[Illustration: THE SEA FIT]
The sea that night sang rather than chanted; all along the far-running
shore a rising tide dropped thick foam, and the waves, white-crested,
came steadily in with the swing of a deliberate purpose. Overhead, in a
cloudless sky, that ancient Enchantress, the full moon, watched their
dance across the sheeted sands, guiding them carefully while she drew
them up. For through that moonlight, through that roar of surf, there
penetrated a singular note of earnestness and meaning--almost as though
these common processes of Nature were instinct with the flush of an
unusual activity that sought audaciously to cross the borderland into
some subtle degree of conscious life. A gauze of light vapour clung
upon the surface of the sea, far out--a transparent carpet through
which the rollers drove shorewards in a moving pattern.
In the low-roofed bungalow among the sand-dunes the three men sat.
Foregathered for Easter, they spent the day fishing and sailing, and at
night told yarns of the days when life was younger. It was fortunate
that there were three--and later four--because in the mouths of several
witnesses an extraordinary thing shall be established--when they agree.
And although whisky stood upon the rough table made of planks nailed
to barrels, it is childish to pretend that a few drinks invalidate
evidence, for alcohol, up to a certain point, intensifies the
consciousness, focusses the intellectual powers, sharpens observation;
and two healthy men, certainly three, must have imbibed an absurd
amount before they all see, or omit to see, the same things.
The other bungalows still awaited their summer occupants. Only
the lonely tufted sand-dunes watched the sea, shaking their hair
of coarse white grass to the winds. The men had the whole spit to
themselves--with the wind, the spray, the flying gusts of sand, and
that great Easter full moon. There was Major Reese of the Gunners and
his half-brother, Dr. Malcolm Reese, and Captain Erricson, their host,
all men whom the kaleidoscope of life had jostled together a decade ago
in many adventures, then flung for years apart about the globe. There
was also Erricson’s body-servant, ‘Sinbad,’ sailor of big seas, and a
man who had shared on many a ship all the lust of strange adventure
that distinguished his great blonde-haired owner--an ideal servant and
dog-faithful, divining his master’s moods almost before they were born.
On the present occasion, besides crew of the fishing-smack, he was
cook, valet, and steward of the bungalow smoking-room as well.
‘Big Erricson,’ Norwegian by extraction, student by adoption, wanderer
by blood, a Viking reincarnated if ever there was one, belonged to
that type of primitive man in whom burns an inborn love and passion
for the sea that amounts to positive worship--devouring tide, a lust
and fever in the soul. ‘All genuine votaries of the old sea-gods have
it,’ he used to say, by way of explaining his carelessness of worldly
ambitions. ‘We’re never at our best away from salt water--never quite
right. I’ve got it bang in the heart myself. I’d do a bit before the
mast sooner than make a million on shore. Simply can’t help it, you
see, and never could! It’s our gods calling us to worship.’ And he
had never tried to ‘help it,’ which explains why he owned nothing in
the world on land except this tumble-down, one-storey bungalow--more
like a ship’s cabin than anything else, to which he sometimes asked
his bravest and most faithful friends--and a store of curious reading
gathered in long, becalmed days at the ends of the world. Heart and
mind, that is, carried a queer cargo. ‘I’m sorry if you poor devils are
uncomfortable in her. You must ask Sinbad for anything you want and
don’t see, remember.’ As though Sinbad could have supplied comforts
that were miles away, or converted a draughty wreck into a snug, taut,
brand-new vessel.
Neither of the Reeses had cause for grumbling on the score of comfort,
however, for they knew the keen joys of roughing it, and both weather
and sport besides had been glorious. It was on another score this
particular evening that they found cause for uneasiness, if not for
actual grumbling. Erricson had one of his queer sea fits on--the Doctor
was responsible for the term--and was in the thick of it, plunging like
a straining boat at anchor, talking in a way that made them both feel
vaguely uncomfortable and distressed. Neither of them knew exactly
perhaps why he should have felt this growing _malaise_, and each was
secretly vexed with the other for confirming his own unholy instinct
that something uncommon was astir. The loneliness of the sand-spit and
that melancholy singing of the sea before their very door may have
had something to do with it, seeing that both were landsmen; for
Imagination is ever Lord of the Lonely Places, and adventurous men
remain children to the last. But, whatever it was that affected both
men in different fashion, Malcolm Reese, the doctor, had not thought
it necessary to mention to his brother that Sinbad had tugged his
sleeve on entering and whispered in his ear significantly: ‘Full moon,
sir, please, and he’s better without too much! These high spring tides
get him all caught off his feet sometimes--clean sea-crazy’; and the
man had contrived to let the doctor see the hilt of a small pistol he
carried in his hip-pocket.
