‘Claude, well-beloved, will you not sketch a little?’
No answer.
‘Not even rhapsodize? call it “lovely, exquisite, grand, majestic”?
There are plenty of such words in worldlings’ mouths—not a Cockney but
would burst out with some enthusiastic commonplace at such a sight—surely
one or other of them must be appropriate.’
‘Silence, profane! and take me away from this. Let us go down, and hide
our stupidities among those sand-hills, and so forget the whole. What
use standing here to be maddened by this tantalizing earth-spirit, who
shows us such glorious things, and will not tell us what they mean?’
So down we went upon the burrows, among the sands, which hid from us
every object but their own chaotic curves and mounds. Above, a hundred
skylarks made the air ring with carollings; strange and gaudy plants
flecked the waste round us; and insects without number whirred over our
heads, or hung poised with their wings outspread on the tall stalks of
marram grass. All at once a cloud hid the sun, and a summer whirlwind,
presage of the thunderstorm, swept past us, carrying up with it a column
of dry sand, and rattling the dry bents over our heads.
‘What a chill, doleful sigh comes from those reeds!’ said Claude. ‘I can
conceive this desert, beneath a driving winter’s sky instead of this
burning azure, one of the most desolate places on the earth.’
‘Ay, desolate enough,’ I said, as we walked down beyond the tide-mark,
over the vast fields of ribbed and splashy sands, ‘when the dead shells
are rolling and crawling up the beach in wreaths before the gale, with a
ghastly rattle as of the dry bones in the “Valley of Vision,” and when
not a flower shows on that sandcliff, which is now one broad bed of
yellow, scarlet, and azure.’
‘That is the first spot in England,’ said Claude, ‘except, of course,
“the meads of golden king-cups,” where I have seen wild flowers give a
tone to the colouring of the whole landscape, as they are said to do in
the prairies of Texas. And look how flowers and cliff are both glowing
in a warm green haze, like that of Cuyp’s wonderful sandcliff picture in
the Dulwich Gallery,—wonderful, as I think, and true, let some critics
revile it as much as they will.’
‘Strange, that you should have quoted that picture here; its curious
resemblance to this very place first awoke in me, years ago, a living
interest in landscape-painting. But look there; even in these grand
summer days there is a sight before us sad enough. There are the ribs of
some ill-fated ship, a man-of-war too, as the story goes, standing like
black fangs, half-buried in the sand. And off what are those two ravens
rising, stirring up with their obscene wings a sickly, putrescent odour?
A corpse?’
No, it was not a corpse; but the token of many corpses. A fragment of
some ship; its gay green paint and half-effaced gilding contrasting
mockingly with the long ugly feathered barnacle-shells, which clustered
on it, rotting into slime beneath the sun, and torn and scattered by the
greedy beaks of the ravens.
In what tropic tornado, or on what coral-key of the Bahamas, months ago,
to judge by those barnacles, had that tall ship gone down? How long had
that scrap of wreck gone wandering down the Gulf Stream, from
Newfoundland into the Mid-Atlantic, and hitherward on its homeless voyage
toward the Spitzbergen shore? And who were all those living men who
“went down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of heroes,” to give no sign
until the sea shall render up her dead? And every one of them had a
father and mother—a wife, perhaps, and children, waiting for him—at least
a whole human life, childhood, boyhood, manhood, in him. All those years
of toil and education, to get him so far on his life-voyage; and here is
the end thereof!’
‘Say rather, the beginning thereof,’ Claude answered, stepping into the
boat. ‘This wreck is but a torn scrap of the chrysalis-cocoon; we may
meet the butterflies themselves hereafter.’
* * * * *
And now we are on board; and alas! some time before the breeze will be
so. Take care of that huge boom, landsman Claude, swaying and sweeping
backwards and forwards across the deck, unless you wish to be knocked
overboard. Take care, too, of that loose rope’s end, unless you wish to
have your eyes cut out. Take my advice, lie down here across the deck,
as others are doing. Cover yourself with great-coats, like an Irishman,
to keep yourself cool, and let us meditate little on this strange thing,
and strange place, which holds us now.
