Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (283 page)
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Authors: Ford Madox Ford
So, my dear Bradley, let this voyage go forth, with its cargo of human passions, faiths and endeavours, as it were crossing and recrossing the windy seas, linking and relinking the old and the new worlds with chains and networks of desires and fears — let this particular voyage go forward with your name on its prow.
F. M. H.
Thus Anne Jeal, arrayed in a great farthingale hoop, ready to dine with the Lord Lieutenant, opened her window on a February morning when the sun shone to look down upon the young Edward Colman that was seeing to the bending of a new mainsail in the
Anne Jeal.
And, looking down upon him, in the midst of an agreeable flutter as to the young lords and secretaries that she should meet that day — for the Lord Lieutenant was come no further away than to Udimore — there came into her head a sudden rage and, afterwards, that thought, that, by willing it, she could make him turn his head towards her. She had proved to herself many times that she could do this with other youths.
There was a ballad that was much sung to the sound of lutes in Rye town of that day — and this ran through her head whilst she kept upon him eyes, dark, lustrous and intent as those of a cat’s that watches the hole in a wainscoting. They gave to her pale face with the carmine cheeks an intent and absent air of being set upon other worlds than this of Rye town with its Dutch, its French, its Spaniards and its parcel of Englishmen. The ballad was one that she thought of often and with much bitterness, though she had never been known to sing it — for it fitted her case as well as if she had made it. It had been made at the time of the French wars after the great French pirate, Clement des Voisins, had sailed his ships up and down Rye bay with the corpses of Englishmen hung from the yardarms. It was about a maiden who loved a young, fighting sailor man that went out with his little cogger to fight Clement des Voisins and was killed with a great stone hurled from the Frenchman’s topcastle. Her lute, with its long black neck, inlaid with nacre and its melon-shaped belly painted with red roses and true lovers’ knots, lay upon her dressing-table, and with her long-nailed, long fingers she touched its strings to give herself the notes that she heard in her mind —
“
What maketh lads so cruel be,”
the ballad ran,
“Amid the spume and wrack?
They pass the door and put to sea,
And never more come back.”
His figure, little in the distance, but clear in the east wind, moved round the little round-bellied cogger, with its white piles new scraped after the winter; he had his back to the town and called upwards to a man that, high up, was bending the end of a rope through a block; the new, gay sail lay over the stern of the little vessel. She looked down upon him and murmured —
“The salt, salt wind winds down the wave,
The Frenchmen flout the bay,
And cobbles and coggers are hoisting their sails,
God keep ‘ee down on the quay,
With a hoist at thy tackle, a haul at thy blocks,
And a hail to the hasting crew,
He’ll take ‘ee Who gave’ ee thy goldilocks,
Ere I pardon thine eyes o’ blue!”
The man at the masthead had the rope end through the block; he let it run through down to the deck, and the end Edward Colman took into his hand; at his hail there came out men from the hold of the vessel and from the forecastle, and the man swarmed down the mast from above. Anne Jeal kept her eyes upon Edward Colman, and hummed —
‘‘Not once to ha’ lookid within my hood,
Nor known I quailed on the strand
Wi’ thee in the boats. Thro’ my closèd door
I ha’ kissed to ‘ee my hand;
But they’ll rive thy keel wi’ their cannon shocks,
And sink ‘ee and all thy crew,
And they’ll leave to the raven and cliff-homed fox
Thy kindly eyes o’ blue.”
Edward Colman leapt down into the little ship; his men came about him; there wound up to her ears faint, intermittent, regular voices, and all the little heads moved together. Slowly the shoulder of the square sail lifted, a canted triangle of silver grey, and, because she could not any more distinguish his head from the other heads, she stayed her willing him. With each cry swiftly the grey sail rose shining; it swayed around in the wind uneasily; it climbed higher, swung round, shivered, and then bellied out with a strong, soft curve to wards the little castle in the bows. They called still and hauled still, the men on the deck, and it crept only inches higher. Then it stayed still.
Anne Jeal shivered in the cold air; for Edward Colman climbed on to the quayside with his head still averted from the town. And she made with herself a pact of what she would do if, before she had finished the song, he should not have looked back. So, with her eyes still set upon him whilst he was speaking down into the ship, she murmured —
“What made ‘ee pass my open door
Each breaking of the day?
What made’ ee take that selfsame path
And never another way?
Ill find ‘ee stretched on the grinding rocks
Wi’ a Frenchman’s shot, shot through,
And the mermaid’s weed from thy goldilocks
Across thine eyes o’ blue.’’
Edward Colman in his blue jerkin and his high brown boots took three steps, backwards always, and gazed at the bellying sail. The colour went out of her cheeks, her eyes dilated.
