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The peep of dawn discovered them swinging in desperate proximity to the Isle of Swona and the surf bursting close under their stern. There was in this place a hamlet of the inhabitants, fisher-folk and wreckers; their huts stood close about the head of the beach.
The night's catch of mackerel had been good, and the small room with its zinc bar was noisy with fisher-folk wiry fishermen with legs and chests as hard as iron; slim brown fisher girls as hardy as the men, capricious, independent and saucy; a race of blonds for the most part, with the temperament of brunettes.
In the evening she would spend some time chatting with other lasses in the Row; but she never had a very long spell of that pastime, for she had to be at work winter and summer by about five or six in the morning. The fisher-folk do not waste many candles by keeping late hours. She was very healthy and powerful, very ignorant, and very modest.
Was it merely the story of those fisher-folk, half apprehended, and yet evoked and subtly clad with form and shape by the strange workshop of imagination? "To all of these I am quite content to say 'Yes. The sight does not trouble me, or, indeed, anything but interest me. I am not superstitious; I am not nervous in the least.
Each winter, instead of lounging in flannels at the Poinciana, he was out with guides and dogs in the Northwest after moose and caribou. He preferred polo to tennis. He would rather pass a fortnight in oilskins with the rough and ready fisher-folk of the Maine coast than don the white ducks and smart caps of his wealthy yachting friends. In a word, society and riches had not spoiled him.
Ord wrote of the place I have reason to doubt the civility shown by them to strangers. It is, according to some who have known Staithes for a long while, less than fifty years ago that the fisher-folk were hostile to a stranger on very small provocation, and only the entirely inoffensive could expect to sojourn in the village without being a target for stones.
Ask any fisherman what he thinks of the "harmless" Starfish, and he will call it a pest and a nuisance. "It gets into the crab traps," he says, "and eats all the bait. And when we are line-fishing it sucks the bait off our hooks, and sometimes swallows hook and all." Small wonder that Five-fingers, or Five-fingered Jack, as it is called, has no friend among fisher-folk.
"But did our Lord not call the righteous? Did he not call honest men about him James and John and Simon sturdy fisher-folk, who faced the night and the storm, worked hard, fared roughly, lived honestly, and led good cleanly lives with father and mother, or with wife and children? I do not know that he said anything special to convince them that they were sinners before he called them.
"Meet me on the south quay, soon after ten." Copplestone was down on the quay by ten o'clock. He became aware as he descended the road from the inn that the fisher-folk, who were always lounging about the sea-front, were being keenly interested in something that was going on there. Drawing nearer he found that an energetic bill-poster was attaching his bills to various walls and doors.
It never dawned on me that I would have to earn my bread and butter that had always come along. Moreover, I had never seen real poverty in others, for all the fisher-folk in our village seemed to have enough. I hated dress and frills, and envied no one. At school, and on the Riviera, and even in Wales, I had never noticed any want.
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