THE WRECK
One wild night in late October of the year before he would be thirteen,
Mark was lying awake hoping, as on such nights he always hoped, to hear
somebody shout "A wreck! A wreck!" A different Mark from that one who
used to lie trembling in Lima Street lest he should hear a shout of
"Fire! or Thieves!"
And then it happened! It happened as a hundred times he had imagined its
happening, so exactly that he could hardly believe for a moment he was
not dreaming. There was the flash of a lanthorn on the ceiling, a
thunderous, knocking on the Vicarage door. Mark leapt out of bed;
flinging open his window through which the wind rushed in like a flight
of angry birds, he heard voices below in the garden shouting "Parson!
Parson! Parson Trehawke! There's a brig driving in fast toward Church
Cove." He did not wait to hear more, but dashed along the passage to
rouse first his grandfather, then his mother, and then Emma, the Vicar's
old cook.
"And you must get soup ready," he cried, standing over the old woman in
his flannel pyjamas and waving his arms excitedly, while downstairs the
cuckoo popped in and out of his door in the clock twelve times. Emma
blinked at him in terror, and Mark pulled off all the bedclothes to
convince the old woman that he was not playing a practical joke. Then he
rushed back to his own room and began to dress for dear life.
"Mother," he shouted, while he was dressing, "the Captain can sleep in
my bed, if he isn't drowned, can't he?"
"Darling, do you really want to go down to the sea on such a night?"
"Oh, mother," he gasped, "I'm practically dressed. And you will see
that Emma has lots of hot soup ready, won't you? Because it'll be much
better to bring all the crew back here. I don't think they'd want to
walk all that way over Pendhu to Nancepean after they'd been wrecked, do
you?"
"Well, you must ask grandfather first before you make arrangements for
his house."
"Grandfather's simply tearing into his clothes; Ernie Hockin and Joe
Dunstan have both got lanthorns, and I'll carry ours, so if one blows
out we shall be all right. Oh, mother, the wind's simply shrieking
through the trees. Can you hear it?"
"Yes, dearest, I certainly can. I think you'd better shut your windows.
It's blowing everything about in your room most uncomfortably."
Mark's soul expanded in gratitude to God when he found himself neither
in a dream nor in a story, but actually, and without any possibility of
self-deception hurrying down the drive toward the sea beside Ernie and
Joe, who had come from the village to warn the Vicar of the wreck and
were wearing oilskins and sou'westers, thus striking the keynote as it
were of the night's adventure. At first in the shelter of the holm-oaks
the storm seemed far away overhead; but when they turned the corner and
took the road along the valley, the wind caught them full in the face
and Mark was blown back violently against the swinging gate of the
drive. The light of the lanthorns shining on a rut in the road showed a
field-mouse hurrying inland before the rushing gale. Mark bent double to
force himself to keep up with the others, lest somebody should think, by
his inability to maintain an equal pace that he ought to follow the
field-mouse back home. After they had struggled on for a while a bend of
the valley gave them a few minutes of easy progress and Mark listened
while Ernie Hockin explained to the Vicar what had happened:
"Just before dark Eddowes the coastguard said he reckoned there was a
brig making very heavy weather of it and he shouldn't be surprised if
she come ashore tonight. Couldn't seem to beat out of the bay noways, he
said. And afterwards about nine o'clock when me and Joe here and some
of the chaps were in the bar to the Hanover, Eddowes come in again and
said she was in a bad way by the looks of her last thing he saw, and he
telephoned along to Lanyon to ask if they'd seen her down to the
lifeboat house. They reckoned she was all right to the lifeboat, and old
man Timbury who do always go against anything Eddowes do say shouted
that of course she was all right because he'd taken a look at her
through his glass before it grew dark. Of course she was all right.
'She's on a lee shore,' said Eddowes. 'It don't take a coastguard to
tell that,' said old man Timbury. And then they got to talking one
against the other the same as they belong, and they'd soon got back to
the same old talk whether Jackie Fisher was the finest admiral who ever
lived or no use at all. 'What's the good in your talking to me?' old man
Timbury was saying. 'Why afore you was born I've seen' . . . and we all
started in to shout 'ships o' the line, frigates, and cavattes,' because
we belong to mock him like that, when somebody called 'Hark, listen,
wasn't that a rocket?' That fetched us all outside into the road where
we stood listening. The wind was blowing harder than ever, and there was
a parcel of sea rising. You could hear it against Shag Rock over the
wind. Eddowes, he were a bit upset to think he should have been talking
and not a-heard the rocket. But there wasn't a light in the sky, and
when we went home along about half past nine we saw Eddowes again and he
said he'd been so far as Church Cove and should walk up along to the
Bar. No mistake, Mr. Trehawke, he's a handy chap is Eddowes for the
coastguard job. And then about eleven o'clock he saw two rockets close
in to Church Cove and he come running back and telephoned to Lanyon, but
they said no one couldn't launch a boat to-night, and Eddowes he come
banging on the doors and windows shouting 'A Wreck' and some of us took
ropes along with Eddowes, and me and Joe here come and fetched you
along. Eddowes said he's afeard she'll strike in Dollar Cove unless
she's lucky and come ashore in Church Cove."
