HOW CARETTE AND I WERE GIRL AND BOY TOGETHER
I suppose I could fill a great book with my recollections of those
wonderful days when I was a boy of twelve and Carette Le Marchant was a
girl of ten, and far and away the prettiest girl in Sercq,--or in Guernsey
or Jersey either, for that matter, I'll wager. And at that time I would
have fought on the spot any boy not too visibly beyond me who dared to hold
any other opinion.
My mother and my grandfather did not by any means approve my endless
battles, I am bound to say, and I do not think I was by nature of a
quarrelsome disposition, but it seems to me now that a good deal of my time
was spent in boyish warfare, and as often as not Carette was in one way or
another accountable for it.
Not that herself or her looks could be called in question. These spoke for
themselves, though I grant you she was a fiery little person and easily
provoked. If any attack was made on her looks or her doings it was usually
only for my provocation, as the knights in olden times flung down their
gauntlets by way of challenge. But there were other matters relating to
Carette, or rather to her family, which I could defend only with my fists,
and not at all with my judgment even at twelve years old, and only for her
sake who had, of herself, nothing whatever to do with them.
For the Le Marchants of Brecqhou were known and held in a somewhat
wholesome respect of fear, by all grown-up dwellers in the Islands, from
Alderney to Jersey.
It was not simply that they were bold and successful free-traders.
Free-trade--or, as some would call it, smuggling--was the natural commerce
of the Islands, and there were not very many whose fingers were not in the
golden pie. My grandfather, Philip Carré, was one, however, and he would
have starved sooner than live by any means which did not commend themselves
to his own very clear views of right and wrong. The Le Marchants had made
themselves a name for reckless daring, and carelessness of other people's
well-being when it ran counter to their own, which gave them right of way
among their fellows, but won comment harsh enough behind their backs. Many
a strange story was told of them, and as a rule the stories lost nothing in
the telling.
But my boyish recollections of Carette,--Carterette in full, but shortened
by everyone to Carette, unless it was Aunt Jeanne Falla under very great
provocation, which did not, indeed, happen often but was not absolutely
unknown,--my recollections of Carette, and of my mother, and my
grandfather, and Krok, and George Hamon, and Jeanne Falla, are as bright
and rosy as the dawns and sunsets of those earlier days.
All these seem to have been with me from the very beginning. They made up
my little world, and Carette was the sunlight,--and occasionally the
lightning,--and the moonlight was my mother, and the bright stars were
Jeanne Falla and George Hamon, while my grandfather was a benevolent power,
always kind but rather far above me, and Krok was a mystery man, dearly
loved, but held in something of awe by reason of his strange affliction.
For Krok could hear and understand all that was said to him, even in our
Island tongue which was not native to him, but he had no speech. The story
ran that he had been picked off a piece of wreckage, somewhere off the
North African coast, by the ship in which my grandfather made his last
voyage, very many years ago. He was very intelligent and quick of hearing,
but dumb, and it was said that he had been captured by Algerine pirates
when a boy and had his tongue cut out by them. This, however, I was in a
position to contradict, for I had once got a glimpse of Krok's tongue and
so knew that he had one, though his face was so covered with hair that one
might have doubted almost if he even had a mouth.
He was said to be Spanish. He was said to be Scotch. Wherever he was born,
he was by nature an honest man and faithful as a dog. My grandfather had
taken a liking to him, and when he quitted the sea Krok followed him, and
became his man and served him faithfully. He could neither read nor write
at that time, and his only vocal expression was a hoarse croak like the
cawing of a crow, and this, combined with ample play of head and hand and
facial expression and hieroglyphic gesture, formed his only means of
communication with his surroundings.
The sailors called him Krok, from the sound he made when he tried to speak,
and Krok he remained. In moments of intense excitement he was said to have
delivered himself of the word "Gug" also, but doubts were cast upon this.
He was of a placid and obliging nature, a diligent and trustworthy worker,
and on the whole a cheerful companion with whom one could never fall
out--by word of mouth, at all events.
He was short and broad but very powerful, and his face, where it was not
covered with hair, was seamed and meshed with little wrinkles, maybe from
pinching it up in the glare of the sun as a boy. His eyes were brown and
very like a dog's, and that was perhaps because he could not speak and
tried to tell you things with them. At times, when he could not make you
understand, they were full of a straining anxiety, the painful striving of
a dumb soul for utterance, which was very pitiful.
I remember very well quite breaking down once, when I was a very little
fellow and was doing my best to explain something I wanted and could not
make him understand. In my haste I had probably begun in the middle and
left him to guess the beginning. Something I had certainly left out, for
all I could get from Krok was puzzled shakes of the head and anxious
snappings of the bewildered brown eyes.
"Oh, Krok, what a stupid, stupid man you are!" I cried at last, and I can
see now the sudden pained pinching of the hairy face and the welling tears
in the troubled brown eyes.
