Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories/Onnie Dever
III.—ONNIE DEVER
ONNIE is a girl's name and it is not a mispronunciation of Annie. It is a convenient shortening of Honoria, which is far too majestic a name for a child.
It would have been grotesque to call Onnie Dever Honoria when I knew her first—though the long name would suit her very well now.
Indeed she is so grand now that I should not dare to call her anything but Miss Dever; and if I had to address a letter to her my inclination would be to embellish her name and write on the outside of the envelope: The Honourable Honoria—or to Her Honour, Honoria Dever. This would be wrong, of course; but any one who has seen the lady lately would find it excusable.
When Onnie Dever was young she lived with her parents and a great many other little Devers on an island off the coast of Connaught, which is the poorest of the four provinces of Ireland. The Atlantic Ocean washes the shores of Connaught, and Onnie's home was an island in that great sea. It was not, however, a very remote island. Only a narrow channel separated it from the mainland, and this channel went nearly dry at the bottom of a low tide. At the age of five—and legs are very short at the age of five—Onnie could splash across the channel when a spring tide was at its ebb.
There was no need for her to take off her shoes and stockings, for in those days she never wore any. When the tide was high the water in the channel was fifteen feet deep, and the only way of getting to the mainland was by boat.
The island was a very small one. It had two little cottages on it. One belonged to Onnie's father, whose name was Tom Dever; the other to her uncle, who was John Dever. John had nine children, and among them a Honoria, also called Onnie. This might have been confusing elsewhere, but in Connaught we have a way of getting over the difficulty of these similarities of name.
Tom's daughter was called Onnie Dever Tom, and the other girl was Onnie Dever John. It was thus that their names were entered in the register of the school they attended. And the school register is a solemn book inspected from time to time by a Government official—a book in which no one would venture to perpetrate a slang phrase or indulge in a joke. It is with Onnie Dever Tom that I am how concerned.
The children of the two families, some eight or ten of them at a time, went to school on the mainland. John and Tom took turns in ferrying them across the channel. When the time came for their return they stood in a group on the opposite shore and shouted until either John or Tom put out in a boat and ferried them home.
At very high tides the boat ran aground close up to Tom Dever's house, and an active child standing in the bow could jump right into the kitchen through the doorway—could almost have jumped into bed; but tides are as high as that only in March and September. During the rest of the year there is a small patch of beach to cross, even at full tide.
When I first met Onnie she must have been fourteen or fifteen years of age. She had stopped going to school. Her education was then complete; for she had reached what is called the sixth standard, and that is as far as the Irish educational authorities think a normal child ought to go.
At that time she possessed shoes and stockings, but wore them only on Sundays when she crossed to the mainland to go to church. The rest of the week she went barefooted, which was an economy for her parents and a convenience to herself. If you live on an island that, as well as being surrounded by, is also saturated with, water, it is much better to do without shoes and stockings.
I was sailing in a small boat, and the passage between the Devers' island and the mainland offered me a short cut home. The tide was ebbing, and the wind was very light. I knew I ought not to try the passage—that there probably would not be water enough for my boat; but I allowed myself to be tempted, hoping I might creep through.
The luck was all against me. The tide swept me down to a submerged rock. I heard the ominous banging of my centreboard. I hauled it up hurriedly. My boat, deprived of her power of going to windward, drifted sideways to the shore. I made desperate efforts to push her off and failed. The tide, ebbing swiftly, left my boat high and dry. I looked up and saw Onnie standing on the shore grinning.
I had to wait until the tide rose again. I am bound to say the time passed very pleasantly. Onnie was alone on the island, except for the youngest of John's children, who was a baby and lay placidly in a cradle near the fire. Onnie's father and mother, and John and his wife, had gone to our town to attend a fair. All the other children were at school. Onnie—that is, of course, Onnie Tom—had been left to take care of the island and the baby. I imagine she must have found her work dull, for she seemed really pleased to see me. She immediately offered to make tea for me.