"How's the tide?" asked the Vicar.
"About an hour of the ebb," said Ernie Hockin. "And the moon's been up
this hour and more."
Just then the road turned the corner, and the world became a waste of
wind and spindrift driving inland. The noise of the gale made it
impossible for anybody to talk, and Mark was left wondering whether the
ship had actually struck or not. The wind drummed in his ears, the
flying grit and gravel and spray stung his face; but he struggled on
hoping that this midnight walk would not come to an abrupt end by his
grandfather's declining to go any farther. Above the drumming of the
wind the roar of the sea became more audible every moment; the spume was
thicker; the end of the valley, ordinarily the meeting-place of sand and
grass and small streams with their yellow flags and forget-me-nots, was
a desolation of white foam beyond which against the cliffs showing black
in the nebulous moonlight the breakers leapt high with frothy tongues.
Mark thought that they resembled immense ghosts clawing up to reach the
summit of the cliff. It was incredible that this hell-broth was Church
Cove.
"Hullo!" yelled Ernie Hockin. "Here's the bridge."
It was true. One wave at the moment of high tide had swept snarling over
the stream and carried the bridge into the meadow beyond.
"We'll have to get round by the road," shouted the Vicar.
They turned to the right across a ploughed field and after scrambling
through the hedge emerged in the comparative shelter of the road down
from Pendhu.
"I hope the churchyard wall is all right," said the Vicar. "I never
remember such a night since I came to Nancepean."
"Sure 'nough, 'tis blowing very fierce," Joe Dunstan agreed. "But don't
you worry about the wall, Mr. Trehawke. The worst of the water is broken
by the Castle and only comes in sideways, as you might say."
When they drew near the gate of the churchyard, the rain of sand and
small pebbles was agonizing, as it swept across up the low sandstone
cliffs on that side of the Castle. Two or three excited figures shouted
for them to hurry because she was going to strike in Dollar Cove, and
everybody began to scramble up the grassy slope, clutching at the
tuffets of thrift to aid their progress. It was calm here in the lee;
and Mark panting up the face thought of those two princesses who were
wrecked here ages ago, and he understood now why one of them had
insisted on planting the tower deep in the foundation of this green
fortress against the wind and weather. While he was thinking this, his
head came above the sky line, his breath left him at the assault of the
wind, and he had to crawl on all fours toward the sea. He reached the
edge of the cliff just as something like the wings of a gigantic bat
flapped across the dim wet moonlight, and before he realized that this
was the brig he heard the crashing of her spars. The watchers stood up
against the wind, battling with it to fling lines in the vain hope of
saving some sailor who was being churned to death in that dreadful
creaming of the sea below. Yes, and there were forms of men visible on
board; two had climbed the mainmast, which crashed before they could
clutch at the ropes that were being flung to them from land, crashed and
carried them down shrieking into the surge. Mark found it hard to
believe that last summer he had spent many sunlit hours dabbling in the
sand for silver dollars of Portugal lost perhaps on such a night as this
a hundred years ago, exactly where these two poor mariners were lost. A
few minutes after the mainmast the hull went also; but in the nebulous
moonlight nothing could be seen of any bodies alive or dead, nothing
except wreckage tossing upon the surge. The watchers on the cliff turned
away from the wind to gather new breath and give their cheeks a rest
from the stinging fragments of rock and earth. Away up over the towans
they could see the bobbing lanthorns of men hurrying down from Chypie
where news of the wreck had reached; and on the road from Lanyon they
could see lanthorns on the other side of Church Cove waiting until the
tide had ebbed far enough to let them cross the beach.
Suddenly the Vicar shouted:
"I can see a poor fellow hanging on to a ledge of rock. Bring a rope!
Bring a rope!"
Eddowes the coastguard took charge of the operation, and Mark with
beating pulses watched the end of the rope touch the huddled form below.