I flung my little arms half round his big neck and hugged myself tight to
him, crying, "Oh, Krok, I love you!" and he fondled me and patted me and
soothed me, and our discussion was forgotten. And after that, boy as I
was, and as wild and thoughtless as most, I do not think I ever wounded
Krok's soul again, for it was like striking a faithful dog or a horse that
was doing his best.
But better times came--to Krok, at all events--when my mother began to
teach me my letters.
That was in the short winter days and long evenings, when all the west was
a shrieking black fury, out of which hurtled blasts so overpowering that
you could lean up against them as against a wall, and with no more fear of
falling, and the roar of great waters was never out of our ears.
In the daytime I would creep to the edge of the cliff, and lie flat behind
a boulder, and watch by the hour the huge white waves as they swept round
the Moie de Batarde and came ripping along the ragged side of Brecqhou like
furious white comets, and hurled themselves in thunder on our Moie de
Mouton and Tintageu. Then the great granite cliffs and our house up above
shook with their pounding, and Port à la Jument and Pegane Bay were all
aboil with beaten froth, and the salt spume came flying over my head in
great sticky gouts, and whirled away among the seagulls feeding in the
fields behind. When gale and tide played the same way, the mighty strife
between the incoming waves and the Race of the Gouliot passage was a thing
to be seen. For the waves that had raced over a thousand miles of sea split
on the point of Brecqhou, and those that took the south side piled
themselves high in the great basin formed by Brecqhou and the Gouliot rocks
and Havre Gosselin, and finding an outlet through the Gouliot Pass, they
came leaping and roaring through, the narrow black channel in a very fury
of madness, and hurled themselves against their fellows who had taken the
north side of the Island, and there below me they fought like giants, and I
was never tired of watching.
But in the evenings, when the lamp was lit, and the fire of dried gorse and
driftwood burnt with coloured flames and lightning forks, my grandfather
would get out his books with a sigh of great content, and Krok would settle
silently to his work on net or lobster pot, and my mother took to teaching
me my letters, which was not at all to my liking.
At first I was but a dull scholar, and the letters had to be dinned into my
careless little head many times before they stuck there, and anything was
sufficient to draw me from my task,--a louder blast outside than usual, or
the sight of Krok's nimble fingers, or of my grandfather's deep absorption,
which at that time I could not at all understand, and which seemed to me
extraordinary, and made me think of old Mother Mauger, who was said to be a
witch, and who lost herself staring into her fire just as my grandfather
did into his books.
My wits were always busy with anything and everything rather than their
proper business, but my mother was patience itself and drilled things into
me till perforce I had to learn them, and, either through this constant
repetition, or from a friendly feeling for myself in trouble, Krok began to
take an intelligent interest in my lessons.
He would bring his work alongside, and listen intently, and watch the book,
and at times would drop his work and by main force would turn my head away
from himself to that which was of more consequence, when my mother would
nod and smile her thanks.
And so, as I slowly learned, Krok learned also, and very much more
quickly, for he had more time than I had to think over things, because he
wasted none of it in talking, and he was more used to thinking than I was.
And then, to me it was still only drudgery, while to him it was the opening
of a new window to his soul.
Why, in all these years, he had never learned to read and write--why my
grandfather had never thought to teach him--I cannot tell. Perhaps because
my mother had learned at the school; perhaps because Krok himself had shown
no inclination to learn; perhaps because, in the earlier days, the scanty
little farm and the fishing which eked it out took up all the men's time
and attention.
However that might be, now that he had begun to learn Krok learned quickly,
and the signs of his knowledge were all over the place.
He knew all that wonderful west coast of our Island as well as he knew the
fingers of his hand, and before long the ground all round the house was
strewn about with smooth flat stones on which were scratched the letters of
the alphabet, which presently, according to the pace of my studies indoors,
began to arrange themselves into words, and so I was encompassed with
learning, inside and out, as it were, and sucked it in whether I would or
no.
Well do I remember the puzzlement in old Krok's face when the mischief that
dwells in every boy set me to changing the proper order of his stones, and
the eagerness with which he awaited the evening lesson to compare the new
wrong order of things with his recollections of the original correct one,
and then the mild look of reproachful enquiry he would turn upon me.
But my mother, catching me at it one day, sharply forbade me meddling with
Krok's studies, and showed me the smallness of it, and I never touched one
of his stones again.
Both my mother and my grandfather could read and speak English, in addition
to the Norman-French which was the root of our Island tongue, and that was
something of a distinction in those days. He had learned it, perforce,
during his early voyagings. He had been twice round the world, both times
on English ships, and he was the kind of man, steady, quiet, thoughtful, to
miss no opportunities of self-improvement, though I do not think there ever
can have been a man less desirous of gain. His wants were very few, and so
long as the farm and the fishing provided us all with a sufficient living,
he was satisfied and grateful. He saw his neighbours waxing fat all about
him, in pursuits which he would have starved sooner than set his hand to.
To them, and according to Island standards, these things might be right or
wrong, but to him, and for himself, he had no doubts whatever in the
matter.
