I
'Those who in childhood have had solitary communings with the sea
know the sea's prophecy. They know that there is a deeper sympathy
between the sea and the soul of man than other people dream of. They
know that the water seems nearer akin than the land to the spiritual
world, inasmuch as it is one and indivisible, and has motion, and
answers to the mysterious call of the winds, and is the writing
tablet of the moon and stars. When a child who, born beside the sea,
and beloved by the sea, feels suddenly, as he gazes upon it, a dim
sense of pity and warning; when there comes, or seems to come, a
shadow across the waves, with never a cloud in the sky to cast it;
when there comes a shuddering as of wings that move in dread or ire,
then such a child feels as if the bloodhounds of calamity are let
loose upon him or upon those he loves; he feels that the sea has told
him all it dares tell or can. And, in other moods of fate, when
beneath a cloudy sky the myriad dimples of the sea begin to sparkle
as though the sun were shining bright upon them, such a child feels,
as he gazes at it, that the sea is telling him of some great joy near
at hand, or, at least, not far off.'
One lovely summer afternoon a little boy was sitting on the edge of
the cliff that skirts the old churchyard of Raxton-on-Sea. He was
sitting on the grass close to the brink of the indentation cut by the
water into the horse-shoe curve called by the fishermen Mousetrap
Cove; sitting there as still as an image of a boy in stone, at the
forbidden spot where the wooden fence proclaimed the crumbling hollow
crust to be specially dangerous--sitting and looking across the sheer
deep gulf below.
Flinty Point on his right was sometimes in purple shadow and
sometimes shining in the sun; Needle Point on his left was sometimes
in purple shadow and sometimes shining in the sun; and beyond these
headlands spread now the wide purple, and now the wide sparkle of the
open sea. The very gulls, wheeling as close to him as they dared,
seemed to be frightened at the little boy's peril. Straight ahead he
was gazing, however--gazing so intently that his eyes must have been
seeing very much or else very little of that limitless world of light
and coloured shade. On account of certain questions connected with
race that will be raised in this narrative, I must dwell a little
while upon the child's personal appearance, and especially upon his
colour. Natural or acquired, it was one that might be almost called
unique; as much like a young Gypsy's colour as was compatible with
respectable descent, and yet not a Gypsy's colour. A deep undertone
of 'Romany brown' seemed breaking through that peculiar kind of ruddy
golden glow which no sunshine can give till it has itself been
deepened and coloured and enriched by the responsive kisses of the
sea.
Moreover, there was a certain something in his eyes that was not
Gypsy-like--a something which is not uncommonly seen in the eyes of
boys born along that coast, whether those eyes be black or blue or
grey; a something which cannot be described, but which seems like a
reflex of the daring gaze of that great land-conquering and daring
sea. Very striking was this expression as he momentarily turned his
face landward to watch one of the gulls that had come wheeling up the
cliffs towards the flinty grey tower of the church--the old deserted
church, whose graveyard the sea had already half washed away. As his
eyes followed the bird's movements, however, this daring sea-look
seemed to be growing gradually weaker and weaker. At last it faded
away altogether, and by the time his face was turned again towards
the sea, the look I have tried to describe was supplanted by such a
gaze as that gull would give were it hiding behind a boulder with a
broken wing. A mist of cruel trouble was covering his eyes, and soon
the mist had grown into two bright glittering pearly tears, which,
globing and trembling, larger and larger, were at length big enough
to drown both eyes; big enough to drop, shining, on the grass: big
enough to blot out altogether the most brilliant picture that sea and
sky could make. For that little boy had begun to learn a lesson which
life was going to teach him fully--the lesson that shining sails in
the sunny wind, and black trailing bands of smoke passing here and
there along the horizon, and silvery gulls dipping playfully into the
green and silver waves (nay, all the beauties and all the wonders of
the world), make but a blurred picture to eyes that look through the
lens of tears. However, with a brown hand brisk and angry, he brushed
away these tears, like one who should say, 'This kind of thing will
never do.'