And then it came to her that he might be granted one last chance. For, properly sung, the ballad repeated at its end, its opening stanza. If he would look round upon her he might live; if he would not feel what her black and steadfast eyes said to him he should assuredly die. Her face grew wax-white; the golden tint died out of her black hair; she touched again on her lute those clinging notes upon which the melody turned, and she whispered, for her throat trembled so that she could neither hum an air nor yet sing aloud —
“What made ‘ee, lad, so cruel be,
Amid the spume and wrack
To pass the door and put to sea,
And never once look back
?”
Edward Colman stayed gazing at the grey sail; her lips were parted; her face was more pallid than the morning sky. She gave him another minute, and another long minute. She could not believe that he would not turn. Her whole soul gave straining force to her eyes. His head moved, his body moved, half round. He gazed toward the brown gateway; he gazed towards Rye-in-the-Foreign that he could see below her window to the left, little roofs of tile and roofs of thatch that she hated because they held so many Dutchmen. With her eyes parted, striving to turn them yet further, she heard him say —
“For thee this sail fills itself, Magdalena!”
Anne Jeal made with her two hands a gesture as if she threw something fragile from her window down the holders, among the green weeds of the town wall. Her lips were set tightly when she turned to come back from the gable into her room with the painted walls.
“It is time he put to sea,” she said to herself, “now I can hear his thoughts, and yet may not make him bestow on me the beggar’s alms of a glance.”
There was a wooden arm that came out from the sloping ceiling, working upon a hinge; and there were two little mannikins upon her table, such as maids in those days used to send one to another as presents, dressed to show new fashions upon. She moved out from the wall the wooden arm; she was used to hang her dresses upon it when she worked at the skirts of them, a wooden hoop filling the farthingale skirts. She tied a silken cord round the neck of each mannikin and strung them side by side to the bar. It ran out upon the wall, a cross piece supporting it, and the dolls dangled from it so that it showed like a small gallows.
“By the Virgin Mother of Christ,” she said, “an oath it is sin to swear — these two shall hang there till he and she dangle from another tree!”
The last of twelve generations of ship-builders and ship-owners, Edward Colman was an alert, good-humoured, and not very tall young man, with a fair face, a little moustache the colour of hay, and with all the lines about him hard but for their springiness, so that he appeared to have been cut out with a very sure chisel. He looked upon the world, even in the chilliest weather, with friendly eyes; there was always a little smile at the corners of his lips; he was a little slow to speak in a voice that came from his chest, and it was hard to tell from his face of what he was thinking. Thus, as he stood on the quayside, he looked at the new gilding upon the little castle that made a platform in the bow of his cogger, and then suddenly, to his five men on the deck who were resting and imagined that their master was pondering upon doing away with that little castle, he said that they must take four more hauls upon the king-rope to stretch the mainsail up. And, to themselves, they acknowledged that you never knew when the master hadn’t his eyes open.
Edward Colman owned seven ships of forty tons and under, where his father had owned eleven and his great-grandfather forty-two. That was all a part of the gradual decaying of the port of Rye — and a part of the absolute decay of the Old Faith in England. For it was recorded that, in one year, Edward’s great-grandfather had sent, on his ships, seven thousand pilgrims to Compostella in Spain; now there were no more any pilgrims, and Edward Colman’s father had been wont to declare before his death that if, when the Queen ‘died, King James did not bring back from Scotland the old ways and the old pilgrims, he would sell his ships, coin down his silver and gold plate, and pack off his men to found a Settlement in Virginia. For already in his father’s day the name of Captain John Smith had been praised in all seaports, and it was said that the Queen would knight any such man as founded a great settlement beyond the seas. But Edward Colman’s father had died four years before, when King James had been in England one year, and although King James had set up more firmly than ever the Reformed Church of England, Edward Colman the elder had died a ship-owner still.
Neither did Edward Colman the younger sell all the ships that came to him, though four of the little ones he sold into the East Counties. As for Virginia he said little of it; but he bought for himself the book of
John Smith’s Voyages,
and, having read it slowly aloud to Magdalena Koop, her father and the deacon of the Dutch Brethren, he remarked three days after that all that talk of palisadoes, hut-building, Indian savages and relief ships made little mention of gold to come back. He figured out that to send a ship of forty men to the New World would cost him £240, and he saw no three hundred pounds’ worth of gear to return. And, as he worked it out again, to keep — with the Golden Fleeces of this their Britain at his very doors — a cogger with fifteen men, good screwjacks for packing the wool and storage places for seven and forty tons of fleece, cost him in the year but,£270 and he had for his pains a profit of
£320
a ship. It was work illicit, and the ships were profitable; but if he lost a ship a year — the ship costing him
£207
to build — he was yet, given the price of her lading, eighteen pounds in pocket. And, in the four years that he had had his father’s ships he had lost not one. How should he lose them? There were no ships of the King’s upon the sea to take them there — and no ship of the King’s and no men of the King’s could come to take him or his goods in the port of Rye. For was he not a jurat, and was not Rye an ancient town of the Cinque Ports where the King’s writ did not run but only the Lord Warden’s?
