TRIUMPH
Afterwards, he never quite understood the chance to which he owed his
life. The most that he could remember was that one of his feet touched
something solid which served him as a support and that something else
enabled him to advance, now a step, now two or three, to lift himself
little by little out of his living tomb and to leave it alive. What
had happened? Had he come upon a loose plank of the buried vessel
whose flag he saw before him? He did not know. But what he never
forgot was the horror of that minute, which was followed by such a
collapse of all his will and strength that he remained for a long time
lying on a piece of wreckage, unable to move a limb and shuddering all
over with fever and mental anguish.
He set off again mechanically, under the irresistible influence of
confused feelings which bade him go forward and reconnoitre. But he
had lost his former energy. His eyes remain obstinately fixed upon
the ground. For no appreciable reason, he judged certain spots to be
dangerous and avoided them by making a circuit, or even leapt back as
though at the sight of an abyss. Simon Dubosc was afraid.
Moreover, after reading on a piece of wood from a wreck the name of Le
Havre, that is to say, the port which lay behind him, he asked himself
anxiously whether the new land had not changed its direction; whether,
by doubling upon itself, it was not leading him into the widest part
of the Channel.
The thought of no longer knowing where he was or whither he was going
increased his lassitude twofold. He felt overwhelmed, discouraged,
terribly alone. He had no hope of rescue, either by sea, on which no
boat would dare put out, or from the air, which the sea-fog had made
impossible for aeroplanes. What would happen then?
Nevertheless he walked on; and the hours went by; and the belt of land
unrolled vaguely before his eyes the same monotonous spectacle, the
same melancholy sand-hills, the same dreary landscapes on which no sun
had ever shone.
"I shall get there," he repeated, stubbornly. "I mean to get there; I
must and shall."
Four o'clock. He often looked at his watch, as though expecting a
miraculous intervention at some precise moment, he did not know when.
Worn out by excessive and ill-directed efforts, exhausted by the fear
of a hideous death, he was gradually yielding beneath the weight of a
fatigue which tortured his body and unhinged his brain. He was afraid.
He dreaded the trap laid for him by the sands. He dreaded the
threatening night, the storm and, above all, hunger, for all his
provisions had been lost in the abyss of the quicksand.
The agony which he suffered! A score of times he was on the point of
stretching himself on the ground and abandoning the struggle. But the
thought of Isabel sustained him; and he walked on and on.
And then, suddenly, an astonishing sight held him motionless. Was it
possible? He hesitated to believe it, so incredible did the reality
seem to him. But how could he doubt the evidence of his eyes?
He stooped forward. Yes, it was really that: there were footprints!
The ground was marked with footprints, the prints of two bare feet,
very plainly defined and apparently quite recent.
And immediately his stupefaction made way for a great joy, aroused by
the sudden and clear conception of a most undeniable fact: the new
land was indeed connected, as he had supposed, with some point on the
northern coast of France; and from this point, which could not be very
remote, in view of the distance which he himself had covered, one of
his fellow-creatures had come thus far.
Delighted to feel that there was human life near at hand, he
recollected the incident where Robinson Crusoe discovers the imprint
of a naked foot on the sand of his desert island:
"It's Man Friday's footprint!" he said, laughing. "There is a Friday,
too, in this land of mine! Let's see if we can find him!"
At the point where he had crossed the trail, it branched off to the
left and approached the sea. Simon was feeling surprised at not
meeting or catching sight of any one, when he discovered that the
author of the footprints, after going round a shapeless wreck, had
turned and was therefore walking in the same direction as himself.
After twenty minutes, the trail, intersected by a gully which ran
across it, escaped him for a time. He found it again and followed it,
skirting the base of a chain of rather high sand-hills, which ended
suddenly in a sort of craggy cliff.
