a message from the sea(大海来信)

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A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA

A MESSAGE FROM

THE SEA

By Charles Dickens

A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA

I--THE VILLAGE

"And a mighty sing'lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the

days of my life!" said Captain Jorgan, looking up at it.

Captain Jorgan had to look high to look at it, for the village was built

sheer up the face of a steep and lofty cliff. There was no road in it, there

was no wheeled vehicle in it, there was not a level yard in it. From the

sea-beach to the cliff-top two irregular rows of white houses, placed

opposite to one another, and twisting here and there, and there and here,

rose, like the sides of a long succession of stages of crooked ladders, and

you climbed up the village or climbed down the village by the staves

between, some six feet wide or so, and made of sharp irregular stones.

The old pack- saddle, long laid aside in most parts of England as one of

the appendages of its infancy, flourished here intact. Strings of pack-

horses and pack-donkeys toiled slowly up the staves of the ladders,

bearing fish, and coal, and such other cargo as was unshipping at the pier

from the dancing fleet of village boats, and from two or three little

coasting traders. As the beasts of burden ascended laden, or descended

light, they got so lost at intervals in the floating clouds of village smoke,

that they seemed to dive down some of the village chimneys, and come to

the surface again far off, high above others. No two houses in the village

were alike, in chimney, size, shape, door, window, gable, roof-tree,

anything. The sides of the ladders were musical with water, running

clear and bright. The staves were musical with the clattering feet of the

pack-horses and pack-donkeys, and the voices of the fishermen urging

them up, mingled with the voices of the fishermen's wives and their many

children. The pier was musical with the wash of the sea, the creaking of

capstans and windlasses, and the airy fluttering of little vanes and sails.

The rough, sea-bleached boulders of which the pier was made, and the

whiter boulders of the shore, were brown with drying nets. The red-

brown cliffs, richly wooded to their extremest verge, had their softened

and beautiful forms reflected in the bluest water, under the clear North

Devonshire sky of a November day without a cloud. The village itself

A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA

was so steeped in autumnal foliage, from the houses lying on the pier to

the topmost round of the topmost ladder, that one might have fancied it

was out a bird's- nesting, and was (as indeed it was) a wonderful climber.

And mentioning birds, the place was not without some music from them

too; for the rook was very busy on the higher levels, and the gull with his

flapping wings was fishing in the bay, and the lusty little robin was

hopping among the great stone blocks and iron rings of the breakwater,

fearless in the faith of his ancestors, and the Children in the Wood.

Thus it came to pass that Captain Jorgan, sitting balancing himself on

the pier-wall, struck his leg with his open hand, as some men do when

they are pleased--and as he always did when he was pleased--and said, -

"A mighty sing'lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the days of

my life!"

Captain Jorgan had not been through the village, but had come down

to the pier by a winding side-road, to have a preliminary look at it from the

level of his own natural element. He had seen many things and places,

and had stowed them all away in a shrewd intellect and a vigorous

memory. He was an American born, was Captain Jorgan,--a New-

Englander,--but he was a citizen of the world, and a combination of most

of the best qualities of most of its best countries.

For Captain Jorgan to sit anywhere in his long-skirted blue coat and

blue trousers, without holding converse with everybody within speaking

distance, was a sheer impossibility. So the captain fell to talking with the

fishermen, and to asking them knowing questions about the fishery, and

the tides, and the currents, and the race of water off that point yonder, and

what you kept in your eye, and got into a line with what else when you ran

into the little harbour; and other nautical profundities. Among the men

who exchanged ideas with the captain was a young fellow, who exactly hit

his fancy,--a young fisherman of two or three and twenty, in the rough sea-

dress of his craft, with a brown face, dark curling hair, and bright, modest

eyes under his Sou'wester hat, and with a frank, but simple and retiring

manner, which the captain found uncommonly taking. "I'd bet a

thousand dollars," said the captain to himself, "that your father was an

honest man!"

A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA

"Might you be married now?" asked the captain, when he had had

some talk with this new acquaintance.

"Not yet."

