Gilliatt bade him jump into the boat. When he had landed this young
priest, who had a somewhat feminine cast of features, a clear eye, and a
grave manner, Gilliatt perceived that he was holding out a sovereign in
a very white hand. Gilliatt moved the hand gently away. There was a
pause. Then the young man bowed, and left him.
Gilliatt had forgotten all about this stranger, when a voice hailed him.
It was one of the inhabitants, driving by quickly.
"There is news, Gilliatt--at the Bravées."
"What is it?"
"I am too hurried to tell you the story. Go up to the house, and you
will learn."
The Bravées was the residence of a man named Lethierry. He had raised
himself to a position of wealth by starting the first steamboat between
Guernsey and the coast of Normandy; he called this vessel La Durande;
the natives, who prophesied evil of such a frightful invention, called
it the Devil's Boat. But the Durande went to and fro without disaster,
and Lethierry's gold increased. There was nothing in all the universe he
loved so much as this marvellous ship worked by steam. Next to the
Durande, he most loved his pretty niece Dérouchette, who kept house for
him.
One day as Gilliatt was walking over the snow-covered roads,
Dérouchette, who was ahead of him, had stopped for a moment, and
stooping down, had written something with her finger in the snow. When
the fisherman reached the place, he found that the mischievous little
creature had written his name there. Ever since that hour, in the almost
unbroken solitude of his life, Gilliatt had thought about Dérouchette.
Now that he heard of news at the Bravées, the lonely man made his way to
Lethierry's house, which was the nest of Dérouchette.
The news was soon told. The Durande was lost! Presently, amid the
details of the story--the Durande had been wrecked in a fog on the
terrible rocks known as the Douvres--one thing emerged: the engines were
intact. To rescue the Durande was impossible; but the machinery might
still be saved. These engines were unique. To construct others like
them, money was wanting; but to find the artificer would have been still
more difficult. The constructor was dead. The machinery had cost two
thousand pounds. As long as these engines existed, it might almost be
said that there was no shipwreck. The loss of the engines alone was
irreparable.
Now, if ever a dream had appeared wild and impracticable, it was that of
saving the engines then embedded between the Douvres. The idea of
sending a crew to work upon those rocks was absurd. It was the season of
heavy seas. Besides, on the narrow ledge of the highest part of the rock
there was scarcely room for one person. To save the engines, therefore,
it would be necessary for a man to go to the Douvres, to be alone in
that sea, alone at five leagues from the coast, alone in that region of
terrors, for entire weeks, in the presence of dangers foreseen and
unforeseen--without supplies in the face of hunger and nakedness,
without companionship save that of death.
A pilot present in the room delivered judgment.
"No; it is all over. The man does not exist who could go there and
rescue the machinery of the Durande."
"If I don't go," said the engineer of the lost ship, who loved those
engines, "it is because nobody could do it"
"If he existed----" continued the pilot.
Dérouchette turned her head impulsively, and interrupted.
"I would marry him," she said innocently.
There was a pause. A man made his way out of the crowd, and standing
before her, pale and anxious, said, "You would marry him, Miss
Dérouchette?"
It was Gilliatt. All eyes were turned towards him. Lethierry had just
before stood upright and gazed about him. His eyes glittered with a
strange light. He took off his sailor's cap, and threw it on the ground;
then looked solemnly before him, and without seeing any of the persons
present, said Dérouchette should be his. "I pledge myself to it in God's
name!"
_II.--The Prey of the Rocks_
The two perpendicular forms called the Douvres held fast between them,
like an architrave between two pillars, the wreck of the Durande. The
spectacle thus presented was a vast portal in the midst of the sea. It
might have been a titanic cromlech planted there in mid-ocean by hands
accustomed to proportion their labours to the great deep. Its wild
outline stood well defined against the clear sky when Gilliatt
approached in his sloop.
The rocks, thus holding fast and exhibiting their prey, were terrible to
behold. There was a menace in the attitude of the rocks. They seemed to
be biding their time. Nothing could be more suggestive of haughtiness
and arrogance: the conquered vessel, the triumphant abyss. The two
rocks, still streaming with the tempest of the day before, were like two
wrestlers sweating from a recent struggle. Up to a certain height they
were completely bearded with seaweed; above this their steep haunches
glittered at points like polished armour. They seemed ready to begin the
strife again. The imagination might have pictured them as two monstrous
arms, reaching upwards from the gulf, and exhibiting to the tempest the
lifeless body of the ship. If Gilliatt had known how she came to be
there, he might have been more awed by the tremendous spectacle. The
cause was an accident, and yet a purposed act.