On rounding this cliff Simon started back. On the ground, flat on its
face, with the arms at right angles to the body, lay the corpse of a
man, curiously dressed in a very short, yellow leather waistcoat and a
pair of trousers, likewise leather, the ends of which were bell-shaped
and slit in the Mexican fashion. In the middle of his back was the
hilt of a dagger which had been driven between the shoulder-blades.
What astonished Simon when he had turned the body over was that the
face was brick-red, with prominent cheek-bones and long, black hair:
it was the undoubted face of a Redskin. Blood trickled from the mouth,
which was distorted by a hideous grin. The eyes were wide open, and
showed only their whites. The contracted fingers had gripped the sand
like claws. The body was still warm.
"It can't be an hour since he was killed," said Simon, whose hand was
trembling. And he added, "What the deuce brought the fellow here? By
what unheard-of chance have I come upon a Redskin in this desert?"
The dead man's pockets contained no papers to give Simon any
information. But, near the body, within the actual space in which the
struggle had taken place, another trail of footsteps came to an end, a
double trail, made by the patterned rubber soles of a man who had come
and gone. And, ten yards away, Simon picked up a gold hundred-franc
piece, with the head of Napoleon I. and the date 1807.
He followed this double trail, which led him to the edge of the sea.
Here a boat had been put aground. It was now easy to reconstruct the
tragedy. Two men who had landed on this newly-created shore had set
out to explore it, each taking his own direction. One of them, an
Indian, had found, in the hulk of some wreck, a certain quantity of
gold coins, perhaps locked up in a strong-box. The other, to obtain
the treasure for himself, had murdered his companion, and reembarked.
Thus, on this virgin soil, Simon was confronted--it was the first sign
of life--with a crime, with an act of treachery, with armed cupidity
committing murder, with the human animal. A man finds gold. One of
his fellows attacks and kills him.
Simon pushed onwards without further delay, feeling certain that these
two men, doubtless bolder than the rest, were only the forerunners of
others coming from the mainland. He was eager to see these others, to
question them upon the point whence they had started, the distance
which they had covered and many further particulars which as yet
remained unexplained.
The thought of this meeting filled him with such happiness that he
resisted his longing for rest. Yet what a torture was this almost
uninterrupted effort! He had walked for sixteen hours since leaving
Dieppe. It was eighteen hours since the moment when the great upheaval
had driven him from his home. In ordinary times the effort would not
have been beyond his strength. But under what lamentable conditions
had he accomplished it!
He walked on and on. Rest? And what if the others, coming behind him
from Dieppe, should succeed in catching him up?
The scene was always the same. Wrecks marked his path, like so many
tomb-stones. The mist still hung above the endless grave-yard.
After walking an hour, he was brought to a stop. The sea barred his
way.
The sea facing him! His disappointment was not unmixed with anger. Was
this then the limit of his journey and were all these convulsions of
nature to end merely in the creation of a peninsula cut off in this
meaningless fashion?
But, on scanning from the sloping shore the waves tossing their foam
to where he stood, he perceived at some distance a darker mass, which
gradually emerged from the mist; and he felt sure that this was a
continuation of the newly-created land, beyond a depression covered by
the sea:
"I must get across," said Simon.
He removed his clothes, made them into a bundle, tied it round his
neck and entered the water. For him the crossing of this strait, in
which, besides, he was for some time able to touch bottom, was mere
child's-play. He landed, dried himself and resumed his clothes.
A very gentle ascent led him, after some five hundred yards, to a
reef, overtopped by actual hills of sand, but of sand so firm that he
did not hesitate to set foot on it. He therefore climbed till he
reached the highest crest of these hills.
And it was here, at this spot--where a granite column was raised
subsequently, with an inscription in letters of gold: two names and a
date--it was here, on the 4th of June, at ten minutes past six in the
evening, above a vast amphitheatre girt about with sand-hills like the
benches of a circus, it was here that Simon Dubosc at last saw,
climbing to meet him, a man.
