When Tony was indisputably grown up, one half of what he earned went, according to custom, to the boat-owner, in this case his father, frequently had be thu to pay for repairs and new gear. That went on for years after he was married--'hauling an' rowing an' slaving an' pulling me guts out wi't!'--until, in fact, the present Mrs Widger insisted on his buying boats of his own.
Our talk shifted to Tony's first wife, who died (and Tony almost died too) as the result of the landlord's taking up the drains, and leaving them open, in the height of a hot summer. Tony told me about her people and her native place, a fishing village along the coast. He showed me photographs of her, and a framed, pathetically ugly, imitation cameo memorial, which is getting very dirty now. I knew he loved her very much. He nearly went out of his mind when she died, leaving him with four young children. The untidy little kitchen, with its bright fire, its deep shadows and its white clothes hung along the line; Tony's drooping figure, bent over the hearth in an old blue guernsey: the contrasting redness of his face, and the beam of light from a cracked lamp-shade falling across his wet, memory-stuck blue eyes.... The kitchen seemed full of the presence of the long-dead woman whom Tony was still grieving for in some underpart of his mind. "Iss, her was a nice woman," he said, "a gude wife to me; a gude wife: I hadn't no complaint to make against she."
The one shabby sentence hit into me all his sorrow, that which remains and that which has sunk into time.
The Mrs Widger that is, returned from the Dutch auction with an elaborate badly-plated cruet. "Al'ays using up my saxpinces what I has to slave for," said Tony.
"We'll hae it out on thy birthday--there! Will that zatisfy thee?"
"Not afore then? I wer born at the end o' the year, an' that's why I al'ays gets lef' behind."
"Not a day before thy birthday! What'll yu be saying if I buys sauces to put in all they bottles?"
"What a woman 'tis! Gie yer Tony a kiss then."
The wise fool took a kiss. We had a second supper and hot grog. We were merry. But when I said _Good night_, I saw in Tony's eyes a recognition that I had understood (so he felt, I think) some part of what he seldom, if ever, brings up now to talk about.