You see, long ago, in Guernsey, he had come across Master Claude Gray, the
Quaker preacher, and had been greatly drawn to him and the simple high-life
he proclaimed. Frequently, on still Sabbath mornings, he would put off in
his boat, and, if the wind did not serve, would pull all the way to Peter
Port, a good fourteen miles there and back, for the purpose of meeting his
friend, and looked on it as a high privilege.
When, at times, he took me with him, I, too, looked on it as a mighty
privilege; for Peter Port, even on a Sabbath morning, was, to a boy whose
life was spent within the shadow of the Autelets, so to speak, a great and
bustling city, full of people and houses and mysteries, and of course of
wickedness, all of which excited my liveliest imaginings.
In the evening we would pull back, or run before the west wind if it
served, and my grandfather would thoughtfully con over the gains of the day
as another might tell the profits of his trading. Master Claude Gray was a
man of parts, well read, an Englishman, and it was doubtless from him that
my grandfather drew some of that love of books which distinguished him
above any man I ever knew on Sercq, not excepting even the Seigneur, or the
Sénéchal, or the Schoolmaster, or the Parson.
His library consisted of five books which he valued beyond anything he
possessed, chiefly on account of what was in them and what he got out of
them; to some extent also, in the case of three of them, for what they
represented to him.
The first was a very large Bible bound in massive leather-covered boards, a
present from Master Claude Gray to his friend, and brother in Christ,
Philip Carré, and so stated in a very fine round-hand on the front page. It
contained a number of large pictures drawn on wood which, under strict
injunctions as to carefulness and clean hands and no wet fingers, I was
occasionally allowed to look at on a winter's Sabbath evening, and which
always sent me to bed in a melancholy frame of mind, yet drew me to their
inspection with a most curious fascination when the next chance offered.
Another was Mr. John Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, also with woodcuts of a
somewhat terrifying aspect, yet not devoid of lively fillips to the
imagination.
Then there was a truly awful volume, _Foxe's Book of Martyrs_, with
pictures which wrought so upon me that I used to wake up in the night
shrieking with terror, and my mother forbade any further study of it;
though Krok, when he came to be able to read, would hang over it by the
hour, spelling out all the dreadful stories with his big forefinger and
noting every smallest detail of the pictured tortures.
These two my grandfather had bought in Peter Port at a sale, together with
a copy of Jean de la Fontaine's _Fables Choisies_ in French, with
delightful pictures of all the talking beasts.
And--crowning glory from the purely literary point of view--a massive
volume of Plays by William Shakespeare, and to this was attached a history
and an inscription of which my grandfather, in his quiet way, was not a
little proud.
When the _Valentine_, East Indiaman, went ashore on Brecqhou in the great
autumn gale, the year before I was born,--that was before the Le Marchants
set themselves down there,--my grandfather was among the first to put out
to the rescue of the crew and passengers. He got across to Brecqhou at risk
of his life, and, from his knowledge of that ragged coast and its currents,
managed to float a line down to the sinking ship by means of which every
man got safe ashore. There was among them a rich merchant of London, a Mr.
Peter Mulholland, and he would have done much for the man who had saved all
their lives.
"I have done naught more than my duty," said my grandfather, and would
accept nothing.
But Mr. Mulholland stopped with him for some days, while such of the cargo
as had floated was being gathered from the shores--and, truth to tell, from
the houses--of Sercq, that is to say some portion of it, for some went
down with the ship, and in some of the houses there are silken hangings to
this day. And the rich Englishman came to know what manner of man my
grandfather was and his tastes, and some time after he had gone there came
one day a great parcel by the Guernsey cutter, addressed to my grandfather,
and in it was that splendid book of Shakespeare's Plays which, after his
Bible, became his greatest delight. An inscription, too, which he read
religiously every time he opened the book, though he must have known every
curl of every letter by heart.
It was a wonderful book, even to look at. When I grew learned enough to
read it aloud to him and my mother and Krok of a winter's night, I came by
degrees, though not by any means at first, to understand what a very
wonderful book it was.
When one's reading is limited to four books it is well that they should be
good books. Every one of those books I read through aloud from beginning to
end, not once, but many times, except indeed the long lists of names in the
Bible, which my grandfather said were of no profit to us, and some other
portions which he said were beyond me, and which I therefore made a point
of reading to myself, but got little benefit from.
But to these books, and to the habit of reading them aloud, which impressed
them greatly on my memory, and to my own observation of men and things and
places through the eyes which these books helped to open, and to the wise
words of my grandfather, and the quiet faithful teaching of my mother, and
to all that old Krok taught me without ever speaking one word--I know that
I owe everything, and that is why it was necessary to tell you so much
about them.
If the telling has wearied you, I am sorry. For myself, I like to think
back upon it all, and to trace the beginnings of some things of which I
have seen the endings, and of some which are not ended yet, thank God!--and
to find, in all that lies between, the signs of a Power that is beyond any
power of man's, and is, indeed, and rightly I think, beyond even the power
of any man's full understanding.