The Book of Ebenezer le Page Read online

  I have known one happy marriage, and that was my sister’s; and, if ever a girl deserved it, it was Tabitha. She was a good girl. I don’t mean she was strait-laced, she was full of fun; but she wasn’t loose, and was as loyal as only the best sort of fellow can be. She went out to service to the Priaulx from Le Courtil à Bas from the time she left school, and they thought the world of her and treated her as one of the family. The eldest son, Jack, wanted her to marry him, but she wouldn’t. Her heart was set on Jean Batiste from Perelle. He was only a young fisherman and lived in a cottage smaller than ours. La Prissy said Tabitha was a born fool, seeing as Jack Priaulx would have Le Courtil à Bas when the old man died. ‘That Jean Batiste got nothing,’ said Prissy. ‘He is nobody.’ Tabitha said, ‘He is Jean.’

  I must give him his due and say he was a nice chap; and he was good to Tabitha. I reckon I was a bit jealous of Jean. Tabby had always trusted me and told me everything. I think she still trusted me; but her confidences was for Jean. My mother liked him all right when Tabitha brought him along to tea Sunday afternoons; but she didn’t set much store by marrying and giving in marriage in this world. They was engaged for two years before they could get married. He was an only son and lived with his mother, who was an invalid; but when she saw he was going to be all right after she’d gone, she was willing to go. The wedding was at the Câtel Church and arranged from Le Courtil à Bas; and everything was given by Mrs Priaulx. They didn’t go away for a honeymoon, but settled down right away in their little house at Perelle. It was a hard life for Tabitha. They had enough, but only enough. The ground is sandy round there and they couldn’t grow much; and there was no protection against the southwest winds and, in rough weather, often the waves would go right over the house. Tabitha must have had some anxious times when Jean was out to sea and it was rough. ‘I always knew he would come back to me,’ she said.

  Well, she had him for ten years. He had done his training in the Militia and when the war against the Kaiser came, he was among the first to go. He was killed in 1915. Tabby didn’t make a fuss. I never saw her cry. She went back in service for the Priaulx and, when the old people died, she stayed on with Jack and his young wife, Annette Gaudion. It wasn’t that she forgot Jean. The last thing she said to me before she died, and she was by no means an old woman, was ‘I want to go to Jean now.’

  It’s strange they had no children. It wasn’t because they didn’t want any; and I find it hard to believe it was because they couldn’t. I have often wondered about that. They say children are born because of the love the parents have for each other. I haven’t noticed that myself. Perhaps the children are born because the love of the parents for each other is not perfect. Perhaps the children come into the world through a gap between the parents. I don’t know. I do know that Jean and Tabitha was very close. It wasn’t that they made a show of it, or said silly things to each other. They seemed to understand each other with very few words; and when they was together, there was a quietness around them.

  I haven’t got no children, that I know of; but that don’t mean I’ve been a perfect lover. I haven’t led any girl up the garden, either. When I took a girl out I soon let her know what it was I wanted. I kept my nose to the ground and, if there was nothing doing, I trotted off. All the same, I often think it is a pity one got to do such things. When old Jim used to come round for me to go out with him, he’d say, ‘Es-che pour la royne, ou es-che pour la nanny-goat, eh?’ If I said, ‘Ch’est pour la royne,’ we’d go to the Pictures. If I said, ‘Ch’est pour la nanny-goat,’ we’d go square-pushing. He didn’t care which. I was the one for chasing the girls, he wasn’t. The girls hung round him; but with most of them he was more like a big brother. If one got desperate, he was good-natured.

  7

  Jim. Jim Mahy. Jim Mahy, my chum. Nobody know where his dust and his bones lie, or exactly where he died, or how; but he is dead. If I don’t put up a monument to Jim Mahy, who will? His children was too young to remember him and, anyway, left Guernsey long ago; and Phoebe is dead, such as she was, God forgive her! I wasn’t such a good friend to him, either. I would give everything I have, and I have more than people think, for him to walk in the back door this minute and say, ‘Wharro, Ebby!’ and I would say, ‘Wharro, Jim!’