Clubin, the captain, as smug a hypocrite as ever scuttled a ship, had
intended to run the Durande on the Hanways. His belt contained three
thousand pounds. He meant to lose the ship on the Hanways, a mile from
shore, and when the passengers had rowed away, pretending that he would
go down with the ship, Clubin purposed to swim to land, get on board a
pirate ship, and be off to the East. His little drama had been acted
out; the boats had rowed away, everybody praising Captain Clubin, who
would not abandon his ship. But when the fog cleared--horror of
horrors!--Clubin found himself not on the Hanways, but on the Douvres;
not one mile from shore, but five miles!
Clubin saw a ship in the distance. He determined to swim to a rock from
which he could be seen, and make signals of distress. He undressed,
leaving his clothing on deck. He retained nothing but his leather belt,
and then, precipitating himself head first, plunged into the sea. As he
dived from a height, he plunged heavily. He sank deep in the water,
touched the bottom, skirted for a moment the submarine rocks, then
struck out to regain the surface. At that moment he felt himself seized
by one foot.
But of all this Gilliatt, arriving at the Douvres, knew nothing. He was
absorbed by the spectacle of the ship held in mid-air. And what did he
find? The machinery was saved, but it was lost. The ocean saved it, only
to demolish it at leisure--like a cat playing with her prey. Its fate
was to suffer there, and to be dismembered day by day. It was to be the
plaything of the savage amusements of the sea. For what could be done?
That this vast block of mechanism and gear, at once massive and
delicate, condemned to fixity by its weight, delivered up in that
solitude to the destructive elements, could, under the frown of that
implacable spot, escape from slow destruction seemed a madness even to
imagine.
Gilliatt looked about him.
When he had made a lodging for himself, and had suffered the misfortune
of losing the basket containing his provisions, Gilliatt considered his
difficulties.
In order to raise the engine of the Durande from the wreck in which it
was three-fourths buried, with any chance of success--in order to
accomplish a salvage in such a place and such a season, it seemed almost
necessary to be a legion of men. Gilliatt was alone. A complete
apparatus of carpenter's and engineer's tools and implements were
wanted. Gilliatt had a saw, a hatchet, a chisel, and a hammer. He wanted
both a good workshop and a good shed; Gilliatt had not a roof to cover
him. Provisions, too, were necessary on that bare rock, but he had not
even bread.
Anyone who could have seen Gilliatt working on the rock during all that
first week might have been puzzled to determine the nature of his
operations. He seemed to be no longer thinking of the Durande or the two
Douvres. He was busy only among the breakers. He seemed absorbed in
saving the smaller parts of the shipwreck. He took advantage of every
high tide to strip the reefs of everything that the ship-wreck had
distributed among them. He went from rock to rock, picking up whatever
the sea had scattered--tatters of sail-cloth, pieces of iron, splinters
of panels, shattered planking, broken yards; here a beam, there a chain,
there a pulley.
He lived upon limpets, hermit-crabs, and rain-water. He was surrounded
by a screaming garrison of gulls, cormorants, and sea-mews. The deep
boom of the waves among the caves and reefs was never out of his ears.
By day he was roasted in the terrific heat which beat with pitiless
force on this exposed pinnacle; at night he was chilled to the marrow by
the cold of the open sea. And for ever he was hungry, thirsty--famished.
One day, in exploring for salvage some of the grottoes of his rock,
Gilliatt came upon a cave within a cave, so beautiful with sea-flowers
that it seemed the retreat of a sea-goddess. The shells were like
jewels; the water held eternal moonlight. Some of the flowers were like
sapphires. Standing in this dripping grotto, with his feet on the edge
of a probably bottomless pool, Gilliatt suddenly became aware in the
transparence of that water of the approach of some mystic form. A
species of long, ragged band was moving amid the oscillation of the
waves. It did not float, but darted about at its own will. It had an
object; was advancing somewhere rapidly. The thing had something of the
form of a jester's bauble with points, which hung flabby and undulating.
It seemed covered with a dust incapable of being washed away by the
water. It was more than horrible; it was foul. It seemed to be seeking
the darker portion of the cavern, where at last it vanished.
Gilliatt returned to his work. He had a notion. Since the time of the
carpenter-mason of Salbris, who, in the sixteenth century, without other
helper than a child, his son, with ill-fashioned tools, in the chamber
of the great clock at La Charité-sur-Loire, resolved at one stroke five
or six problems in statics and dynamics inextricably intervolved--since
the time of that grand and marvellous achievement of the poor workman,
who found means, without breaking a single piece of wire, without
throwing one of the teeth of the wheels out of gear, to lower in one
piece, by a marvellous simplification, from the second story of the
clock tower to the first, that massive clock, large as a room, nothing
that could be compared with the project which Gilliatt was meditating
had ever been attempted.