For Erricson had got upon his old subject: that the gods were not dead,
but merely withdrawn, and that even a single true worshipper was enough
to draw them down again into touch with the world, into the sphere
of humanity, even into active and visible manifestation. He spoke of
queer things he had seen in queerer places. He was serious, vehement,
voluble; and the others had let it pour out unchecked, hoping thereby
for its speedier exhaustion. They puffed their pipes in comparative
silence, nodding from time to time, shrugging their shoulders, the
soldier mystified and bewildered, the doctor alert and keenly watchful.
‘And I like the old idea,’ he had been saying, speaking of these
departed pagan deities, ‘that sacrifice and ritual feed their great
beings, and that death is only the final sacrifice by which the
worshipper becomes absorbed into them. The devout worshipper’--and
there was a singular drive and power behind the words--‘should go to
his death singing, as to a wedding--the wedding of his soul with the
particular deity he has loved and served all his life.’ He swept his
tow-coloured beard with one hand, turning his shaggy head towards
the window, where the moonlight lay upon the procession of shaking
waves. ‘It’s playing the whole game, I always think, man-fashion.... I
remember once, some years ago, down there off the coast by Yucatan----’
And then, before they could interfere, he told an extraordinary tale
of something he had seen years ago, but told it with such a horrid
earnestness of conviction--for it was dreadful, though fine, this
adventure--that his listeners shifted in their wicker chairs, struck
matches unnecessarily, pulled at their long glasses, and exchanged
glances that attempted a smile yet did not quite achieve it. For the
tale had to do with sacrifice of human life and a rather haunting pagan
ceremonial of the sea, and at its close the room had changed in some
indefinable manner--was not exactly as it had been before perhaps--as
though the savage earnestness of the language had introduced some new
element that made it less cosy, less cheerful, even less warm. A secret
lust in the man’s heart, born of the sea, and of his intense admiration
of the pagan gods called a light into his eye not altogether pleasant.
‘They were great Powers, at any rate, those ancient fellows,’ Erricson
went on, refilling his huge pipe bowl; ‘too great to disappear
altogether, though to-day they may walk the earth in another manner.
I swear they’re still going it--especially the----’ (he hesitated for
a mere second) ‘the old water Powers--the Sea Gods. Terrific beggars,
every one of ’em.’
‘Still move the tides and raise the winds, eh?’ from the Doctor.
Erricson spoke again after a moment’s silence, with impressive dignity.
‘And I like, too, the way they manage to keep their names before
us,’ he went on, with a curious eagerness that did not escape the
Doctor’s observation, while it clearly puzzled the soldier. ‘There’s
old Hu, the Druid god of justice, still alive in “Hue and Cry”; there’s
Typhon hammering his way against us in the typhoon; there’s the
mighty Hurakar, serpent god of the winds, you know, shouting to us in
hurricane and _ouragan_; and there’s----’
‘Venus still at it as hard as ever,’ interrupted the Major,
facetiously, though his brother did not laugh because of their host’s
almost sacred earnestness of manner and uncanny grimness of face.
Exactly how he managed to introduce that element of gravity--of
conviction--into such talk neither of his listeners quite understood,
for in discussing the affair later they were unable to pitch upon any
definite detail that betrayed it. Yet there it was, alive and haunting,
even distressingly so. All day he had been silent and morose, but since
dusk, with the turn of the tide, in fact, these queer sentences, half
mystical, half unintelligible, had begun to pour from him, till now
that cabin-like room among the sand-dunes fairly vibrated with the
man’s emotion. And at last Major Reese, with blundering good intention,
tried to shift the key from this portentous subject of sacrifice to
something that might eventually lead towards comedy and laughter,
and so relieve this growing pressure of melancholy and incredible
things. The Viking fellow had just spoken of the possibility of the
old gods manifesting themselves visibly, audibly, physically, and so
the Major caught him up and made light mention of spiritualism and
the so-called ‘materialisation séances,’ where physical bodies were
alleged to be built up out of the emanations of the medium and the
sitters. This crude aspect of the Supernatural was the only possible
link the soldier’s mind could manage. He caught his brother’s eye too
late, it seems, for Malcolm Reese realised by this time that something
untoward was afoot, and no longer needed the memory of Sinbad’s warning
to keep him sharply on the look-out. It was not the first time he had
seen Erricson ‘caught’ by the sea; but he had never known him quite so
bad, nor seen his face so flushed and white alternately, nor his eyes
so oddly shining. So that Major Reese’s well-intentioned allusion only
brought wind to fire.