  It was over the football I met Jim. I liked the football, me. I played for the North for three years, the good old chocolate and blue; and the Rangers didn’t get much of a look in those years, I can tell you. They never was much cop, anyhow; but then what could you expect from a lot of Townies? Jim didn’t play for the North regular, but he was in the reserve and played a few matches. He had the weight, but not the speed. I was a boy at school yet the day I saw Jim the first time. I was playing for the Vale and he was playing for the Capelles Boys’ on Delancey Park. I dribbled the ball right from under his nose and scored a goal. He tried to charge me, but I was too quick for him and he fell over. After the game, he said to me, ‘Damme, you’re quick on your feet, you!’ I looked at him. ‘A pity you fall over,’ I said. I knew there and then I didn’t want to play against him ever again: at football, or in any other way. I wanted to be always on his side.

  Everybody liked Jim. The only person I ever knew who didn’t was Liza Quéripel. She said he was a charmer. I don’t know where she learnt that word. There was nothing put on about Jim. He wasn’t like Horace, who showed you his teeth while his eyes was reckoning up what he could make out of you. Jim had big grey eyes and, when you said anything to him, he would look at you for a long time with his head on one side like a big dog; and when the smile came, it was in his eyes first and they’d wrinkle up at the corners; and then he would open his big mouth and laugh. ‘Ça va!’ he’d say.

  He was a real farmer’s boy, and slow; but he was nobody’s fool. I don’t think anybody could pull his leg really; though sometimes he let chaps think they did, rather than make bad feeling. He was big and clumsy and slouched along as if he had all the time in the world. If we was late for going anywhere, it was no use trying to get Jim to hurry. ‘Aw, we can always go another day,’ he’d say. I don’t know why Liza didn’t like him because even my mother did. Her serious old face would light up every time he came into the house; and my father said he was a fine strapping lad. As the years went on and we was still always going about together, my Aunt Prissy said, ‘I will say for your friend, Jim Mahy, he come of a good family; but it’s high time he began to think of looking for a wife.’

  It’s true Jim’s people was much better off than us; but they never made me feel it. I was always made welcome. His father owned the farm and the cottages and vergées of land; though most of it have long since been sold, and there are bungalows built where Jim and me used to cross the meadow to stake the cows. The farm itself is a guest-house now and owned by I don’t know who. It belonged to Jim’s sister while she lived, and she haven’t been dead for so long. I can’t believe that if Jim was alive now he would be an old man. He was never old. The kitchen where I ate so many meals with him was three or four times the size of ours; and there was lovely copper pots and pans on the walls, and always a big fire blazing on the hearth. I will never feel warm and happy again as long as I live, the way I used to feel those Saturday nights when I was sitting in that kitchen having a good supper with Jim.

  Jim’s mother was a de Putron from St Martin’s, and of a better family and better off than his father. A lot of people had to pay rentes to Mrs Mahy, though we didn’t; and she had money in the bank and owned a house in St Martin’s and another in St Saviour’s. She could have lived without working, yet she was busy from morning to night; only somehow she always managed to make you feel she was a lady. As far as I know, farming those days didn’t pay any better than it do now; but that didn’t worry Jim’s father. If there was a bad year, he knew he could depend on his wife’s money to make it up. He always looked well-to-do and, when he was togged up to go to the Cattle Show, he looked as if he owned the island. It was Jim did the work.

  Jim could have
gone to Elizabeth College, if he had wanted to; but he wouldn’t go. He only went to the Capelles. His one idea was to work on the farm. ‘I don’t have to go to Elizabeth College to learn how to milk a cow,’ he said. His brothers, Wilfred and Gerald, went to the Secondary School, or the States Intermediate, as they preferred to call it; but they was younger than Jim and more spoilt by their mother, especially Gerald, the youngest. The sister, Lydia, who was next to Jim, was spoilt by her father. The darling Lydia must have everything she fancied and be brought up to do nothing at all. She had long white hands and wouldn’t even help the girl in the dairy, for fear they got dirty. She passed her time reading love stories and playing the piano and painting flowers on satin. I had no patience with her. I would have given her a turn on the purain cart, if I’d had my way; but Jim waited on her hand and foot. ‘After all, she’s my sister,’ he said.