But either from exhaustion or because he feared to let go of the
slippery ledge for one moment the sailor made no attempt to grasp the
rope. The men above shouted to him, begged him to make an effort; but he
remained there inert.
"Somebody must go down with the rope and get a slip knot under his
arms," the Vicar shouted.
Nobody seemed to pay attention to this proposal, and Mark wondered if he
was the only one who had heard it. However, when the Vicar repeated his
suggestion, Eddowes came forward, knelt down by the edge of the cliff,
shook himself like a bather who is going to plunge into what he knows
will be very cold water, and then vanished down the rope. Everybody
crawled on hand and knees to see what would happen. Mark prayed that
Eddowes, who was a great friend of his, would not come to any harm, but
that he would rescue the sailor and be given the Albert medal for saving
life. It was Eddowes who had made him medal wise. The coastguard
struggled to slip the loop under the man's shoulders along his legs; but
it must have been impossible, for presently he made a signal to be
raised.
"I can't do it alone," he shouted. "He's got a hold like a limpet."
Nobody seemed anxious to suppose that the addition of another rescuer
would be any more successful.
"If there was two of us," Eddowes went on, "we might do something."
The people on the cliff shook their heads doubtfully.
"Isn't anybody coming down along with me to have a try?" the coastguard
demanded at the top of his voice.
Mark did not hear his grandfather's reply; he only saw him go over the
cliff's edge at the end of one rope while Eddowes went down on another.
A minute later the slipknot came untied (or that was how the accident
was explained) and the Vicar went to join the drowned mariners,
dislodging as he fell the man whom he had tried to save, so that of the
crew of the brig _Happy Return_ not one ever came to port.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the effect upon Mark Lidderdale of
that night. He was twelve years old at the time; but the years in
Cornwall had retarded that precocious development to which he seemed
destined by the surroundings of his early childhood in Lima Street, and
in many ways he was hardly any older than he was when he left London. In
after years he looked back with gratitude upon the shock he received
from what was as it were an experience of the material impact of death,
because it made him think about death, not morbidly as so many children
and young people will, but with the apprehension of something that
really does come in a moment and for which it is necessary for every
human being to prepare his soul. The platitudes of age may often be for
youth divine revelations, and there is nothing so stimulating as the
unaided apprehension of a great commonplace of existence. The awe with
which Mark was filled that night was too vast to evaporate in sentiment,
and when two days after this there came news from Africa that his father
had died of black-water fever that awe was crystallized indeed. Mark
looking round at his small world perceived that nobody was safe.
To-morrow his mother might die; to-morrow he might die himself. In any
case the death of his grandfather would have meant a profound change in
the future of his mother's life and his own; the living of Nancepean
would fall to some other priest and with it the house in which they
lived. Parson Trehawke had left nothing of any value except Gould's
_Birds of Great Britain_ and a few other works of ornithology. The
furniture of the Vicarage was rich neither in quality nor in quantity.
Three or four hundred pounds was the most his daughter could inherit.
She had spoken to Mark of their poverty, because in her dismay for the
future of her son she had no heart to pretend that the dead man's money
was of little importance.
"I must write and ask your father what we ought to do." . . . She
stopped in painful awareness of the possessive pronoun. Mark was
unresponsive, until there came the news from Africa, which made him
throw his arms about his mother's neck while she was still alive. Mrs.
Lidderdale, whatever bitterness she may once have felt for the ruin of
her married life, shed fresh tears of sorrow for her husband, and
supposing that Mark's embrace was the expression of his sympathy wept
more, as people will when others are sorry for them, and then still more
because the future for Mark seemed hopeless. How was she to educate him?
How clothe him? How feed him even? At her age where and how could she
earn money? She reproached herself with having been too ready out of
sensitiveness to sacrifice Mark to her own pride. She had had no right
to leave her husband and live in the country like this. She should have
repressed her own emotion and thought only of the family life, to the
maintenance of which by her marriage she had committed herself. At first
it had seemed the best thing for Mark; but she should have remembered
that her father could not live for ever and that one day she would have
to face the problem of life without his help and his hospitality. She
began to imagine that the disaster of that stormy night had been
contrived by God to punish her, and she prayed to Him that her
chastisement should not be increased, that at least her son might be
spared to her.
Mrs. Lidderdale was able to stay on at the Vicarage for several weeks,
because the new Vicar of Nancepean was not able to take over his charge
immediately. This delay gave her time to hold a sale of her father's
furniture, at which the desire of the neighbours to be generous fought
with their native avarice, so that in the end the furniture fetched
neither more nor less than had been expected, which was little enough.