Look at those spars, how they creak and groan with every heave of the
long glassy swell. How those sails flap, and thunder, and rage, with
useless outcries and struggles—only because they are idle. Let the wind
take them, and they will be steady, silent in an instant—their deafening
dissonant grumbling exchanged for the soft victorious song of the breeze
through the rigging, musical, self-contented, as of bird on bough. So it
is through life; there is no true rest but labour. “No true misery,” as
Carlyle says, “but in that of not being able to work.” Some may call it
a pretty conceit. I call it a great worldwide law, which reaches from
earth to heaven. Whatever the Preacher may have thought it in a moment
of despondency, what is it but a blessing that “sun, and wind, and
rivers, and ocean,” as he says, and “all things, are full of labour—man
cannot utter it.” This sea which bears us would rot and poison, did it
not sweep in and out here twice a day in swift refreshing current; nay,
more, in the very water which laps against our bows troops of negro girls
may have hunted the purblind shark in West Indian harbours, beneath
glaring white-walled towns, with their rows of green jalousies, and
cocoa-nuts, and shaddock groves. For on those white sands there to the
left, year by year, are washed up foreign canes, cassia beans, and tropic
seeds; and sometimes, too, the tropic ocean snails, with their fragile
shells of amethystine blue, come floating in mysteriously in fleets from
the far west out of the passing Gulf Stream, where they have been sailing
out their little life, never touching shore or ground, but buoyed each by
his cluster of air-bubbles, pumped in at will under the skin of his tiny
foot, by some cunning machinery of valves—small creatures truly, but very
wonderful to men who have learned to reverence not merely the size of
things, but the wisdom of their idea, and raising strange longings and
dreams about that submarine ocean-world which stretches, teeming with
richer life than this terrestrial one, away, away there westward, down
the path of the sun, toward the future centre of the world’s destiny.
Wonderful ocean-world! three-fifths of our planet! Can it be true that
no rational beings are denizens there? Science is severely silent—having
as yet seen no mermaids: our captain there forward is not silent—if he
has not seen them, plenty of his friends have. The young man here has
been just telling me that it was only last month one followed a West
Indiaman right across the Atlantic. “For,” says he, “there must be
mermaids, and such like. Do you think Heaven would have made all that
water there only for the herrings and mackerel?”
I do not know, Tom: but I, too, suspect not; and I do know that honest
men’s guesses are sometimes found by science to have been prophecies, and
that there is no smoke without fire, and few universal legends without
their nucleus of fact. After all, those sea-ladies are too lovely a
dream to part with in a hurry, at the mere despotic fiat of stern old
Dame Analysis, divine and reverend as she is. Why, like Keats’s Lamia,
‘Must all charms flee,
At the mere touch of cold Philosophy,’
who will not even condescend to be awe-struck at the new wonders which
she herself reveals daily? Perhaps, too, according to the Duke of
Wellington’s great dictum, that each man must be the best judge in his
own profession, sailors may know best whether mermaids exist or not.
Besides, was it not here on Croyde Sands abreast of us, this very last
summer, that a maiden—by which beautiful old word West-country people
still call young girls—was followed up the shore by a mermaid who issued
from the breakers, green-haired, golden-combed, and all; and, fleeing
home, took to her bed and died, poor thing, of sheer terror in the course
of a few days, persisting in her account of the monster? True, the
mermaid may have been an overgrown Lundy Island seal, carried out of his
usual haunts by spring-tides and a school of fish. Be it so. Lundy and
its seals are wonderful enough in all reason to thinking men, as it looms
up there out of the Atlantic, with its two great square headlands, not
twenty miles from us, in the white summer haze. We will go there some
day, and pick up a wild tale or two about it.
But, lo! a black line creeps up the western horizon. Tom, gesticulating,
swears that he sees ‘a billow break.’ True: there they come; the great
white horses, that ‘champ and chafe, and toss in the spray.’ That
long-becalmed trawler to seaward fills, and heels over, and begins to tug
and leap impatiently at the weight of her heavy trawl. Five minutes
more, and the breeze will be down upon us. The young men whistle openly
to woo it; the old father thinks such a superstition somewhat beneath
both his years and his religion, but cannot help pursing up his lips into
a sly ‘whe-eugh’ when he has got well forward out of sight.
* * * *
Five long minutes; there is a breath of air; a soft distant murmur; the
white horses curve their necks, and dive and vanish; and rise again like
snowy porpoises, nearer, and nearer, and nearer. Father and sons are
struggling with that raving, riotous, drunken squaresail forward; while
we haul away upon the main-sheet.
