher folk,and hurt them so sometimes that they would cry whole days and nights together with the pain,or would sit with white scared faces,rocking themselves to and fro.
Once when I was playing among the sandhills,there came by a tall,grey woman,bending beneath a load of driftwood.She paused when nearly opposite to me,and,facing seaward,fixed her eyes upon the breaking surf above the Bar."Ah,how I hate the sight of your white teeth!"she muttered;then turned and passed on.
Another morning,walking through the village,I heard a low wailing come from one of the cottages,while a little farther on a group of women were gathered in the roadway,talking."Ay,"said one of them,"I thought the Bar was looking hungry last night."So,putting one and the other together,I concluded that the "Bar"must be an ogre,such as a body reads of in books,who lived in a coral castle deep below the river's mouth,and fed upon the fishermen as he caught them going down to the sea or coming home.
From my bedroom window,on moonlight nights,I could watch the silvery foam,marking the spot beneath where he lay hid;and I would stand on tip-toe,peering out,until at length I would come to fancy I could see his hideous form floating below the waters.Then,as the little white-sailed boats stole by him,tremblingly,I used to tremble too,lest he should suddenly open his grim jaws and gulp them down;and when they had all safely reached the dark,soft sea beyond,I would steal back to the bedside,and pray to God to make the Bar good,so that he would give up eating the poor fishermen.
Another incident connected with that coast lives in my mind.It was the morning after a great storm--great even for that stormy coast--and the passion-worn waters were still heaving with the memory of a fury that was dead.Old Nick had scattered his marbles far and wide,and there were rents and fissures in the pebbly wall such as the oldest fisherman had never known before.Some of the hugest stones lay tossed a hundred yards away,and the waters had dug pits here and there along the ridge so deep that a tall man might stand in some of them,and yet his head not reach the level of the sand.
Round one of these holes a small crowd was pressing eagerly,while one man,standing in the hollow,was lifting the few remaining stones off something that lay there at the bottom.I pushed my way between the straggling legs of a big fisher lad,and peered over with the rest.A ray of sunlight streamed down into the pit,and the thing at the bottom gleamed white.Sprawling there among the black pebbles it looked like a huge spider.One by one the last stones were lifted away,and the thing was left bare,and then the crowd looked at one another and shivered.
"Wonder how he got there,"said a woman at length;"somebody must ha'helped him."