  I suppose some people would say she was beautiful. She was tall for a girl and thin and had a long pale face and big dreamy eyes and always looked as if she was going to cry. She floated about in a dress of pale grey or blue with a chiffon veil like a shawl over her shoulders, and had a very small waist with her skirt trailing to the ground; and she wore a rose in her bosom. She had a great romance in her life. It was talked about from one end of the island to the other. Myself, I don’t believe Terence de Freis was real. He came out of a book. He was a big, strong chap and might have been a boxer, but he looked like a woman dressed up. I don’t remember his face now. I know he had long black hair that curled over his coat collar and a big black moustache. It wasn’t a natural moustache like my father’s; or even mine, when I tried to grow one. It looked as if it had been grown in a greenhouse. I remember he carried a walking stick with a silver knob.

  He said his father was a ‘veterinary farrier’. I didn’t know what that was, but it turned out he was a blacksmith at Bailiff’s Cross. Terence himself worked in the office of Advocate Randall by the Court; but he was only a clerk. He just copied. He didn’t know nothing. The great lovers would walk together to St Sampson’s Church arm-in-arm every Sunday evening for everybody to see them; and after the service they would go to Town and walk to the end of the White Rock. The good people those days used to walk to the end of the White Rock after church so as the women could see each other’s clothes. Jim and me would go sometimes, for a laugh. Lydia was too much lost in love to speak to her brother on the White Rock. She would be hanging on to the arm of the dear Terence and looking up into his face as if she was going to melt into him there and then in front of everybody. All the women was saying how beautiful she was; but I expect they said other things as well. La Prissy said, ‘Who are they, those de Freis, for goodness sake? They haven’t got the paper to wipe their backsides with! She will soon find out, that girl, when the poverty come in through the door, the love go out through the window.’

  He left her. The reason was never made known. He went off to Canada, and the last we heard of him was he had joined the Rocky Mountain Police. Lydia went into a decline. She got whiter and whiter in the face and thinner and thinner, and lay all day long on the sofa by the fire in the front room reading books called The Princess Novelettes, which had pictures of loving couples just like her and Terence on the cover. Now and again she would put her hand on her bosom and cough; and sometimes she managed to spit. Everybody in the house waited on her; even the young Gerald, who was a wicked little bugger. Jim had to take his boots off and leave them on the mat before he went in the front room, because she couldn’t bear to have rough men around her. I told him he was a fool. ‘Ah well, it might be you, or me,’ he said.

  Sunday evenings she had to be driven to church in the dog-cart, and she would walk up the aisle between her mother and father, holding on to their arms. After church, she was driven to Town and, by some miracle, she had the strength to walk to the end of the White Rock. She didn’t look at anybody, but everybody looked at her. ‘Mais qu’elle a souffert! mais qu’elle a souffert!’ the women said. I can remember seeing her myself, walking between her parents with a pale blue ostrich-feather boa draped over her shoulders and hanging down, and wearing a pale blue dress and long white gloves and a white hat. When Hetty saw her, she said, ‘Ah, la pauvre Lydia! la pauvre Lydia! Chn’est pas pour longtemps.’ Prissy said, ‘Elle sera en vie quand nous sommes tous morts, tu verras!’ She was right. Lydia was the last alive of Jim’s people, and got everything that was left.

  Going down the White Rock of a Sunday evening wasn’t my idea of going to Town. It was going on the Albert Pier of a Bank Holiday. Nowadays it is offices and rows of motor cars; but in those days they used to have the Fair there. The Pier was like a carpet under your feet with confetti; and every fellow carried a teaser with a mop of strips of coloured paper on the end to tease the girls. There was swinging-boats that swung right over the water, and coconut shies where you could have three goes a penny. I nearly always knocked off two out of three. I was a good shot. Jim wasn’t so good at the coconut shies, but there was a strong-man machine you had to hit with a heavy hammer, and, if you rang the bell, you got a coconut. Jim rang the bell every time. It was three tries a penny, the same as the other; but Jim used to give two of the coconuts back to the fellow, or he would have ruined him.