When will it come? It is dying back—sliding past us. ‘Hope deferred
maketh the heart sick.’ No, louder and nearer swells ‘the voice of many
waters,’ ‘the countless laugh of ocean,’ like the mirth of ten thousand
girls, before us, behind us, round us; and the oily swell darkens into
crisp velvet-green, till the air strikes us, and heels us over; and
leaping, plunging, thrashing our bows into the seas, we spring away
close-hauled upon the ever-freshening breeze, while Claude is holding on
by ropes and bulwarks, and some, whose sea-legs have not yet forgot their
craft, are swinging like a pendulum as they pace the deck, enjoying, as
the Norse vikings would have called it, ‘the gallop of the flying
sea-horse, and the shiver of her tawny wings.’
Exquisite motion! more maddening than the smooth floating stride of the
race-horse, or the crash of the thorn-hedges before the stalwart hunter,
or the swaying of the fir-boughs in the gale, when we used to climb as
schoolboys after the lofty hawk’s nest; but not so maddening as the new
motion of our age—the rush of the express-train, when the live iron pants
and leaps and roars through the long chalk cutting; and white mounds
gleam cold a moment against the sky and vanish; and rocks, and grass, and
bushes, fleet by in dim blended lines; and the long hedges revolve like
the spokes of a gigantic wheel; and far below, meadows, and streams, and
homesteads, with all their lazy old-world life, open for an instant, and
then flee away; while awe-struck, silent, choked with the mingled sense
of pride and helplessness, we are swept on by that great pulse of
England’s life-blood, rushing down her iron veins; and dimly out of the
future looms the fulfilment of our primæval mission, to conquer and
subdue the earth, and space too, and time, and all things,—even, hardest
of all tasks, yourselves, my cunning brothers ever learning some fresh
lesson, except that hardest one of all, that it is the Spirit of God
which giveth you understanding.
Yes, great railroads, and great railroad age, who would exchange you,
with all your sins, for any other time? For swiftly as rushes matter,
more swiftly rushes mind; more swiftly still rushes the heavenly dawn up
the eastern sky. ‘The night is far spent, the day is at hand.’ ‘Blessed
is that servant whom his Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching!’
But come, my poor Claude, I see you are too sick for such deep subjects;
so let us while away the time by picking the brains of this tall handsome
boy at the helm, who is humming a love-song to himself sotto voce, lest
it should be overheard by the grey-headed father, who is forward, poring
over his Wesleyan hymn-book. He will have something to tell you; he has
a soul in him looking out of those wild dark eyes, and delicate aquiline
features of his. He is no spade-drudge or bullet-headed Saxon clod: he
has in his veins the blood of Danish rovers and passionate southern
Milesians, who came hither from Teffrobani, the Isle of Summer, as the
old Fenic myths inform us. Come and chat with him. You dare not stir?
Perhaps you are in the right. I shall go and fraternize, and bring you
reports.
* * * *
He has been, at all events, ‘up the Straits’ as the Mediterranean voyage
is called here, and seen ‘Palermy’ and the Sicilians. But, for his
imagination, what seems to have struck it most was that it was a ‘fine
place for Jack, for a man could get mools there for a matter of
three-halfpence a-day.’
‘And was that all you got out of him?’ asked Claude, sickly and sulkily.
‘Oh, you must not forget the halo of glory and excitement which in a
sailor’s eyes surrounds the delights of horseback. But he gave me
besides a long glowing account of the catechism which they had there,
three-quarters of a mile long.’
‘Pope Pius’s catechism, I suppose?’
So thought I, at first; but it appeared that all the dead of the city
were arranged therein, dried and dressed out in their finest clothes,
‘every sect and age,’ as Tom said, ‘by itself; as natural as life!’ We
may hence opine that he means some catacombs or other.
Poor Claude could not even get up a smile: but his sorrows were coming
swiftly to an end. The rock clefts grew sharper and sharper before us.
The soft masses of the lofty bank of wooded cliff rose higher and higher.
The white houses of Clovelly, piled stair above stair up the rocks,
gleamed more and more brightly out of the green round bosoms of the
forest. As we shut in headland after headland, one tall conical rock
after another darkened with its black pyramid the bright orb of the
setting sun. Soon we began to hear the soft murmur of the snowy surf
line; then the merry voices of the children along the shore; and running
straight for the cliff-foot, we shipped into the little pier, from whence
the red-sailed herring-boats were swarming forth like bees out of a hive,
full of gay handsome faces, and all the busy blue-jacketed life of
seaport towns, to their night’s fishing in the bay.