I got the sails off my boat and followed her into the cottage. I realised almost at once that Onnie was a young woman with a future before her. She displayed a surprising efficiency in making tea. The fire was almost out when we entered the cottage. Onnie had it blazing round the kettle in a couple of minutes. She got out her mother's best cups and saucers. She cut slices of bread from a home-baked loaf, laid them flat along the palm of her hand and buttered them lavishly.
All the time she was at work she talked to me without shyness or embarrassment. Her subject was, of course, ready to hand and a tempting one—my stupidity in not getting my boat through the passage. In Onnie's opinion the thing could have been done. She explained to me with force exactly where my seamanship had been at fault.
From that we passed to the subject of boats in general, and the shortcomings of my particular boat. She happened to be a vessel of which I was both proud and fond. Onnie found out what my feelings were, and took the greatest pleasure in hurting them. This lasted until we had both finished tea. Then Onnie asked me whether I would like a lobster to take home with me. She said she knew of a hole in which there was generally a lobster lying.
We went out together to look for the lobster. No man of proper feelings would allow a young lady—it was as a young lady and not as a child that I had come to think of Onnie—to wade knee-deep after a fierce shellfish while he sat dry-footed on the shore. I took off my shoes and socks and followed Onnie into the middle of the channel. I hurt my feet a good deal and got very wet. Onnie gathered her single petticoat out of reach of the water, rolled up her sleeves and plunged her arms elbow-deep among the seaweed.
She brought out a lobster that had been lying—secure, it thought—under a ledge of rock. It flapped its tail furiously and made grabs in the air with its claws. Onnie held it by the middle of its back and laughed at its struggles.
I carried that lobster home with me and ate it. If I had known how great a lady Onnie was going to become afterwards I should have had the lobster stuffed and put in a glass case, so as to be able to offer it as evidence of the fact that I had been on intimate terms with Miss Dever in her early youth.
The next time I saw Onnie was two years later, and she was again in pursuit of shellfish. It was a very calm summer day and I was far out in the bay in my boat. The tide was a spring tide one of those that come in a long way and go out until one thinks the sea will disappear altogether. It was at its ebb at noon.
There is in our bay, beyond the farthest of the islands, a long reef of rocks which is well covered at half tide. It is just awash at the ebb of an ordinary tide, but emerges long and brown for a couple of hours when the spring tides have gone out their farthest. I slipped down towards this reef about noon, sailing free, with a gentle breeze on my quarter. A boat—a large, heavy black boat—lay with her bows out of the water at the end of the reef.
Among the rocks, scattered here and there, were eight or ten girls, barefooted, bareheaded, and bare-armed. Each of them had a tin can. They were gathering periwinkles among the pools. I could hear their voices as they shouted to each other. I bore slowly down on them and then, hauling my wind, circled round the outer side of the reef. I recognised Onnie Dever, most eager picker of all of them—busiest gathering the periwinkles; busiest at shouting jests; readiest with her laughter.
I drew past the reef and sailed away reflecting on the fate of the periwinkles. Dragged from their cool and pleasant homes they would be measured out in pints and quarts, paid for by the man who bought them with sixpences and shillings, which would go to buy ribbons for Onnie and her friends. Then, boiled and packed in huge cases, they would go to Manchester and to Warrington—to any of the group of smoke-grimed Lancashire towns where cotton is spun. There they would be piled in street barrows, with green labels stuck on them, and sold to pallid women to be eaten as a relish—picked from their shells with a pin and poised on slices of bread and margarine.
It seemed a far cry from our sunny bay to the flare-lit market-place of Bolton on a Saturday night—a great change from the sound of the laughter of merry girls to the raucous cries of the vendors. Such, I reflected, are the tricks that fate plays with us in life. As is the periwinkle so is the man—a card in a pack shuffled by a sportive destiny.
Sailing on summer seas leads naturally to facile philosophy; but, lest I should sentimentalise helplessly and lose my self-respect, I put my boat about and stood back towards the reef.
The girls were crowding into their boat when I reached them. Already the rising tide had covered most of the rocks, and left only the higher ones standing up like islands in a kind of Saragasso Sea of swaying brown weed. Onnie was the last to embark; giving one final shove-off with her foot she slid across the bow of the boat, climbed sternward and took the stroke oar.