After incredible exertions, the machinery was ready for lowering into
the sloop. Gilliatt had constructed tackle, a regulating gear, and made
all sure. The long labour was finished; the first act had been the
simplest of all. He could put to sea. To-morrow he would be in Guernsey.
But no. He had waited for the tide to lift the sloop as near to the
suspended engines as possible, and now the funnel, which he had lowered
with the paddle-boxes, prevented the sloop from getting out of the
little gorge. It was necessary to wait for the tide to fall. Gilliatt
drew his sheepskin about him, pulled his cap over his eyes, and lying
down beside the engine, was soon asleep.
When he woke, it was to feel the coming of a storm. A fresh task was
forced upon this famished man. It was necessary to build a breakwater in
the gorge. He flew to this task. Nails driven into the cracks of the
rocks, beams lashed together with cordage, cat-heads from the Durande,
binding strakes, pulley-sheaves, chains--with these materials the
haggard dweller of the rock built his barrier against the wrath of God.
Then the storm came.
_III.--The Devil-Fish_
When the awful rage of the storm had passed, and the barrier which he
had repaired in the midst of the tempest hung like a broken arm across
the gorge, Gilliatt, maddened by hunger, took advantage of the receding
tide to go in search of crayfish. Half naked, and with his open knife
between his teeth, he sprang from rock to rock. In hunting a crab he
found himself once more in the mysterious grotto that glittered with
jewel-like flowers. He noticed a fissure above the level of the water.
The crab was probably there. He thrust in his hand as far as he was
able, and groped about in that dusky aperture.
Suddenly he felt himself seized by the arm. A strange, indescribable
horror thrilled through him.
Some living thing--thin, rough, flat, cold, slimy--had twisted itself
round his naked arm. It crept upward towards his chest. Its pressure was
like a tightening cord, its steady persistence like that of a screw. In
less than a moment some mysterious spiral form had passed round his
wrist and elbow, and had reached his shoulder. A sharp point penetrated
beneath the arm-pit.
Gilliatt recoiled; but he had scarcely power to move. He was, as it
were, nailed to the place. With his left hand, which was disengaged, he
seized his knife, and made a desperate effort to withdraw his arm. He
only succeeded in disturbing his persecutor, which wound itself still
tighter. It was supple as leather, strong as steel, cold as night.
A second form--sharp, elongated, and narrow--issued out of the crevice,
like a tongue out of monstrous jaws. It seemed to lick his naked body;
then, suddenly stretching out, it became longer and thinner, as it crept
over his skin, and wound itself round him. A terrible sense of anguish,
comparable to nothing he had ever known, compelled all his muscles to
contract. He felt upon his skin a number of flat, rounded points. It
seemed as if innumerable suckers had fastened to his flesh, and were
about to drink his blood.
A third long, undulating shape issued from the hole in the rock, felt
about his body, lashed round his ribs like a cord, and fixed itself
there. There was sufficient light for Gilliatt to see the repulsive
forms which had entangled themselves about him. A fourth ligature, but
this one swift as an arrow, darted towards his stomach.
These living things crept and glided about him; he felt the points of
pressure, like sucking mouths, change their places from time to time.
Suddenly a large, round, flattened, glutinous mass shot from beneath the
crevice. It was the centre! The thongs were attached to it like spokes
to the nave of a wheel. In the middle of this slimy mass appeared two
eyes. The eyes were fixed on Gilliatt.
He recognised the devil-fish.
Gilliatt had but one resource--his knife.
He knew that these frightful monsters are vulnerable in only one
point--the head. Standing half naked in the water, his body lashed by
the foul antennae of the devil-fish, Gilliatt looked at the devil-fish
and the devilfish looked at Gilliatt.
With the devil-fish, as with a furious bull, there is a certain moment
in the conflict which must be seized. It is the instant when the bull
lowers its neck; it is the instant when the devil-fish advances its
head. The movement is rapid. He who loses that moment is destroyed.
Suddenly it loosened another antenna from the rock, and darting it at
him, seized him by the left arm. At the same moment it advanced its
head.
Rapid as was this movement, Gilliatt, by a gigantic effort, plunged the
blade of his knife into the flat, slimy substance, and with a movement
like the flourish of a whip, described a circle round the eyes and
wrenched off the head as a man would draw a tooth.