She kept back enough to establish herself and Mark in rooms, should she
be successful in finding some unfurnished rooms sufficiently cheap to
allow her to take them, although how she was going to live for more than
two years on what she had was a riddle of which after a month of
sleepless nights she had not found the solution.
In the end, and as Mrs. Lidderdale supposed in answer to her prayers,
the solution was provided unexpectedly in the following letter:
Haverton House,
Elmhurst Road,
Slowbridge.
November 29th.
Dear Grace,
I have just received a letter from James written when he was at the
point of death in Africa. It appears that in his zeal to convert
the heathen to Popery he omitted to make any provision for his wife
and child, so that in the event of his death, unless either your
relatives or his relatives came forward to support you I was given
to understand that you would be destitute. I recently read in the
daily paper an account of the way in which your father Mr. Trehawke
lost his life, and I caused inquiries to be made in Rosemarket
about your prospects. These my informant tells me are not any too
bright. You will, I am sure, pardon my having made these inquiries
without reference to you, but I did not feel justified in offering
you and my nephew a home with my sister Helen and myself unless I
had first assured myself that some such offer was necessary. You
are probably aware that for many years my brother James and myself
have not been on the best of terms. I on my side found his
religious teaching so eccentric as to repel me; he on his side was
so bigoted that he could not tolerate my tacit disapproval. Not
being a Ritualist but an Evangelical, I can perhaps bring myself
more easily to forgive my brother's faults and at the same time
indulge my theories of duty, as opposed to forms and ceremonies,
theories that if carried out by everybody would soon transform our
modern Christianity. You are no doubt a Ritualist, and your son has
no doubt been educated in the same school. Let me hasten to give
you my word that I shall not make the least attempt to interfere
either with your religious practices or with his. The quarrel
between myself and James was due almost entirely to James'
inability to let me and my opinions alone.
I am far from being a rich man, in fact I may say at once that I am
scarcely even "comfortably off" as the phrase goes. It would
therefore be outside my capacity to undertake the expense of any
elaborate education for your son; but my own school, which while it
does not pretend to compete with some of the fashionable
establishments of the time is I venture to assert a first class
school and well able to send your son into the world at the age of
sixteen as well equipped, and better equipped than he would be if
he went to one of the famous public schools. I possess some
influence with a firm of solicitors, and I have no doubt that when
my nephew, who is I believe now twelve years old, has had the
necessary schooling I shall be able to secure him a position as an
articled clerk, from which if he is honest and industrious he may
be able to rise to the position of a junior partner. If you have
saved anything from the sale of your father's effects I should
advise you to invest the sum. However small it is, you will find
the extra money useful, for as I remarked before I shall not be
able to afford to do more than lodge and feed you both, educate
your son, find him in clothes, and start him in a career on the
lines I have already indicated. My local informant tells me that
you have kept back a certain amount of your father's furniture in
order to take lodgings elsewhere. As this will now be unnecessary I
hope that you will sell the rest. Haverton House is sufficiently
furnished, and we should not be able to find room for any more
furniture. I suggest your coming to us next Friday. It will be
easiest for you to take the fast train up to Paddington when you
will be able to catch the 6.45 to Slowbridge arriving at 7.15. We
usually dine at 7.30, but on Friday dinner will be at 8 p.m. in
order to give you plenty of time. Helen sends her love. She would
have written also, but I assured her that one letter was enough,
and that a very long one.
Your affectionate brother-in-law,
Henry Lidderdale.
Mrs. Lidderdale would no doubt have criticized this letter more sharply
if she had not regarded it as inspired, almost actually written by the
hand of God. Whatever in it was displeasing to her she accepted as the
Divine decree, and if anybody had pointed out the inconsistency of some
of the opinions therein expressed with its Divine authorship, she would
have dismissed the objection as made by somebody who was incapable of
comprehending the mysterious action of God.
"Mark," she called to her son. "What do you think has happened? Your
Uncle Henry has offered us a home. I want you to write to him like a
dear boy and thank him for his kindness." She explained in detail what
Uncle Henry intended to do for them; but Mark would not be enthusiastic.
He on his side had been praying to God to put it into the mind of Samuel
Dale to offer him a job on his farm; Slowbridge was a poor substitute
for that.
"Where is Slowbridge?" he asked in a gloomy voice.
"It's a fairly large place near London," his mother told him. "It's near
Eton and Windsor and Stoke Poges where Gray wrote his Elegy, which we
learned last summer. You remember, don't you?" she asked anxiously, for
she wanted Mark to cut a figure with his uncle.