The man of the sea, once Viking, roared with a rush of boisterous
laughter at the comic suggestion, then dropped his voice to a sudden
hard whisper, awfully earnest, awfully intense. Any one must have
started at the abrupt change and the life-and-death manner of the big
man. His listeners undeniably both did.
‘Bunkum!’ he shouted, ‘bunkum, and be damned to it all! There’s only
one real materialisation of these immense Outer Beings possible, and
that’s when the great embodied emotions, which are their sphere of
action’--his words became wildly incoherent, painfully struggling to
get out--‘derived, you see, from their honest worshippers the world
over--constituting their Bodies, in fact--come down into matter and
get condensed, crystallised into form--to claim that final sacrifice I
spoke about just now, and to which any man might feel himself proud and
honoured to be summoned.... No dying in bed or fading out from old age,
but to plunge full-blooded and alive into the great Body of the god who
has deigned to descend and fetch you----’
The actual speech may have been even more rambling and incoherent than
that. It came out in a torrent at white heat. Dr. Reese kicked his
brother beneath the table, just in time. The soldier looked thoroughly
uncomfortable and amazed, utterly at a loss to know how he had produced
the storm. It rather frightened him.
‘I know it because I’ve seen it,’ went on the sea man, his mind and
speech slightly more under control. ‘Seen the ceremonies that brought
these whopping old Nature gods down into form--seen ’em carry off a
worshipper into themselves--seen that worshipper, too, go off singing
and happy to his death, proud and honoured to be chosen.’
‘Have you really--by George!’ the Major exclaimed. ‘You tell us a
queer thing, Erricson’; and it was then for the fifth time that Sinbad
cautiously opened the door, peeped in and silently withdrew after
giving a swiftly comprehensive glance round the room.
The night outside was windless and serene, only the growing thunder of
the tide near the full woke muffled echoes among the sand-dunes.
‘Rites and ceremonies,’ continued the other, his voice booming with
a singular enthusiasm, but ignoring the interruption, ‘are simply
means of losing one’s self by temporary ecstasy in the God of one’s
choice--the God one has worshipped all one’s life--of being partially
absorbed into his being. And sacrifice completes the process----’
‘At death, you said?’ asked Malcolm Reese, watching him keenly.
‘Or voluntary,’ was the reply that came flash-like. ‘The devotee
becomes wedded to his Deity--goes bang into him, you see, by fire or
water or air--as by a drop from a height--according to the nature of
the particular God; at-one-ment, of course. A man’s death that! Fine,
you know!’
The man’s inner soul was on fire now. He was talking at a fearful pace,
his eyes alight, his voice turned somehow into a kind of sing-song that
chimed well, singularly well, with the booming of waves outside, and
from time to time he turned to the window to stare at the sea and the
moon-blanched sands. And then a look of triumph would come into his
face--that giant face framed by slow-moving wreaths of pipe smoke.
Sinbad entered for the sixth time without any obvious purpose, busied
himself unnecessarily with the glasses and went out again, lingeringly.
In the room he kept his eye hard upon his master. This time he
contrived to push a chair and a heap of netting between him and the
window. No one but Dr. Reese observed the manœuvre. And he took the
hint.
‘The port-holes fit badly, Erricson,’ he laughed, but with a touch of
authority. ‘There’s a five-knot breeze coming through the cracks worse
than an old wreck!’ And he moved up to secure the fastening better.
‘The room _is_ confoundedly cold,’ Major Reese put in; ‘has
been for the last half-hour, too.’ The soldier looked what he
felt--cold--distressed--creepy. ‘But there’s no wind really, you know,’
he added.
Captain Erricson turned his great bearded visage from one to the other
before he answered; there was a gleam of sudden suspicion in his blue
eyes. ‘The beggar’s got that back door open again. If he’s sent for any
one, as he did once before, I swear I’ll drown him in fresh water for
his impudence--or perhaps--can it be already that he expects----?’
