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 very 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 up 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 outwards
at the end of it, in the middle of which is a lighthouse. A heavy
sea-wall runs along outside of it. On the near side, the sea-wall
59
60 Dracula
makes an elbow crooked inversely, and its end too has a light-
house. 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 edge 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
all 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 maseP 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 an’ 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 interesting 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; an’, 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 up 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 some-
thing to do with the abbey. I shall go home too. Lucy went out
Mina Murray’s Journal 61
visiting with her mother, and as they were only duty calls, I did
not go. They will be home by this.
i 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 downfaces
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 tune in coming up 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 subject 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,
an’ nowt else. These bans an 7 wafts an’ boh-ghosts an’ barguests
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
beuk-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 j 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 scowderrnent at the Day
of Judgment when they come tumblin’ up hi their death-sarks,
all jouped together an’ tryin’ to drag their tombsteans with them
to prove how good they was; some of them trimrnlin’ and
ditherin’, with their hands that dozzened an’ slippy from lyin 7
in the sea that they can’t even keep their grup 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 cronies
62 Dracula
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 kirk-garth.» 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 happed here, snod an’ snog?“ I assented again. „Then
that be just where the lie comes in. Why, there be scores of
these lay-beds that be toom as old Dun’s ’bacca-box 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 mariner, murdered by pirates
off the coast of Andres, April, 1854, set. 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 currents
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 Lowrey 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,