On the quayside he had the little, proud, ancient town behind his back. Along the brink of the grey rocks ran the brown walls, with house windows let into them and house roofs red above them. And all the roofs with their slopes and cants ran up to the sloping church roof, so that for all the world Rye town made a shape like the pyramids of Egypt, that were then one of the seven wonders of the world. Beyond the brown gate, outside the town, and low down were the little thatched cottages of Rye-in-the-Foreign; here the Dutchmen mostly lived, so close together that thatched roof touched thatched roof. But they had the peculiarity, those Dutchmen, that they worked, each one, in the roof space, not underground in cellars as was the English custom; thus each thatched roof had in it a door with a pulley before it into which to haul the packs of wool and from which to let down the bales of cloth. This gave to their settlement an odd and foreign look; for who would perch in the air like a bird when there was the solid earth into which to burrow? —
Edward Colman had in his house in the peak of the hill a coat of cramoisyn, many ruffs, three hats, each with a tuft of feathers, jewelled in the brim; he had silken cross garters, he had the red robes and ermine of a Baron of the Five Ports. He
had three dozen plates of silver; he had nine chests of household gear and seven beds of down on Flemish bedsteads. He had most things that a man could desire to be merry with and a cellar full of high wines, sack, and metheglin for his morning drinks. But on that morning he dressed like any Irish costermonger of London, in a blue coat woven by Magdalena; in great baggy breeches, made by Magdalena, in a black slouch hat that had been Magdalena’s father’s, and brown boots, all of one skin, that he tied about his knees with pieces of twine. He moved slowly and composedly about his work, that kept him till the fall of dusk. He had with him his sailmakers’ gang of seven men, that had fifteen pounds by the year each, and having left the new sail bent in the cold sunlight and fresh breezes, to dry and stretch, he moved across to his second ship to hoist on her a sail that was but part new. For in February the winter sleep of ships is nearly over and shortly his crews would be coming back from the inlands where, in the winter, they joined other builders’ bands that set up castles and re-roofed great houses.
Edward Colman’s mind busied itself all day with little calculations of costs and of tonnages. He had before him the problem of building himself one new ship or two; for his two smallest coggers that had been built by his great-great-great-grandfather were already one hundred and twenty years old, and their ancient timbers had so incorrigible an inclination now to collect barnacles and weeds of the sea and to let in water to the cargo spaces, that, along with the time spent in scraping their bottoms, the time they lost in being blown out into the Western Ocean, and the discredit they brought him with the owners of cargoes, they offended his sense of neatness and of despatch. He would keep them that summer in running; but next winter the one should serve him for firewood and the other for a storehouse for old sailcloths. He had then to consider what make of ships he should build to take their places. It lay between two ships of thirty tons that should take wool, or one of sixty that might trade with Spain — for there was a great fashion of Spanish things setting up in the land with the coming of King James. He had a certain itching even to try adventuring a ship to the continent across the seas, or past that continent to the Eastern Indies. But of this last he was not very certain.
He was not even so very certain of the wooling trade; though he was certain enough that a great ship of sixty tons would be an ill venture in these days. For if the King’s ships certainly could not take him on sea or in the ports, the new King, who was newly active to stop the export of wool — the new Scots King, who called himself
Pater Patrice
and was yet doubted by his children, who were after all children of the great Eliza — the new King, who was as yet little known in Sussex or the Kent lands adjoining, might yet press hard upon the wool trade in Kent and Sussex ashore. It was handier to move two cargoes of thirty-two tons of wool across the marshes to his coggers than it would be to make one shipload of sixty-five. Hence wool called for two small ships.
But, on the other hand, though he doubted it, the King might prove to have the power to stop the wooling trade for good and all. The men who came rarely from London town spoke of new laws against wool-exporting. New laws were nothing; those at present in force meant death for the principals and maiming and imprisonment for such as aided to move wool across the sea-shore counties. The old laws would have been good, maybe, to stop wooling; but there was no one to put the old laws in force; the Five Ports were solid fortresses with their privileges and their charters and their rights prescriptive. It was true that King James had not yet finally confirmed their charters; but would he dare to go against the Portsmen? Eliza herself had not dared; but new kings, new ways! The King had sent the new Lord Lieutenant of Sussex down into those parts both to inquire into the state of Rye harbour that was every year more and more filling up with shingle and ooze. The Lord Lieutenant had a commission to inquire as to how the harbour might be amended and preserved; but he had also the power of a commissioner of the wool-staple to inquire how the illicit trade in wool might best be amended and put an end to.