He left the sentence incomplete and rang the bell, laughing with a
boisterousness that was clearly feigned. ‘Sinbad, what’s this cold in
the place? You’ve got the back door open. Not expecting any one, are
you----?’
‘Everything’s shut tight, Captain. There’s a bit of a breeze coming up
from the east. And the tide’s drawing in at a raging pace----’
‘We can all hear _that_. But are you expecting any one? I asked,’
repeated his master, suspiciously, yet still laughing. One might
have said he was trying to give the idea that the man had some land
flirtation on hand. They looked one another square in the eye for a
moment, these two. It was the straight stare of equals who understood
each other well.
‘Some one--might be--on the way, as it were, Captain. Couldn’t say for
certain.’
The voice almost trembled. By a sharp twist of the eye, Sinbad managed
to shoot a lightning and significant look at the Doctor.
‘But this cold--this freezing, damp cold in the place? Are you sure no
one’s come--by the back ways?’ insisted the master. He whispered it.
‘Across the dunes, for instance?’ His voice conveyed awe and delight,
both kept hard under.
‘It’s all over the house, Captain, already,’ replied the man, and moved
across to put more sea-logs on the blazing fire. Even the soldier
noticed then that their language was tight with allusion of another
kind. To relieve the growing tension and uneasiness in his own mind he
took up the word ‘house’ and made fun of it.
‘As though it were a mansion,’ he observed, with a forced chuckle,
‘instead of a mere sea-shell!’ Then, looking about him, he added:
‘But, all the same, you know, there _is_ a kind of fog getting into the
room--from the sea, I suppose; coming up with the tide, or something,
eh?’ The air had certainly in the last twenty minutes turned thickish;
it was not all tobacco smoke, and there was a moisture that began to
precipitate on the objects in tiny, fine globules. The cold, too,
fairly bit.
‘I’ll take a look round,’ said Sinbad, significantly, and went out.
Only the Doctor perhaps noticed that the man shook, and was white down
to the gills. He said nothing, but moved his chair nearer to the window
and to his host. It was really a little bit beyond comprehension how
the wild words of this old sea-dog in the full sway of his ‘sea fit’
had altered the very air of the room as well as the personal equations
of its occupants, for an extraordinary atmosphere of enthusiasm that
was almost splendour pulsed about him, yet vilely close to something
that suggested terror! Through the armour of everyday common sense that
normally clothed the minds of these other two, had crept the faint
wedges of a mood that made them vaguely wonder whether the incredible
could perhaps sometimes--by way of bewildering exceptions--actually
come to pass. The moods of their deepest life, that is to say, were
already affected. An inner, and thoroughly unwelcome, change was in
progress. And such psychic disturbances once started are hard to
arrest. In this case it was well on the way before either the Army or
Medicine had been willing to recognise the fact. There was something
coming--coming from the sand-dunes or the sea. And it was invited,
welcomed at any rate, by Erricson. His deep, volcanic enthusiasm and
belief provided the channel. In lesser degree they, too, were caught
in it. Moreover, it was terrific, irresistible.
And it was at this point--as the comparing of notes afterwards
established--that Father Norden came in, Norden, the big man’s nephew,
having bicycled over from some point beyond Corfe Castle and raced
along the hard Studland sand in the moonlight, and then hullood till a
boat had ferried him across the narrow channel of Poole Harbour. Sinbad
simply brought him in without any preliminary question or announcement.
He could not resist the splendid night and the spring air, explained
Norden. He felt sure his uncle could ‘find a hammock’ for him somewhere
aft, as he put it. He did not add that Sinbad had telegraphed for him
just before sundown from the coast-guard hut. Dr. Reese already knew
him, but he was introduced to the Major. Norden was a member of the
Society of Jesus, an ardent, not clever, and unselfish soul.
Erricson greeted him with obviously mixed feelings, and with an
extraordinary sentence: ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ he exclaimed,
after a few commonplaces of talk, ‘for all religions are the same if
you go deep enough. All teach sacrifice, and, without exception, all
seek final union by absorption into their Deity.’ And then, under his
breath, turning sideways to peer out of the window, he added a swift
rush of half-smothered words that only Dr. Reese caught: ‘The Army,
the Church, the Medical Profession, and Labour--if they would only
all come! What a fine result, what a grand offering! Alone--I seem so
unworthy--insignificant...!’