Six of the girls rowed, keeping time and stroke with Onnie. When she started a song for them their bodies swung with her music. The breeze had nearly died away. The row-boat, with its sturdy pullers, soon distanced me; but for a long time I heard the girls' songs and fancied that I could distinguish Onnie's voice clear above the others.
In December of that year I saw Onnie Dever again under far different circumstances. It was at the railway station, and it chanced to be the day of the week on which the emigrants start in order to catch the transatlantic steamer at Queenstown. In those days the tide of Irish emigration still ran strong, and it was worth the while of even the largest liners to call at Queenstown.
The scene on these occasions at our railroad station is one to which the experience of twenty years has not been able to make me indifferent. The pain and heartbreak of it are as keen to-day as they were when first I saw it. On the platform are women—old women for the most part, mothers and grandmothers—weeping without restraint. Their eyes are swollen; their cheeks are tear-stained. Every now and then one of them wails aloud, and the others, catching the sound, wail with her, their voices rising and falling in a weird melody, like the Church's ancient plain song.
The men stand more silent; but very often their eyes are wet, too. Their lips, tightly pressed, twitch spasmodically. Occasionally an uncontrollable sob breaks from one of them.
The windows of the railway carriages are crowded with the faces of boys and girls, all of them weeping with the helpless abandonment of sheer despair. The engine whistles. There is a rush to the carriage windows. Faces and hands are thrust out of them. There is a frenzied pressing of lips to lips, a clinging of fingers intertwined, until some railway official, mercifully brutal, by main force pushes the people back.
The train moves slowly and gathers speed. A long, sad cry comes from the people left behind, swelling to a pitch of actual agony, until some brave soul somewhere in the crowd chokes down a sob, waves his hat, and makes a pretence to cheer.
That day I saw among the crowd on the platform Tom Dever and his wife. They were both weeping. I looked at the window of the carriage in front of them and saw Onnie.
Alone among the crowd of departing girls she was not crying. Her face was very pale. Her eyes, unnaturally large, seemed full of the sorrow of farewell; but her head was proudly posed. She stood upright while the others stooped or crouched.
I felt a sudden thrill. The girl was going out into a wide, strange world, sad, but not in despair—going to win through, to conquer, not to be beaten. From the carriage in which I sat I heard the last loud cry as the train moved out the blessing, "God be with you, and good luck!" the pitiful cheer; and then Onnie's voice, clear above the wailing:
"Good-bye! Good-bye!"
I bade farewell to Onnie an hour later when I left the train at the station where I had to stop. I asked her whether she wanted to go to America or would rather have stayed at home. Her answer seemed to me characteristic of the fatalism of our people.
"Sure, it was before me anyway," she said; "and it might as well be now as some other time. What was there for me at home?—only the daylight."
There was, of course, more than the daylight. There were lobsters in that cleft of the rock, to be hauled out of it when the tide was low. I reminded Onnie of the lobster she once caught for me and she smiled wanly. There were also periwinkles among the pools on the outlying reef. Onnie remembered them well enough.
"It was out of the price of them," she said, "that I made the money to pay my passage—what was wanted along with what my aunt sent home. I made a deal out of the periwinkles last summer."
So it was for a ticket to America and not for ribbons that the money went; but it must have been hard to save enough!
"I kept what I got," said Onnie; "and along with the few shillings I had in the Post Office Savings Bank I had enough to buy what clothes was wanted. Do you mind the shilling you gave me the day I made the cup of tea for you? Well, that was the first shilling ever I had of my own; and I put it in the savings bank."
"Do you mean to tell me" I said.
I got no further, for the train started and Onnie was borne away from me. I am no stranger to the power of saving possessed by the West of Ireland peasants. It no longer surprises me to find that some small farmer, who has lived all his life in extreme penury, leaves fortunes of fifty pounds each to his three daughters when he dies—money gathered well-nigh penny by penny through many years; and his at the end by virtue of an amazing power of not spending; but I confess that Onnie's hoarding startled me.
