The White Devil

ᗪ尺卂匚ㄩㄥ卂-6

MINA MURRAY’S JOURNAL
24 July. Whitby.—Lucy met me at the station, look-
ing sweeter and lovelier than ever, and we drove up to the
house at the Crescent in which they have rooms. This is a
lovely place. The little river, the Esk, runs through a deep
valley, which broadens out as it comes near the harbour. A
great viaduct runs across, with high piers, through which
the view seems somehow further away than it really is. The
valley is beautifully green, and it is so steep that when you
are on the high land on either side you look right across it,
unless you are near enough to see down. The houses of the
old town—the side away from us, are all red-roofed, and
seem piled up one over the other anyhow, like the pictures
we see of Nuremberg. Right over the town is the ruin of
Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which
is the scene of part of ‘Marmion,’ where the girl was built up
in the wall. It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full
of beautiful and romantic bits. There is a legend that a white
lady is seen in one of the windows. Between it and the town
there is another church, the parish one, round which is a
big graveyard, all full of tombstones. This is to my mind the
nicest spot in Whitby, for it lies right over the town, and has
a full view of the harbour and all up the bay to where the
headland called Kettleness stretches out into the sea. It de-
scends so steeply over the harbour that part of the bank has
fallen away, and some of the graves have been destroyed.
In one place part of the stonework of the graves stretches
out over the sandy pathway far below. There are walks, with
seats beside them, through the churchyard, and people go
and sit there all day long looking at the beautiful view and
enjoying the breeze.
I shall come and sit here often myself and work. Indeed,
I am writing now, with my book on my knee, and listening
to the talk of three old men who are sitting beside me. They
seem to do nothing all day but sit here and talk.
The harbour lies below me, with, on the far side, one long
granite wall stretching out into the sea, with a curve out-
wards at the end of it, in the middle of which is a lighthouse.
A heavy seawall runs along outside of it. On the near side,
the seawall makes an elbow crooked inversely, and its end
too has a lighthouse. Between the two piers there is a narrow
opening into the harbour, which then suddenly widens.
It is nice at high water, but when the tide is out it shoals
away to nothing, and there is merely the stream of the Esk,
running between banks of sand, with rocks here and there.
Outside the harbour on this side there rises for about half a
mile a great reef, the sharp of which runs straight out from
behind the south lighthouse. At the end of it is a buoy with
a bell, which swings in bad weather, and sends in a mourn-
ful sound on the wind.
They have a legend here that when a ship is lost bells are
heard out at sea. I must ask the old man about this. He is
coming this way …
He is a funny old man. He must be awfully old, for his
face is gnarled and twisted like the bark of a tree. He tells
me that he is nearly a hundred, and that he was a sailor in
the Greenland fishing fleet when Waterloo was fought. He
is, I am afraid, a very sceptical person, for when I asked him
about the bells at sea and the White Lady at the abbey he
said very brusquely,
‘I wouldn’t fash masel’ about them, miss. Them things
be all wore out. Mind, I don’t say that they never was, but I
do say that they wasn’t in my time. They be all very well for
comers and trippers, an’ the like, but not for a nice young
lady like you. Them feet-folks from York and Leeds that be
always eatin’ cured herrin’s and drinkin’ tea an’ lookin’ out
to buy cheap jet would creed aught. I wonder masel’ who’d
be bothered tellin’ lies to them, even the newspapers, which
is full of fool-talk.’
I thought he would be a good person to learn interest-
ing things from, so I asked him if he would mind telling
me something about the whale fishing in the old days. He
was just settling himself to begin when the clock struck six,
whereupon he laboured to get up, and said,
‘I must gang ageeanwards home now, miss. My grand-
daughter doesn’t like to be kept waitin’ when the tea is ready,
for it takes me time to crammle aboon the grees, for there
be a many of ‘em, and miss, I lack belly-timber sairly by the
clock.’
He hobbled away, and I could see him hurrying, as well
as he could, down the steps. The steps are a great feature on
the place. They lead from the town to the church, there are
hundreds of them, I do not know how many, and they wind
up in a delicate curve. The slope is so gentle that a horse
could easily walk up and down them.
I think they must originally have had something to do
with the abbey. I shall go home too. Lucy went out, visit-
ing with her mother, and as they were only duty calls, I did
not go.
1 August.—I came up here an hour ago with Lucy, and
we had a most interesting talk with my old friend and the
two others who always come and join him. He is evidently
the Sir Oracle of them, and I should think must have been
in his time a most dictatorial person.
He will not admit anything, and down faces everybody.
If he can’t out-argue them he bullies them, and then takes
their silence for agreement with his views.
Lucy was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock.
She has got a beautiful colour since she has been here.
I noticed that the old men did not lose any time in com-
ing and sitting near her when we sat down. She is so sweet
with old people, I think they all fell in love with her on the
spot. Even my old man succumbed and did not contradict
her, but gave me double share instead. I got him on the sub-
ject of the legends, and he went off at once into a sort of
sermon. I must try to remember it and put it down.