But meanwhile young Norden was speaking before any one could stop him,
although the Major did make one or two blundering attempts. For once
the Jesuit’s tact was at fault. He evidently hoped to introduce a new
mood--to shift the current already established by the single force of
his own personality. And he was not quite man enough to carry it off.
It was an error of judgment on his part. For the forces he found
established in the room were too heavy to lift and alter, their impetus
being already acquired. He did his best, anyhow. He began moving with
the current--it was not the first sea fit he had combated in this
extraordinary personality--then found, too late, that he was carried
along with it himself like the rest of them.
‘Odd--but couldn’t find the bungalow at first,’ he laughed, somewhat
hardly. ‘It’s got a bit of sea-fog all to itself that hides it. I
thought perhaps my pagan uncle----’
The Doctor interrupted him hastily, with great energy. ‘The fog _does_
lie caught in these sand hollows--like steam in a cup, you know,’ he
put in. But the other, intent on his own procedure, missed the cue.
‘----thought it was smoke at first, and that you were up to some
heathen ceremony or other,’ laughing in Erricson’s face; ‘sacrificing
to the full moon or the sea, or the spirits of the desolate places that
haunt sand-dunes, eh?’
No one spoke for a second, but Erricson’s face turned quite radiant.
‘My uncle’s such a pagan, you know,’ continued the priest, ‘that as
I flew along those deserted sands from Studland I almost expected
to hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn ... or see fair Thetis’s
tinsel-slippered feet....’
Erricson, suppressing violent gestures, highly excited, face happy as
a boy’s, was combing his great yellow beard with both hands, and the
other two men had begun to speak at once, intent on stopping the flow
of unwise allusion. Norden, swallowing a mouthful of cold soda-water,
had put the glass down, spluttering over its bubbles, when the sound
was first heard at the window. And in the back room the manservant ran,
calling something aloud that sounded like ‘It’s coming, God save us,
it’s coming in...!’ Though the Major swears some name was mentioned
that he afterwards forgot--Glaucus--Proteus--Pontus--or some such
word. The sound itself, however, was plain enough--a kind of imperious
tapping on the window-panes as of a multitude of objects. Blown sand it
might have been or heavy spray or, as Norden suggested later, a great
watersoaked branch of giant seaweed. Every one started up, but Erricson
was first upon his feet, and had the window wide open in a twinkling.
His voice roared forth over those moonlit sand-dunes and out towards
the line of heavy surf ten yards below.
‘All along the shore of the Ægean,’ he bellowed, with a kind of hoarse
triumph that shook the heart, ‘that ancient cry once rang. But it was a
lie, a thumping and audacious lie. And He is not the only one. Another
still lives--and, by Poseidon, He comes! He knows His own and His own
know Him--and His own shall go to meet Him...!’
That reference to the Ægean ‘cry’! It was so wonderful. Every
one, of course, except the soldier, seized the allusion. It was
a comprehensive, yet subtle, way of suggesting the idea. And
meanwhile all spoke at once, shouted rather, for the Invasion was
somehow--monstrous.
‘Damn it--that’s a bit too much. Something’s caught my throat!’ The
Major, like a man drowning, fought with the furniture in his amazement
and dismay. Fighting was his first instinct, of course. ‘Hurts so
infernally--takes the breath,’ he cried, by way of explaining the
extraordinarily violent impetus that moved him, yet half ashamed
of himself for seeing nothing he could strike. But Malcolm Reese
struggled to get between his host and the open window, saying in
tense voice something like ‘Don’t let him get out! Don’t let him get
out!’ While the shouts of warning from Sinbad in the little cramped
back offices added to the general confusion. Only Father Norden stood
quiet--watching with a kind of admiring wonder the expression of
magnificence that had flamed into the visage of Erricson.
‘Hark, you fools! Hark!’ boomed the Viking figure, standing erect and
splendid.
And through that open window, along the far-drawn line of shore from
Canford Cliffs to the chalk bluffs of Studland Bay, there certainly
ran a sound that was no common roar of surf. It was articulate--a
message from the sea--an announcement--a thunderous warning of
approach. No mere surf breaking on sand could have compassed so deep
and multitudinous a voice of dreadful roaring--far out over the
entering tide, yet at the same time close in along the entire sweep of
shore, shaking all the ocean, both depth and surface, with its deep
vibrations. Into the bungalow chamber came--the SEA!