He did not move at first, so strong was his emotion. The man came on
slowly, sauntering, as it were, examining his surroundings and picking
his way. When at last he raised his head, he gave a start of surprise
at seeing Simon and then waved his cap. Then Simon rushed towards him,
with outstretched arms and an immense longing to press him to his
breast.
At a distance the stranger seemed a young man. He was dressed like a
fisherman, in a brown canvas smock and trousers. His feet were bare;
he was tall and broad-shouldered. Simon shouted to him:
"I've come from Dieppe. You, what town do you come from? Did you take
long to get here? Are you alone?"
He could see that the fisherman was smiling and that his tanned,
clean-shaven face wore a frank and happy expression.
They met and clasped hands; and Simon repeated:
"I started from Dieppe at one in the morning. And you? What port do
you come from?"
The man began to laugh and replied in words which Simon could not
understand. He did not understand them, though he well enough
recognized the language in which they were uttered. It was English,
but a dialect spoken by the lower orders. He concluded that this was
an English fisherman employed at Calais or Dunkirk.
He spoke to him again, dwelling on his syllables and pointing to the
horizon:
"Calais? Dunkirk?"
The other repeated these two names as well as he could, as though
trying to grasp their meaning. At last his face lit up and he shook
his head.
Then, turning round and pointing in the direction from which he had
come, he twice said:
"Hastings. . . . Hastings. . . ."
Simon started. But the amazing truth did not appear to him at once,
though he was conscious of its approach and was absolutely
dumbfounded. Of course, the fisherman was referring to Hastings as
his birthplace or his usual home. But where had he come from at this
moment?
Simon made a suggestion:
"Boulogne? Wimereux?"
"No, no!" replied the stranger. "Hastings. . . . England. . . ."
And his arm pointed persistently to the same quarter of the horizon,
while he as persistently repeated:
"England. . . . England. . . ."
"What? What's that you're saying?" cried Simon. And he seized the man
violently by the shoulders. "What's that you're saying? That's England
behind you? You've come from England? No, no! You can't mean that.
It's not true!"
The sailor struck the ground with his foot:
"_England!_" he repeated, thus denoting that the ground which he had
stamped upon led to the English mainland.
Simon was flabbergasted. He took out his watch and moved his
forefinger several times round the dial.
"What time did you start? How many hours have you been walking?"
"Three," replied the Englishman, opening his fingers.
"Three hours!" muttered Simon. "We are three hours from the English
coast!"
This time the whole stupendous truth forced itself upon him. At the
same moment he realized what had caused his mistake. As the French
coast ran due north, from the estuary of the Somme, it was inevitable
that, in pursuing a direction parallel to the French coast, he should
end by reaching the English coast at Folkestone or Dover, or, if his
path inclined slightly toward the west, at Hastings.
Now he had not taken this into account. Having had proof on three
occasions that France was on his right and not behind him, he had
walked with his mind dominated by the certainty that France was close
at hand and that her coast might loom out of the fog at any moment.
And it was the English coast! And the man who had loomed into sight
was a man of England!
What a miracle! How his every nerve throbbed as he held this man in
his arms and gazed into his friendly face! He was exalted by the
intuition of the extraordinary things which the tremendous event of
the last few hours implied, in the present and the future; and his
meeting with this man of England was the very symbol of that event.
And the fisherman, too, felt the incomparable grandeur of the moment
which had brought them together. His quiet smile was full of
solemnity. He nodded his head in silence. And the two men, face to
face, looking into each other's eyes, gazed at each other with the
peculiar affection of those who have never been parted, who have
striven side by side and who receive together the reward of their
actions performed in common.
The Englishman wrote his name on a piece of paper: William Brown. And
Simon, yielding to one of his natural outbursts of enthusiasm, said:
"William Brown, we do not speak the same language; you do not
understand me and I understand you only imperfectly; and still we are
bound together more closely than two loving brothers could be. Our
embrace has a significance which we cannot yet imagine. You and I
represent the two greatest and noblest countries in the world; and
they are mingled together in our two persons."