"Going to be?" said the captain.

"I hope so."

The captain's keen glance followed the slightest possible turn of the

dark eye, and the slightest possible tilt of the Sou'wester hat. The captain

then slapped both his legs, and said to himself, -

"Never knew such a good thing in all my life! There's his sweetheart

looking over the wall!"

There was a very pretty girl looking over the wall, from a little

platform of cottage, vine, and fuchsia; and she certainly dig not look as if

the presence of this young fisherman in the landscape made it any the less

sunny and hopeful for her.

Captain Jorgan, having doubled himself up to laugh with that hearty

good-nature which is quite exultant in the innocent happiness of other

people, had undoubted himself, and was going to start a new subject, when

there appeared coming down the lower ladders of stones, a man whom he

hailed as "Tom Pettifer, Ho!" Tom Pettifer, Ho, responded with alacrity,

and in speedy course descended on the pier.

"Afraid of a sun-stroke in England in November, Tom, that you wear

your tropical hat, strongly paid outside and paper-lined inside, here?" said

the captain, eyeing it.

"It's as well to be on the safe side, sir," replied Tom.

"Safe side!" repeated the captain, laughing. "You'd guard against a

sun-stroke, with that old hat, in an Ice Pack. Wa'al! What have you

made out at the Post-office?"

"It is the Post-office, sir."

"What's the Post-office?" said the captain.

"The name, sir. The name keeps the Post-office."

"A coincidence!" said the captain. "A lucky bit! Show me where it

is. Good-bye, shipmates, for the present! I shall come and have another

look at you, afore I leave, this afternoon."

This was addressed to all there, but especially the young fisherman; so

A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA

all there acknowledged it, but especially the young fisherman. "He's a

sailor!" said one to another, as they looked after the captain moving away.

That he was; and so outspeaking was the sailor in him, that although his

dress had nothing nautical about it, with the single exception of its colour,

but was a suit of a shore-going shape and form, too long in the sleeves and

too short in the legs, and too unaccommodating everywhere, terminating

earthward in a pair of Wellington boots, and surmounted by a tall, stiff hat,

which no mortal could have worn at sea in any wind under heaven;

nevertheless, a glimpse of his sagacious, weather-beaten face, or his strong,

brown hand, would have established the captain's calling. Whereas Mr.

Pettifer--a man of a certain plump neatness, with a curly whisker, and

elaborately nautical in a jacket, and shoes, and all things correspondent--

looked no more like a seaman, beside Captain Jorgan, than he looked like

a sea-serpent.

The two climbed high up the village,--which had the most arbitrary

turns and twists in it, so that the cobbler's house came dead across the

ladder, and to have held a reasonable course, you must have gone through

his house, and through him too, as he sat at his work between two little

windows,--with one eye microscopically on the geological formation of

that part of Devonshire, and the other telescopically on the open sea,--the

two climbed high up the village, and stopped before a quaint little house,

on which was painted, "MRS. RAYBROCK, DRAPER;" and also "POST-

OFFICE." Before it, ran a rill of murmuring water, and access to it was

gained by a little plank-bridge.

"Here's the name," said Captain Jorgan, "sure enough. You can come

in if you like, Tom."

The captain opened the door, and passed into an odd little shop, about

six feet high, with a great variety of beams and bumps in the ceiling, and,

besides the principal window giving on the ladder of stones, a purblind

little window of a single pane of glass, peeping out of an abutting corner at

the sun-lighted ocean, and winking at its brightness.

"How do you do, ma'am?" said the captain. "I am very glad to see

you. I have come a long way to see you."

"Have you, sir? Then I am sure I am very glad to see you, though I

A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA

don't know you from Adam."

Thus a comely elderly woman, short of stature, plump of form,

sparkling and dark of eye, who, perfectly clean and neat herself, stood in

the midst of her perfectly clean and neat arrangements, and surveyed

Captain Jorgan with smiling curiosity. "Ah! but you are a sailor, sir," she

added, almost immediately, and with a slight movement of her hands, that

was not very unlike wringing them; "then you are heartily welcome."