Out of the night, from the moonlit spaces where it had been steadily
accumulating, into that little cabined room so full of humanity and
tobacco smoke, came invisibly--the Power of the Sea. Invisible, yes,
but mighty, pressed forward by the huge draw of the moon, soft-coated
with brine and moisture--the great Sea. And with it, into the minds
of those three other men, leaped instantaneously, not to be denied,
overwhelming suggestions of water-power, the tear and strain of
thousand-mile currents, the irresistible pull and rush of tides, the
suction of giant whirlpools--more, the massed and awful impetus of
whole driven oceans. The air turned salt and briny, and a welter of
seaweed clamped their very skins.
‘Glaucus! I come to Thee, great God of the deep Waterways.... Father
and Master!’ Erricson cried aloud in a voice that most marvellously
conveyed supreme joy.
The little bungalow trembled as from a blow at the foundations, and the
same second the big man was through the window and running down the
moonlit sands towards the foam.
‘God in Heaven! Did you all see _that_?’ shouted Major Reese, for the
manner in which the great body slipped through the tiny window-frame
was incredible. And then, first tottering with a sudden weakness,
he recovered himself and rushed round by the door, followed by his
brother. Sinbad, invisible, but not inaudible, was calling aloud from
the passage at the back. Father Norden, slimmer than the others--well
controlled, too--was through the little window before either of them
reached the fringe of beach beyond the sand-dunes. They joined forces
halfway down to the water’s edge. The figure of Erricson, towering in
the moonlight, flew before them, coasting rapidly along the wave-line.
No one of them said a word; they tore along side by side, Norden a
trifle in advance. In front of them, head turned seawards, bounded
Erricson in great flying leaps, singing as he ran, impossible to
overtake.
Then, what they witnessed all three witnessed; the weird grandeur of
it in the moonshine was too splendid to allow the smaller emotions
of personal alarm, it seems. At any rate, the divergence of opinion
afterwards was unaccountably insignificant. For, on a sudden, that
heavy roaring sound far out at sea came close in with a swift plunge
of speed, followed simultaneously--accompanied, rather--by a dark line
that was no mere wave moving: enormously, up and across, between the
sea and sky it swept close in to shore. The moonlight caught it for a
second as it passed, in a cliff of her bright silver.
And Erricson slowed down, bowed his great head and shoulders, spread
his arms out and....
And what? For no one of those amazed witnesses could swear exactly what
then came to pass. Upon this impossibility of telling it in language
they all three agreed. Only those eyeless dunes of sand that watched,
only the white and silent moon overhead, only that long, curved beach
of empty and deserted shore retain the complete record, to be revealed
some day perhaps when a later Science shall have learned to develop
the photographs that Nature takes incessantly upon her secret plates.
For Erricson’s rough suit of tweed went out in ribbons across the air;
his figure somehow turned dark like strips of tide-sucked seaweed;
something enveloped and overcame him, half shrouding him from view.
He stood for one instant upright, his hair wild in the moonshine,
towering, with arms again outstretched; then bent forward, turned, drew
out most curiously sideways, uttering the singing sound of tumbling
waters. The next instant, curving over like a falling wave, he swept
along the glistening surface of the sands--and was gone. In fluid form,
wave-like, his being slipped away into the Being of the Sea. A violent
tumult convulsed the surface of the tide near in, but at once, and with
amazing speed, passed careering away into the deeper water--far out. To
his singular death, as to a wedding, Erricson had gone, singing, and
well content.
* * * * *
‘May God, who holds the sea and all its powers in the hollow of His
mighty hand, take them _both_ into Himself!’ Norden was on his knees,
praying fervently.
The body was never recovered ... and the most curious thing of all was
that the interior of the cabin, where they found Sinbad shaking with
terror when they at length returned, was splashed and sprayed, almost
soaked, with salt water. Up into the bigger dunes beside the bungalow,
and far beyond the reach of normal tides, lay, too, a great streak and
furrow as of a large invading wave, caking the dry sand. A hundred
tufts of the coarse grass tussocks had been torn away.
The high tide that night, drawn by the Easter full moon, of course, was
known to have been exceptional, for it fairly flooded Poole Harbour,
flushing all the coves and bays towards the mouth of the Frome. And the
natives up at Arne Bay and Wych always declare that the noise of the
sea was heard far inland even up to the nine Barrows of the Purbeck
Hills--triumphantly singing.