‘It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel, that’s what it be
and nowt else. These bans an’ wafts an’ boh-ghosts an’ bar-
guests an’ bogles an’ all anent them is only fit to set bairns
an’ dizzy women a’belderin’. They be nowt but air-blebs.
They, an’ all grims an’ signs an’ warnin’s, be all invented
by parsons an’ illsome berk-bodies an’ railway touters to
skeer an’ scunner hafflin’s, an’ to get folks to do somethin’
that they don’t other incline to. It makes me ireful to think
o’ them. Why, it’s them that, not content with printin’ lies
on paper an’ preachin’ them out of pulpits, does want to
be cuttin’ them on the tombstones. Look here all around
you in what airt ye will. All them steans, holdin’ up their
heads as well as they can out of their pride, is acant, simply
tumblin’ down with the weight o’ the lies wrote on them,
‘Here lies the body’ or ‘Sacred to the memory’ wrote on all
of them, an’ yet in nigh half of them there bean’t no bodies
at all, an’ the memories of them bean’t cared a pinch of snuff
about, much less sacred. Lies all of them, nothin’ but lies of
one kind or another! My gog, but it’ll be a quare scowder-
ment at the Day of Judgment when they come tumblin’ up
in their death-sarks, all jouped together an’ trying’ to drag
their tombsteans with them to prove how good they was,
some of them trimmlin’ an’ dithering, with their hands that
dozzened an’ slippery from lyin’ in the sea that they can’t
even keep their gurp o’ them.’
I could see from the old fellow’s self-satisfied air and the
way in which he looked round for the approval of his cro-
nies that he was ‘showing off,’ so I put in a word to keep him
going.
‘Oh, Mr. Swales, you can’t be serious. Surely these tomb-
stones are not all wrong?’
‘Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin’
where they make out the people too good, for there be folk
that do think a balm-bowl be like the sea, if only it be their
own. The whole thing be only lies. Now look you here. You
come here a stranger, an’ you see this kirkgarth.’
I nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did
not quite understand his dialect. I knew it had something
to do with the church.
He went on, ‘And you consate that all these steans be
aboon folk that be haped here, snod an’ snog?’ I assented
again. ‘Then that be just where the lie comes in. Why, there
be scores of these laybeds that be toom as old Dun’s ‘bac-
cabox on Friday night.’
He nudged one of his companions, and they all laughed.
‘And, my gog! How could they be otherwise? Look at that
one, the aftest abaft the bier-bank, read it!’
I went over and read, ‘Edward Spencelagh, master mari-
ner, murdered by pirates off the coast of Andres, April, 1854,
age 30.’ When I came back Mr. Swales went on,
‘Who brought him home, I wonder, to hap him here?
Murdered off the coast of Andres! An’ you consated his
body lay under! Why, I could name ye a dozen whose bones
lie in the Greenland seas above,’ he pointed northwards, ‘or
where the currants may have drifted them. There be the
steans around ye. Ye can, with your young eyes, read the
small print of the lies from here. This Braithwaite Lowery,
I knew his father, lost in the Lively off Greenland in ‘20, or
Andrew Woodhouse, drowned in the same seas in 1777, or
John Paxton, drowned off Cape Farewell a year later, or old
John Rawlings, whose grandfather sailed with me, drowned
in the Gulf of Finland in ‘50. Do ye think that all these
men will have to make a rush to Whitby when the trumpet
sounds? I have me antherums aboot it! I tell ye that when
they got here they’d be jommlin’ and jostlin’ one another
that way that it ‘ud be like a fight up on the ice in the old
days, when we’d be at one another from daylight to dark,
an’ tryin’ to tie up our cuts by the aurora borealis.’ This was
evidently local pleasantry, for the old man cackled over it,
and his cronies joined in with gusto.
‘But,’ I said, ‘surely you are not quite correct, for you start
on the assumption that all the poor people, or their spirits,
will have to take their tombstones with them on the Day of
Judgment. Do you think that will be really necessary?’
‘Well, what else be they tombstones for? Answer me that,
miss!’
‘To please their relatives, I suppose.’
‘To please their relatives, you suppose!’ This he said with
intense scorn. ‘How will it pleasure their relatives to know
that lies is wrote over them, and that everybody in the place
knows that they be lies?’
He pointed to a stone at our feet which had been laid
down as a slab, on which the seat was rested, close to the
edge of the cliff. ‘Read the lies on that thruff-stone,’ he said.
The letters were upside down to me from where I sat,
but Lucy was more opposite to them, so she leant over and
read, ‘Sacred to the memory of George Canon, who died,
in the hope of a glorious resurrection, on July 29,1873, fall-
ing from the rocks at Kettleness. This tomb was erected by
his sorrowing mother to her dearly beloved son.‘He was the
only son of his mother, and she was a widow.’ Really, Mr.
Swales, I don’t see anything very funny in that!’ She spoke