I thought of her laughing among the rocks of the reef, with the sunlight in her hair. I thought of her singing in the boat as she and the others rowed home. I have heard of girls singing blithely over their wheels as they spun flax for their bridal linen; but no man ever yet heard of a girl singing over the making of her shroud! Yet, if Onnie worked all summer in order to make money to take her to America, it must have been for her very like the sewing of a shroud.
It is thus, at all events, that the mothers of our Irish boys and girls think about the emigration to America.
"I've had seven children," one of them will say, "and I've lost five of them. Two of them I buried and three are gone to America."
And yet Onnie sang over the business merrily! I went my way, wondering what the future had hidden in it for her and what America would make of her.
I do not know the end—the final achievement of Onnie Dever; but chance gave me a glimpse of her halfway through her career. I was in one of the large cities of the Middle West, a place that boasts about its progress with boasting that is entirely justified. It is a city that has gone ahead fast in the last fifteen years, and which is destined, I imagine, to go faster yet, and to go very far. My wife was with me, and certain needs of hers took us into a large department store. We found—I ought to say she found—the required garment or something very like it.
There was a question of certain alterations. I, who have no taste for the details of a woman's dress and am useless as an adviser on the hang of a skirt or the set of a frill, retired to some distance. I took my stand beside the gate of the lift.
Just as I left the scene of action I heard the very grandly dressed young lady who had attended to our wants offering to send for the head of the department. I turned away and found an agreeable employment for my time in explaining to the man who worked the lift that I did not want to go either up or down.
He passed frequently, for there were many customers in the store, and I had to repeat my explanation every time he reached my floor. He appeared to find it difficult to believe that any one would stand opposite the gate of the cage merely for the fun of watching him, and every time he saw me he stopped and invited me to go with him. After a while he began to lose his temper with me, and I thought it better to turn my back on him and look the other way.
Standing beside my wife, explaining to her the beauties of a certain evening gown, was Onnie Dever Tom. I recognised her at the first glance. A second look made me doubtful. A long stare and some thought convinced me that I must be wrong.
In the first place, the lady who handled the silken flounces of the gown her subordinate held for her looked six inches taller than I remembered Onnie to have been. Long, narrow skirts, especially when very well cut, produce this illusion of height. When last I had a good look at Onnie she was wearing a crimson petticoat that reached very little below her knees. She certainly did not look tall then.
The dressing of the hair is also a disturbing thing. Onnie's, even when she was in the train on her way to the steamer, hung down her back in a long, thick pigtail. The fashion of ladies' hair-doing is not to be described by any words in the English language. I suppose I must use a French word and say that the coiffure of the chief of this department puzzled me; but most perplexing of all was the look of calm authority on her face.
Onnie Dever, even in her tenderest years, had a masterful way with her. I remembered how she had once lectured me on the management of boats, and how she held the flapping lobster at arm's length; but mere masterful self-assertiveness is a very different thing from settled authority. Most fools are self-assertive; but it is only the few men and women who have some strength of real wisdom in them who can reduce those round them to submissiveness, and it is the power of really ruling others that gives the look of authority to the face.
My reason told me that the young lady before me could not possibly be Onnie Dever; but a shadowy resemblance haunted me. I ventured back to the group round the gown and listened from a little distance to the description of its merits given in a high-pitched, far-carrying American voice—a voice the tones of which were as different as possible from the cooing murmurings of our Connaught speech. Certainly this was not Onnie Dever!
Then she looked up and saw me. There was a sudden flash of recognition in her glance, and I knew that, after all, my first impression was the right one.
"That gown," I said "would not be at all suitable for going to catch lobsters in."
It was a flimsy affair, with gold beads on it, and a kind of outer skin of very transparent material called, I believe, chiffon. Onnie and her attendant saleswoman both spoke at once in reply to my criticism.
"It would not!" said Onnie. "I'd be sorry for the one who was fool enough to try for a lobster at Carrigwee with a dress the like of that on her!"
This time her voice had the true Connaught intonation. She framed her sentences as all good Connaught girls should. She also grinned. Grin is, of course, a wrong word to use about a stately lady; but I run the risk of using it because her mouth took on the same expression exactly that Onnie Dever's wore when she stood on the shore and watched me run my boat aground.
