The Story of Jael. Baring-Gould Sabine

      Chapter I: Gull-Fleet

       Table of Contents

      The river Colne, once upon a time, was seized with the desire of being a second Nile. We are speaking of course of that præhistoric age in which imagination runs riot, and sets down all its fancies as facts. The Nile brings down mud which it deposits over the surface of Egypt, and fertilizes it. Mud! thought the Colne, I can do a neat thing in mud. I can beat the Nile in the amount of slimy material I can bring on my waters and cast down where my waters reach. But it was not in mud that the Nile was to be equalled and excelled. A delta! thought the Colne. I can delticulate—a præhistoric verb and passable—into any number of mouths. Then the Colne proceeded near its embouchure to ramify in various directions, like a fan. But the attempt proved a failure, and in the end the Colne was forced to find her way to the sea through a single channel out of the many abortive ones she had run, leaving these latter some longer, some shorter, all smothering themselves in mud, and annually contracting. The Colne in the world of rivers is an instance of the great pretence and poor execution, and has its counterpart in the world of men.

      Crafty millers have cast their eyes on these channels, and have run dams across their extremities with sluices in them, and when the tide flows into the creeks and flushes them full, it pours up through the sluice gate and brims the basin beyond; but when the water tries to return with the ebb, No, no, says the miller, you come as you will, you go as I choose! The trap is shut, and the water is caught and allowed to run away as the miller orders, and is made to turn a wheel and grind corn before it goes.

      That water, as it trickles down the empty channel blushing brown with humiliation, finds that channel which erewhile was an arm of green and glittering water, deteriorated into a gulf of ill-savoured ooze, alive with gulls chattering, leaping, fluttering, arguing, gobbling.

      At the mouth of the Colne, and yet not on it, nor on the sea, but lost and entangled among the creeks that end in mud-smother, lies the port of Brightlingsea. The name it takes from its first settler, Brit-helm, the Dane with the bright helmet by which he was known, who ran his boat across an arm of the sea, and squatted on what was then an island. It was Brithelm’s Isle; but now it is no more an island. One long creek runs past it for several miles eastward to St. Osyth’s Priory, and almost reaches the ocean, perhaps at one day it may have done so. Another, in an opposite direction, cuts across the land to the Maldon river, and actually reaches the great bay of the Blackwater, so that in its mid channel the tides meet, and strike each other in their wavelets angrily. And again, another above Brightlingsea runs behind the little port and tries to reach the sea, and did reach it in historic times, but is now stopped by a causeway and a miller’s dam. That road marks the spot where Brithelm’s boat crossed in ancient days. In later times a causeway was carried over on piles driven into the ooze, and then the sea began to choke itself at the extremity, and to deposit banks of mud behind the cause way, which finally became dry land, and so Brithelm’s Isle ceased to be an Isle.

      Nowadays, it is along this road that the Brightlingsea people have to go when they drive or walk to the market town of Colchester, and a very long détour it obliges them to make. When a railway was run by a private company up the river, it was carried across the mouth of this creek three miles down over a timber bridge, but as boats were accustomed to enter the channel and run up to the quay by the mill, the bridge was fashioned so as to open and allow a small craft to pass through. Then, to make sure that the bridge was complete for the train to pass across it, a guard or pointsman was stationed in a wooden hut near the end of the bridge, whose duty it was to let the boats through, and also to close the bridge again for the passage of the train.

      Conceive of an express rushing along the bridge whilst a schooner was in the act of passing, and consider to which would the encounter be the most unpleasant. The object in life set before the pilot of the bridge over Gull-Fleet was to prevent such encounters.

      That railway from Brightlingsea up the Colne went no further than the next village, Wyvenhoe, where it touched the G.E.R., but was there ever, among coy railways such a coquette as this little affair? It sidled up to the burly, stately G.E.R. and said, ‘Take me on,’ and ‘Let us love one another,’ and then, when the G.E.R. grunted, and puffed, and said, ‘I don’t particularly like you, I don’t—to be plain—see much good in you,’ then this little pouting Mignon went into sulks, and turned her back on the G.E.R. and said, ‘You nasty, ugly monster, I hate you! I can have my own puff-puffs! I will have my own dear little cosy station, and my own servants—officials in my own livery.’ So the little coquette set up her private establishment, and got to spending money lavishly, and, it was whispered, but the whisper may have been wicked scandal—got dipped. So then she set up a little scream from the whistles of one of her little engines, and drew a long puff, and cast two piteous little lines of rail towards the G.E.R., and said, not in words, but by gestures, ‘I have been naughty, take me on, on your own terms.’ Then the G.E.R. grandly put out his hand to her and took her. Now, at the time when our story moves its course, this little absurd, coy little railway was not married to G.E.R., but was only coughing to draw attention to her, and making signals that meant, if they meant anything, ‘Come to my help, dear duck of a G.E.R.’ But G.E.R. was looking another way, to Walton, and had shut his ears and would not hear the appeals. And the little B. and W.R. was unhappy, and a little careless about the times it kept, and the charges it made, and did capricious things which old and well-conducted railways would never think of doing. But B. and W.R. was in a sulky mood, and didn’t care what it did, didn’t care what folks said, didn’t care to do its duty, and seemed to have lost all moral discrimination between right and wrong.

      But there was one point on which the B. and W.R. did not fail, and that was in the maintenance of the pilot at Gull-Fleet Bridge. It let the paint come off its wood-work, and the waiting-rooms be without fire, and diminished its staff to a sort of maid-of-all-work, who sold tickets, stationmastered, stoked and poked, and acted as guard—but it never gave notice to quit to the pilot, Shamgar Tapp.

      On the marsh in the sun on a blazing summer day, lay the daughter of the said