He was weeping. The Englishman still smiled, but his eyes were moist
with tears. Excitement, excessive fatigue, the violence of the
emotions which he had experienced that day, produced in Simon a sort
of intoxication in which he found an unsuspected source of energy.
"Come," he said to the fisherman catching hold of his arm. "Come, show
me the way."
He would not even allow William Brown to help him in difficult places,
so determined was he to accomplish this glorious and magnificent
undertaking by his unaided efforts.
This last stage of his journey lasted three hours.
Almost at the start they passed three Englishmen, to whom Brown
addressed a few words and who, while continuing on their road, uttered
exclamations of surprise. Then came two more, who stopped for a moment
while Brown explained the situation. These two turned back with Simon
and the fisherman; and all four, on coming closer to the sea, were
attracted by a voice appealing for help.
Simon ran forward and was the first to reach a woman lying on the
sand. The waves were drenching her with their spray. She was bound by
cords which fettered her legs, held her arms motionless against her
body, pressed the wet silk of her blouse against her breast and
bruised the bare flesh of her shoulders. Her black hair, cut rather
short and fastened in front by a little gold chain, framed a dazzling
face, with lips like the petals of a red flower and a warm, brown
skin, burnt by the sun. The face, to an artist like Simon, was of a
brilliant beauty and recalled to his mind certain feminine types which
he had encountered in Spain or South America. Quickly he cut her
bonds; and then, as his companions were approaching before he had time
to question her, he slipped off his jacket and covered her beautiful
shoulders with it.
She gave him a grateful glance, as though this delicate act was the
most precious compliment which he could pay her:
"Thank you, thank you!" she murmured. "You are French, are you not?"
But groups of people came hurrying along, followed by a more numerous
company. Brown told the story of Simon's adventure; and Simon found
himself separated from the young woman without learning more about
her. People crowded about him, asking him questions. At every moment
fresh crowds mingled with the procession which bore him along in its
midst.
All these people seemed to Simon unusually excited and strange in
their behaviour. He soon learnt that the earthquake had devastated the
English coast. Hastings, having been, like Dieppe, a centre of seismic
shocks, was partly destroyed.
About eight o'clock they came to the edge of a deep depression quite
two-thirds of a mile in width. Filled with water until the middle of
the afternoon, this depression, by a stroke of luck for Simon, had
delayed the progress of those who were flying from Hastings and who
had ventured upon the new land.
A few minutes later, the fog being now less dense, Simon was able to
distinguish the endless row of houses and hotels which lines the
sea-fronts of Hastings and St. Leonards. By this time, his escort
consisted of three or four hundred people; and many others, doubtless
driven from their houses, were wandering in all directions with dazed
expressions on their faces.
The throng about him became so thick that soon he was able to see
nothing in the heavy gloom of the twilight but their crowded heads and
shoulders. He replied as best he could to the thousand questions which
were put to him; and his replies, repeated from mouth to mouth,
aroused cries of astonishment and admiration.
Gradually, lights appeared in the Hastings windows. Simon, exhausted
but indomitable, was walking briskly, sustained by a nervous energy
which seemed to be renewed as and when he expended it. And suddenly he
burst out laughing to think--and certainly no thought could have been
more stimulating or better calculated to give a last fillip to his
failing strength--to think that he, Simon Dubosc, a man of the good
old Norman stock, was setting foot in England at the very spot where
William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, had landed in the eleventh
century! Hastings! King Harold and his mistress, Edith of the swan's
neck! The great adventure of yore was being reenacted! For the second
time the virgin isle was conquered . . . and conquered by a Norman!
"I believe destiny is favouring me, my Lord Bakefield," he said to
himself.