"Wolfe liked it," said Mark. "And I like it too," he added ungraciously.
He wished that he could have said he hated it; but Mark always found it
difficult to tell a lie about his personal feelings, or about any facts
that involved him in a false position.
"And now before you go down to tea with Cass Dale, you will write to
your uncle, won't you, and show me the letter?"
Mark groaned.
"It's so difficult to thank people. It makes me feel silly."
"Well, darling, mother wants you to. So sit down like a dear boy and get
it done."
"I think my nib is crossed."
"Is it? You'll find another in my desk."
"But, mother, yours are so thick."
"Please, Mark, don't make any more excuses. Don't you want to do
everything you can to help me just now?"
"Yes, of course," said Mark penitently, and sitting down in the window
he stared out at the yellow November sky, and at the magpies flying
busily from one side of the valley to the other.
The Vicarage,
Nancepean,
South Cornwall.
My dear Uncle Henry,
Thank you very much for your kind invitation to come and live with
you. We should enjoy it very much. I am going to tea with a friend
of mine called Cass Dale who lives in Nancepean, and so I must stop
now. With love,
I remain,
Your loving nephew,
Mark.
And then the pen must needs go and drop a blot like a balloon right over
his name, so that the whole letter had to be copied out again before his
mother would say that she was satisfied, by which time the yellow sky
was dun and the magpies were gone to rest.
Mark left the Dales about half past six, and was accompanied by Cass to
the brow of Pendhu. At this point Cass declined to go any farther in
spite of Mark's reminder that this would be one of the last walks they
would take together, if it were not absolutely the very last.
"No," said Cass. "I wouldn't come up from Church Cove myself not for
anything."
"But I'm going down by myself," Mark argued. "If I hadn't thought you'd
come all the way with me, I'd have gone home by the fields. What are you
afraid of?"
"I'm not afraid of nothing, but I don't want to walk so far by myself.
I've come up the hill with 'ee. Now 'tis all down hill for both of us,
and that's fair."
"Oh, all right," said Mark, turning away in resentment at his friend's
desertion.
Both boys ran off in opposite directions, Cass past the splash of light
thrown across the road by the windows of the Hanover Inn, and on toward
the scattered lights of Nancepean, Mark into the gloom of the deep lane
down to Church Cove. It was a warm and humid evening that brought out
the smell of the ferns and earth in the high banks on either side, and
presently at the bottom of the hill the smell of the seaweed heaped up
in Church Cove by weeks of gales. The moon, about three days from the
full, was already up, shedding her aqueous lustre over the towans of
Chypie, which slowly penetrated the black gulfs of shadow in the
countryside until Mark could perceive the ghost of a familiar landscape.
There came over him, whose emotion had already been sprung by the
insensibility of Cass, an overwhelming awareness of parting, and he
gave to the landscape the expression of sentiment he had yearned to give
his friend. His fear of seeing the spirits of the drowned sailors, or as
he passed the churchyard gate of perceiving behind that tamarisk the
tall spectre of his grandfather, which on the way down from Pendhu had
seemed impossible to combat, had died away; and in his despair at losing
this beloved scene he wandered on past the church until he stood at the
edge of the tide. On this humid autumnal night the oily sea collapsed
upon the beach as if it, like everything else in nature, was overcome by
the prevailing heaviness. Mark sat down upon some tufts of samphire and
watched the Stag Light occulting out across St. Levan's Bay, distant
forty miles and more, and while he sat he perceived a glow-worm at his
feet creeping along a sprig of samphire that marked the limit of the
tide's advance. How did the samphire know that it was safe to grow where
it did, and how did the glow-worm know that the samphire was safe?
Mark was suddenly conscious of the protection of God, for might not he
expect as much as the glow-worm and the samphire? The ache of separation
from Nancepean was assuaged. That dread of the future, with which the
impact of death had filled him, was allayed.
"Good-night, sister glow-worm," he said aloud in imitation of St.
Francis. "Good-night, brother samphire."
A drift of distant fog had obliterated the Stag Light; but of her
samphire the glow-worm had made a moonlit forest, so brightly was she
shining, yes, a green world of interlacing, lucid boughs.
_Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works,
and glorify your Father which is in heaven._
And Mark, aspiring to thank God Who had made manifest His protection,
left Nancepean three days later with the determination to become a
lighthouse-keeper, to polish well his lamp and tend it with care, so
that men passing by in ships should rejoice at his good works and call
him brother lighthouse-keeper, and glorify God their Father when they
walked again upon the grass, harking to the pleasant song of birds and
the hum of bees.