The House on the Beach | Page 4

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