"Thank'ee, ma'am," said the captain, "I don't know what it is, I am sure;

that brings out the salt in me, but everybody seems to see it on the crown

of my hat and the collar of my coat. Yes, ma'am, I am in that way of

life."

"And the other gentleman, too," said Mrs. Raybrock.

"Well now, ma'am," said the captain, glancing shrewdly at the other

gentleman, "you are that nigh right, that he goes to sea,--if that makes him

a sailor. This is my steward, ma'am, Tom Pettifer; he's been a'most all

trades you could name, in the course of his life,-- would have bought all

your chairs and tables once, if you had wished to sell 'em,--but now he's

my steward. My name's Jorgan, and I'm a ship-owner, and I sail my own

and my partners' ships, and have done so this five-and-twenty year.

According to custom I am called Captain Jorgan, but I am no more a

captain, bless your heart, than you are."

"Perhaps you'll come into my parlour, sir, and take a chair?" said Mrs.

Raybrock.

"Ex-actly what I was going to propose myself, ma'am. After you."

Thus replying, and enjoining Tom to give an eye to the shop, Captain

Jorgan followed Mrs. Raybrock into the little, low back-room,-- decorated

with divers plants in pots, tea-trays, old china teapots, and punch-bowls,--

which was at once the private sitting-room of the Raybrock family and the

inner cabinet of the post-office of the village of Steepways.

"Now, ma'am," said the captain, "it don't signify a cent to you where I

was born, except--" But here the shadow of some one entering fell upon

the captain's figure, and he broke off to double himself up, slap both his

legs, and ejaculate, "Never knew such a thing in all my life! Here he is

again! How are you?"

A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA

These words referred to the young fellow who had so taken Captain

Jorgan's fancy down at the pier. To make it all quite complete he came in

accompanied by the sweetheart whom the captain had detected looking

over the wall. A prettier sweetheart the sun could not have shone upon

that shining day. As she stood before the captain, with her rosy lips just

parted in surprise, her brown eyes a little wider open than was usual from

the same cause, and her breathing a little quickened by the ascent (and

possibly by some mysterious hurry and flurry at the parlour door, in which

the captain had observed her face to be for a moment totally eclipsed by

the Sou'wester hat), she looked so charming, that the captain felt himself

under a moral obligation to slap both his legs again. She was very

simply dressed, with no other ornament than an autumnal flower in her

bosom. She wore neither hat nor bonnet, but merely a scarf or kerchief,

folded squarely back over the head, to keep the sun off,-- according to a

fashion that may be sometimes seen in the more genial parts of England as

well as of Italy, and which is probably the first fashion of head-dress that

came into the world when grasses and leaves went out.

"In my country," said the captain, rising to give her his chair, and

dexterously sliding it close to another chair on which the young fisherman

must necessarily establish himself,--"in my country we should call

Devonshire beauty first-rate!"

Whenever a frank manner is offensive, it is because it is strained or

feigned; for there may be quite as much intolerable affectation in plainness

as in mincing nicety. All that the captain said and did was honestly

according to his nature; and his nature was open nature and good nature;

therefore, when he paid this little compliment, and expressed with a

sparkle or two of his knowing eye, "I see how it is, and nothing could be

better," he had established a delicate confidence on that subject with the

family.

"I was saying to your worthy mother," said the captain to the young

man, after again introducing himself by name and occupation,--"I was

saying to your mother (and you're very like her) that it didn't signify where

I was born, except that I was raised on question- asking ground, where the

babies as soon as ever they come into the world, inquire of their mothers,

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AMESSAGEFROMTHESEA1AMESSAGEFROMTHESEAByCharlesDickensAMESSAGEFROMTHESEA2I--THEVILLAGE"Andamightysing'larandprettyplaceitis,aseverIsawinallthedaysofmylife!"saidCaptainJorgan,lookingupatit.CaptainJorganhadtolookhightolookatit,forthevillagewasbuiltsheerupthefaceofasteepandloftycliff.Therewasnoroadinit,...

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