Thus, if, on the one hand, Edward Colman might willingly have gone to the Lord Lieutenant to dine with him and to advise him how best, with sea walls and fences, the shingle might be made to drift out from the harbour, he had been most unwilling to go to the Lord Lieutenant — for who better than himself could, if questioned, advise him how to dispose his men for the prevention of the wool trade? and who was more unwilling than himself to give advice that should lead to that prevention? Therefore he stayed in the mud and in his old clothes and smiled back at the town when, from above the walls, there came the sound of trumpets and he could see, going down in a long procession, upon their horses, the scarlet and ermine robes of his brothers and com-barons, the black and gold of the jurats, the pikeheads of the javelin-men and the nodding tufts of plumes of the Mayoress’s horse litter. He smiled at the horse litter. For it had been instituted for the Mayoress, two years before, when Anne Jeal’s father had for the fourth time become Mayor and Anne Jeal herself — her mother being lately dead — for the first time, Mayoress. Queen Elizabeth had been the first that Anne Jeal had seen to ride in a litter between two horses. Formerly the Mayoresses of Rye had ridden pillion on a white mule; but nothing that was not good enough for a queen had been good enough for Anne Jeal. So Rye, it being then the speaker town of the Five Ports, had bought for its Mayoress a white litter with silken curtains, drawing up to a peak, and ostrich feather plumes at the four corners and a gilded device, half lion, half ship, at the very top where the Queen had shown the lion of England.
The grave and slow procession wound down the hill at a foot pace; passed through the gate and turned inland towards Udimore, which was distant three miles on the ridge of hills. It could be seen to glint, scarlet and black, up the London road, and though Rye Foreign, and Colman smiled again as he thought what misleading counsel my Lord Lieutenant would get from those grave and bearded men in scarlet. He was not minded to lie himself; but if his elders would lie in his cause and theirs it was beyond him to stay them.
Towards two of the afternoon he wiped his hands upon a piece of cloth; climbed up the rope ladder that mounted the rocks and the high wall beside his house and sat in his houseplace to take the orders of four Lewes merchants that had a mind for wine to be brought from Burgundy. Whilst he dressed himself, about half-past three, in a white shirt with a ruff, a black coat and cross-gartered stockings of a sober grey silk, he saw from his window that down below men in steel breastplates and half-helmets were marching along the quaysides near his ships. He considered that they must be soldiers of the Lord Lieutenant sent to survey the harbour, and, since he was very little minded to come against my Lord’s men, he took from a chest two oranges and a piece of cane-tobacco, and down the angled, cobbled, narrow streets took his way in the half-dusk to the house of Magdalena Koop.
The Pastor’s house lay nearest of all to the gateway of the town itself; the Dutchmen that came latest having been given lodgings on these town lands which were just beyond the walls, separated from the town by what was in winter a passable stream and in summer an almost impassable roadway where the swine, in spite of ordinances, waddled all day amid puddles and wet depressions by the wallsides. Rye Foreign, whilst it contributed with its taxes to the glory of the ancient town, enjoyed none of the privileges of the Ports; it had the right neither of infangtheff nor of utfangtheff, and, far from being free of all marketable fees throughout the realm, the foreigners paid toll, lastage, tonnage, soccage, succage and poundage and market fees there in Rye town itself. Nevertheless such Dutchmen — and in that term were included Protestants from all Holland, Germany and Almain — such Dutchmen as had been there from the earlier and persecutions from the various sects — the Brethren, Apostles, Saints, Anabaptists and Schmalkaldners, had prospered very well and were there content to remain with their progenies, rather than go back to their native lands, though persecutions had ceased. They awaited with tranquil minds their comings of the Saints, their Reigns on Earth, their Days of Revenge, of Atonement or of Rejoicing; they built houses and conventicles for their pastors; they wove, cured bacon, dried simples, traded in cordials or changed money; they buried, they married, they were born and they were baptized — or they refused to baptize — much at their own sweet wills, denouncing only occasionally to the Privy Council in London, their rulers in the ancient town; and denouncing every seventh day or three times a day, according to their faiths and practices, the bishops and clergy of the Established Church, or the deacons and pastors of the six other several sects that existed amongst them. They were beginning already to be called Puritans in the town of Rye, and several of their sects had many followers amongst the poorer townsmen and yokels.