The new land joined the mainland between Hastings and St. Leonards. It
was intersected by valleys and fissures, bristling with rocks and
fragments of the cliffs, in the midst of which lay, in an
indescribable jumble, the wreckage of demolished piers, fallen
lighthouses, stranded and shattered ships. But Simon saw nothing of
all this. His eyes were too weary to distinguish things save through a
mist.
They reached the shore. What happened next? He was vaguely conscious
that some one was leading him, through streets with broken pavements
and between heaps of ruins, to the hall of a casino, a strange,
dilapidated building, with tottering walls and a gaping roof, but
nevertheless radiant with electric light.
The municipal authorities had assembled here to receive him. Champagne
was drunk. Hymns of rejoicing were sung with religious fervour. A
stirring spectacle and, at the same time, a striking proof of the
national self-control, this celebration improvised in the midst of a
town in ruins. But every one present had the impression that something
of a very great importance had occurred, something so great that it
outweighed the horror of the catastrophe and the consequent mourning:
France and England were united!
France and England were united; and the first man who had walked from
the one country to the other by the path which had risen from the very
depths of the ancient Channel that used to divide them was there, in
their midst. What could they do but honour him? He represented in his
magnificent effort the vitality and the inexhaustible ardour of
France. He was the hero and the herald of the most mysterious future.
A tremendous burst of cheering rose to the platform on which he stood.
The crowd thronged about him, the men shook him by the hand, the
ladies kissed him. They pressed him to make a speech which all could
hear and understand. And Simon, leaning over these people, whose
enthusiasm blended with his own exaltation, stammered a few words in
praise of the two nations.
The frenzy was so violent and unbridled that Simon was jostled,
carried off his feet, swept into the crowd and lost among the very
people who were looking for him. His only thought was to go into the
first hotel that offered and throw himself down on a bed. A hand
seized his; and a voice said:
"Come with me; I will show you the way."
He recognized the young woman whom he had released from her bonds. Her
face likewise was transfigured with emotion.
"You have done a splendid thing," she said. "I don't believe any
other man could have done it. . . . You are above all other men.
. . ."
An eddy in the crowd tore them apart, although the stranger's hand
clutched his. He fell to the floor among the overturned chairs, picked
himself up again and was feeling at the end of his tether as he neared
one of the exits, when suddenly he stood to attention. Strength
returned to his limbs. Lord Bakefield and Isabel were standing before
him.
Eagerly Isabel held out her hand:
"We were there, Simon. We saw you. I'm proud of you, Simon."
He was astonished and confused.
"Isabel! Is it really you?"
She smiled, happy to see him so much moved in her presence.
"It really is; and it's quite natural, since we live at Battle, a mile
away. The catastrophe has spared the house but we came to Hastings to
help the sufferers and in that way heard of your arrival . . . of your
triumph, Simon."
Lord Bakefield did not budge. He pretended to be looking in another
direction. Simon addressed him.
"May I take it, Lord Bakefield, that you will regard this day's work
as a first step towards the goal for which I am making?"
The old nobleman, stiff with pride and resentment, vouchsafed no
reply.
"Of course," Simon continued, "I haven't conquered England. But all
the same there seem to be a series of circumstances in my favour which
permit me at least to ask you whether you consider that the first of
your conditions has been fulfilled."
This time Lord Bakefield seemed to be making up his mind. But, just as
he was going to reply--and his features expressed no great amount of
good-will--Isabel intervened:
"Don't ask my father any questions, Simon . . . He appreciates the
wonderful thing that you have done at its true value. But you and I
have offended him too seriously for him to be able to forgive you just
yet. We must let time wipe out the unpleasant memory."
"Time!" echoed Simon, with a laugh. "Time! The trouble is that I have
only twelve days left in which to triumph over all the labours put
upon me. After conquering England, I have still to win the laurels of
Hercules . . . or of Don Quixote."
"Well," she said, "in the meantime hurry off and go to bed. That's the
best thing you can do for the moment."
And she drew Lord Bakefield away with her.