The Pleasures of Ignorance | Page 4

morning hanging outside
the door of his house while he slept. They have been oiled, and left
there to dry. They have kept the shape of his limb and the crook of his
knee in an uncanny way. They look as though he had taken off his legs

before going into the house and hung them on the wall. But the
fisherman is a hero not only in his boots. His sea-coat is no less
magnificent. This may be of oil-skin yellow or of maroon or of stained
white or of blue, with a blue jersey showing under it, and, perhaps, a
red woollen muffler or a scarf with green spots on a red ground round
his throat. He has not learned to be timid of colour. Even out of the
mouths of his boots you may see the ends of red knitted leggings
protruding. His yellow or black sou'-wester roofing the back of his neck,
he comes down to harbour, as splendid as a figure at a fair. And always,
when he arrives, he is smoking a pipe. As one watches him, one
wonders if anybody except a fisherman, as he looks out over the
harbour, knows how to smoke. He has made tobacco part of himself,
like breathing.
If the tide is already full the fishermen are taken off in small
rowing-boats, most of them standing, and the place is busy with a
criss-cross of travelling crews till the fishing-boats are all manned. If
the water is not yet deep, however, most of the men walk to their boats,
lumbering through the waves, and occasionally jumping like a wading
girl as a larger wave threatens the tops of their boots. Many of them
carry their supper in a basket or a handkerchief. The first of the boats
begins to move out of its stall. It is tugged into the clear water, and the
fishermen put out long oars and row it laboriously to the mouth of the
harbour and the wind. It is followed by a motor-boat, and another, and
another. There are forty putting up their sails like one. The harbour
moves. One has a sense as of things liberated. It is as though a flock of
birds were being loosed into the air--as though pigeon after pigeon
were being set free out of a basket for home. Lug-sail after lugsail,
brown as the underside of a mushroom, hurries out among the waves. A
green little tub of a steamboat follows with insolent smoke. The
motor-boats hasten out like scenting dogs. Every sort of
craft--motor-boat, gig, lugger and steamboat--makes for sea,
higgledy-piggledy in a long line, an irregular procession of black and
blue and green and white and brown. Here, as in the men's clothes, the
paint-pots have been spilled.
There is nothing more sociable than a fishing-fleet. The boats overtake

each other, like horses in a race. They gallop in rivalry. But for the
most part they keep together, and move like a travelling town over the
sea. As likely as not they will have to come back out of the storm into
the shelter of the bay, and they will ride there till nightfall, when every
boat becomes a lamp and every sail a shadow. In the darkness they
hang like a constellation on the oily water. They become a company of
dancing stars. Every now and then a boat moves off on a quest of its
own. It is as though the firmament were shaken. One hears the
kick-kick-kick of the motor, and a star has become a will-o'-the-wisp.
These lights can no more keep still than a playground of children. They
always make a pattern on the water, but they never make the same
pattern. Sometimes they lengthen themselves against the sandy shore
on the far side of the bay into a golden river. Sometimes they huddle
together into a little procession of monks carrying tapers....
One goes down to the harbour after breakfast the next morning to see
what has been the result of the night's fishing. One does not really need
to go down. One can see it afar off. There is movement as at the
building of a city. On every boat men are busy emptying the nets,
disentangling the fish that have been caught by the gills, tumbling them
in a liquid mass into the bottom of the boat. One can hardly see the fish
separately. They flow into one another. They are a pool of quick-silver.
One is amazed, as the disciples must have been amazed at the
miraculous draught. Everything is covered with their scales. The
fishermen are spotted as if with confetti. Their hands, their brown coats,
their boots are a mass of white-and-blue spots. The labourers with the
gurries--great blue boxes that are carried like Sedan-chairs between