  What I liked best was to go on the merry-go-round. Jim and me would sit on two horses side by side and gallop up and down and round and round, while the music of the steam-organ was playing ‘Over the Waves’. I spent a lot of pennies on the merry-go-round. There was also stalls where you could win prizes, if you was lucky with numbers. I have never been one to go in for lotteries and games of chance. I like to know what I am going to get for my money. Jim would have a go; and once he won a lovely plush box with shells round the edge, and a picture of the Houses of Parliament on the cover. He took it home and gave it to his mother.

  One Whitsun, I’m not sure which, I think it was the year after my father got killed, the Great Sequois came to Guernsey for the Fair. I thought from his name he was a Frenchman, but he didn’t speak as if he was French; and a chap from off one of the colliers told me he was a Cockney. He was on a waggon with a brass band. Talk of electric in him: I bet the planchette would have written out answers to anything he asked! He cured the people of the rheumatics by just feeling their legs. Old Peter Boissel, who had walked on two sticks for years, climbed up the ladder into the waggon with the help of other people; and the next minute came dancing down, and waving his sticks above his head. It’s true he was back on his sticks in a week, and doubled up; but Sequois had gone away by then. He also sold bottles of the Elixir of Life for a shilling. It was green. He said as long as you could drink it you would never die. I didn’t buy a bottle, because I didn’t think I needed it then; but I’m not so sure I wouldn’t have, if it was now. I heard after that he got it from Cumber, the chemist, in Fountain Street, and it was out of the big green bottle over the shop window. It cost him a penny a gallon.

  His great stunt was pulling out teeth without pain. He pulled out hundreds of teeth that night. The people was all mad to have their teeth out. They said he didn’t hurt at all; but the brass band made such a row while he was doing it they couldn’t hear themselves screaming. It happened poor old Jim had toothache that night. It was a big one at the back that hurt, he said. I said he was lucky: it had happened just at the right time. It was only sixpence a tooth. Up the ladder he went and paid the sixpence. He sat in the chair. The band played and Sequois pulled out the tooth. He put it in Jim’s hand. There was nothing wrong with it. Jim knew there ought to have been a hole in it, because he had felt it with his tongue. ‘Hi, you’ve pulled out the wrong one!’ said Jim, ‘it’s the other side.’ Back he was in the chair and his jaw open, and Sequois pulled out the other. It had a hole in it all right. ‘I’m not going to pay you for this one,’ said Jim. ‘That’s all right, boy!’ said Sequois: ‘Two for the price of one! Two for the price of one! Walk up, ladies and gents! Two for the price of one!’ ‘That’s all very well,’ said Jim, when he
came down the steps, ‘but it don’t put the other one back.’

  I only go to Town when I got to these days and I haven’t been at night for years. It is dead compared to what it used to be. It used to be good of a Saturday night. The shops was open to nine or ten, and everybody was there, except the gentry, of course, who did their shopping in the morning. I remember one Saturday night especially. It must have been before Sequois because my father was alive. My mother had come to Town with him in the trap, and I was with Jim. She didn’t bother about what I might be up to, as a rule, if I was out with Jim; but that night, when she saw us, she said, ‘Now mind you boys don’t go up Horn Street, or they’ll throw rotten eggs at you.’ I wondered how my mother could know about Horn Street.

  It put ideas into our heads and we went down to the Green Shutters to have a look at the whores. There wasn’t none of them on show. All the shutters was closed, so they was all busy; but Madame Hamon herself was standing in the door. She said, ‘Bon soir, messieurs,’ and we said, ‘Bon soir, madame.’ Then we went for a walk along Havelet and up Hauteville and came back the short cut down Horn Street. My mother and father was standing against the railings by the market, looking over at the fire-swallower and the cheap-jack and the Salvation Army down below; and the German Band was playing round the corner of the Commercial Arcade. We was following our noses to the French Halls for to buy hot chestnuts we could smell roasting, but my mother spotted us and called us over. ‘Where have you two been?’ she said. ‘Aw, we’ve just come down Horn Street,’ said Jim, ‘but they didn’t throw no rotten eggs at us.’ My father doubled up laughing, and even my mother had to smile.