The four hundred suckers dropped at once from the man and the rock. The
mass sank to the bottom of the water.
Nearly exhausted, Gilliatt plunged into the water to heal by friction
the numberless purple swellings which were pricking all over his body.
He advanced up the recess. Something caught his eye. He approached
nearer. The thing was a bleached skeleton; nothing was left but the
white bones. Yes, something else. A leather belt and a tobacco-tin. On
the belt Gilliatt read the name of Clubin; in the tobacco-tin, which he
opened with his knife, he found three thousand pounds.
When Gilliatt reached his sloop, with this belt and box in his
possession, he found, to his unspeakable horror, that she had been
making water fast. Had he come an hour later he would have found nothing
above water but the funnel of the steamer.
He slung a tarpaulin by chains overboard and hung it over the hole.
Pressure of the sea held it tight. The wound was stanched. Gilliatt
began to bale for dear life. As he emptied the hole the tarpaulin bulged
in, as if a fist were pushing it from outside. He ran for his clothes;
brought them, and stuffed them into the wound.
He was saved--for a few moments.
Death was certain. He had succeeded in the impossible, to fail in what a
shipwright might have mended in a few minutes.
Upon that solitary rock he had been subjected by turns to all the varied
and cruel tortures of nature. He had conquered his isolation, conquered
hunger, conquered thirst, conquered cold, conquered fever, conquered
labour, conquered sleep. A dismal irony was then the end of all.
Gilliatt climbed to the top of the rock and gazed wildly into space. He
had no clothing. He stood naked in the midst of that immensity.
Then, overwhelmed by the sense of that unknown infinity, like one
bewildered by a strange persecution, confronting the shadows of night,
in the midst of the murmur of the waves, the swell, the foam, the
breeze, under that vast diffusion of force, having around him and
beneath him the ocean, above him the constellations, under him the great
unfathomable deep, he sank, gave up the struggle, laid down upon the
rock, humbled, and uplifting his joined hands towards the terrible
depths, he cried aloud, "Have mercy!"
When he issued from his swoon, the sun was high in a cloudless sky. The
blessed heat had saved the poor, broken, naked man upon the rock. He
rose up refreshed, and filled with divine energy. A day's work sufficed
to mend the gap in the sloop's side. On the following day, dressed in
the tattered garments which had stuffed the rent, with a favourable
breeze and a good sea, Gilliatt pushed off from the Douvres.
_IV.--Fate's Last Blow_
Gilliatt arrived in harbour at night. He went ashore in his rags, and
hovered for a while about the darkness of Lethierry's house. Then he
made his way into the garden, like an animal returning to its hole. He
sat himself down and looked about him. He saw the garden, the pathways,
the beds of flowers, the house, the two windows of Dérouchette's
chamber. He felt it horrible to be obliged to breathe; he did what he
could to prevent it.
To see those windows was almost too much happiness for Gilliatt.
Suddenly he saw her.
Dérouchette approached. She stopped. She walked back a few paces,
stopped again; then returned and sat upon a wooden bench. The moon was
in the trees; a few clouds floated among the pale stars; the sea
murmured to the shadows in an undertone.
Gilliatt felt a thrill through him. He was the most miserable and yet
the happiest of men. He knew not what to do. His delirious joy at seeing
her annihilated him. He gazed upon her neck--her hair.
A noise aroused them both--her from her reverie, him from his ecstasy.
Someone was walking in the garden. It was the footsteps of a man.
Dérouchette raised her eyes. The footsteps drew nearer, then ceased.
Accident had so placed the branches that Dérouchette could see the
newcomer while Gilliatt could not. He looked at Dérouchette.
She was quite pale; her mouth was partly open, as with a suppressed cry
of surprise. Her surprise was enchantment mingled with timidity. She
seemed as if transfigured by that presence; as if the being whom she saw
before her belonged not to this earth.
The stranger, who was to Gilliatt only a shadow, spoke. A voice issued
from the trees, softer than the voice of a woman; yet it was the voice
of a man. Gilliatt heard many words, then, "Mademoiselle, you are poor;
since this morning I am rich. Will you have me for your husband? I love
you. God made not the heart of man to be silent. He has promised him
eternity with the intention that he should not be alone. There is for me
but one woman on the earth; it is you. I think of you as of a prayer. My
faith is in God, and my hope in you."
Gilliatt heard them talking--the woman he loved, the man whose shadow
lay upon the path. Presently he heard the invisible man exclaim:
"Mademoiselle! You are silent."
"What would you have me say?"