The assistant saleswoman neither grinned nor smiled—she sniffed.
"This is a dinner dress," she said; "but if madam wants a golfing costume we have some rough tweeds"
It is not easy to guess why the mention of the lobster should have suggested golf to this damsel's mind. The word sport no doubt covers many things, and golf among them; but it can hardly be stretched to include the dragging of lobsters out of rocky holes along the shore.
She was never allowed to explain what her idea was. Miss Honoria Dever glanced at her. Without saying another word, without hearing one, the girl laid the dinner dress down on the chair and faded away. Such is the discipline maintained by the competent head of a department in a great store.
Then Onnie Dever Tom, no longer Honoria, turned to me with a flood of questions. I had to tell her a hundred intimate details about men and things—how this one was dead and that one married; how one cottage, known to both of us, was thatched last summer, and another had a new door; what boats caught mackerel, what hookers brought loads of winter fuel. For nearly an hour the business of selling ladies' dresses in that store was either held up or conducted without the knowledge of the head of the department.
When Onnie had finished her questions, I began mine, and I heard a very interesting story. It began with the adventures of a girl who did odd jobs of sewing for a man who specialised in the manufacture of cheap shirt waists. It went on with an account of the struggles of a junior assistant taken on one Christmastime to assist at the "notions" counter. It reached at last the daily life of Miss Honoria Dever, head of the costume department, responsible for the fashion of the clothes of half of the smartest women in the city—leader and commander of a regiment of some thirty young women, all bound to sell, to fit, to advise, to sew—even, I imagine, to dress as Miss Honoria bade them.
She told me the salary she earned; and I, dividing her dollars by five, assured her that no man who lived anywhere round the shores of our bay—not the doctor; not the lawyer; not the priest—was earning so much as she was. Then she confided to me that she had not reached yet the end of her career. There were heights to be climbed.
There are buyers who visit New York in the season when the form and colour of clothes are decided on by the ultimate, remote authorities who settle these things. There are buyers who go out from New York itself to London and Paris, crossing the Atlantic once or twice a year, who, by virtue of some strange instinct for raiment, can be trusted to guess in December what fabrics American women will want to buy in May.
Some day Miss Honoria will do this work—will, I feel tolerably certain, be at the very head of the elect corps of those who do it; will guess more brilliantly than the others; will buy with more infallible certainty that what she buys will be sold again.
Here I am left wondering! If Onnie Dever had remained at home she would, in the ordinary course of time, have married. In some tiny windswept cabin on an island she would have ministered to the wants of a man who returned to her day after day, wet and weary from toiling on the sea. She herself would have toiled, sometimes standing knee-deep in water beside a stranded boat while the creel on her back was filled with turf.
She would have staggered under her burden up the stony beach time after time, until the autumn darkness closed round her, and built her stack of fuel against the coming of the winter days. She would have baked great brown-crusted loaves in pot ovens. She would have dragged scanty milk from the udders of lean cows. She would have cleaned and salted the fish her husband caught and hung them in the reek of the fire's smoke to dry. She would have patched shirts and trousers painfully until patch was joined to patch and the original fabric was no more than a memory. She would have gone barefooted, with splayed, misshapen feet, down among the boulders of the upper beach to bring water from a brackish well.
She would have lost the fresh beauty of girlhood very speedily and ceased after a little while to care greatly that her hands were rough, her face weather-beaten and her figure ungainly. The other life, the one she has chosen, is better than that.
And yet I wonder! Onnie would have borne children. Year after year, for many years perhaps, a fresh baby would have ousted the old one from its cradle. Boys and girls would have clung about her skirts and clamoured in her ears. Slapped and kissed, scolded and caressed, they would have been a plague and a joy to her. She would have watched them grow to be men and women brave and strong. She would have known that life, the great insistent need of the universe, was going forth from her.
Which, after all, is best? Which achievement gives most satisfaction to look back on after all is over. I said good-bye to Onnie—still wondering.