Indeed, so hardy was the boy's face--tanned by the sun, hardened and
bronzed by the wind, reddened by the brine--that tears seemed
entirely out of place there. The meaning of those tears must be fully
accounted for, and if possible fully justified, for this little boy
is to be the hero of this story. In other words, he is Henry Aylwin;
that is to say, myself: and those who know me now in the full vigour
of manhood, a lusty knight of the alpenstock of some repute, will be
surprised to know what troubled me. They will be surprised to know
that owing to a fall from the cliff I was for about two years a
cripple.
This is how it came about. Rough and yielding as were the paths,
called 'gangways,' connecting the cliffs with the endless reaches of
sand below, they were not rough enough, or yielding enough, or in any
way dangerous enough for me.
So I used to fashion 'gangways' of my own; I used to descend the
cliff at whatsoever point it pleased me, clinging to the lumps of
sandy earth with the prehensile power of a spider-monkey. Many a
warning had I had from the good fishermen and sea-folk, that some day
I should fall from top to bottom--fall and break my neck. A laugh was
my sole answer to these warnings; for, with the possession of perfect
health, I had inherited that instinctive belief in good luck which
perfect health will often engender.
However, my punishment came at last. The coast, which is yielding
gradually to the sea, is famous for sudden and gigantic landslips.
These landslips are sometimes followed, at the return of the tide, by
a further fall, called a 'settlement.' The word 'settlement' explains
itself, perhaps. No matter how smooth the sea, the return of the tide
seems on that coast to have a strange magnetic power upon the land,
and the debris of a landslip will sometimes, though not always,
respond to it by again falling and settling into new and permanent
shapes.
Now, on the morning after a great landslip, when the coastguard,
returning on his beat, found a cove where, half-an-hour before, he
had left his own cabbages growing, I, in spite of all warnings, had
climbed the heap of _débris_ from the sands, and while I was
hallooing triumphantly to two companions below--the two most
impudent-looking urchins, bare-footed and unkempt, that ever a
gentleman's son forgathered with--a great mass of loose earth
settled, carrying me with it in its fall. I was taken up for dead.
It was, however, only a matter of broken ribs and a damaged leg. And
there is no doubt that if the local surgeon had not been allowed to
have his own way, I should soon have been cured. As it was I became a
cripple. The great central fact--the very pivot upon which all the
wheels of my life have since been turning--is that for two years
during the impressionable period of childhood I walked with crutches.
It must not be supposed that my tears--the tears which at this moment
were blotting out the light and glory of the North Sea in the
sun--came from the pain I was suffering. They came from certain
terrible news, which even my brother Frank had been careful to keep
from me, but which had fallen from the lips of my father--the news
that I was not unlikely to be a cripple for life. From that moment I
had become a changed being, solitary and sometimes morose. I would
come and sit staring at the ocean, meditating on tilings in general,
but chiefly on things connected with cripples, asking myself, as now,
whether life would be bearable on crutches.
At my heart were misery and anger and such revolt as is, I hope,
rarely found in the heart of a child. I had sat down outside the
rails at this most dangerous point along the cliff, wondering whether
or not it would crumble beneath me. For this lameness coming to me,
who had been so active, who had been, indeed, the little athlete and
pugilist of the sands, seemed to have isolated me from my
fellow-creatures to a degree that is inconceivable to me now. A
stubborn will and masterful pride made me refuse to accept a disaster
such as many a nobler soul than mine has, I am conscious, borne with
patience. My nature became soured by asking in vain for sympathy at
home; my loneliness drove me--silent, haughty, and aggressive--to
haunt the churchyard, and sit at the edge of the cliff, gazing
wistfully at the sea and the sands which could not be reached on
crutches. Like a wounded sea-gull, I retired and took my trouble
alone.
How could I help taking it alone when none would sympathise with me?
My brother Frank called me 'The Black Savage,' and I half began to
suspect myself of secret impulses of a savage kind. Once I heard my
mother murmur, as she stroked Frank's rosy cheeks and golden curls,
'My poor Henry is a strange, proud boy!' Then, looking from my
crutches to Frank's beautiful limbs, she said, 'How providential that
it was not the elder! Providence is kind.' She meant kind to the
House of Aylwin. I often wonder whether she guessed that I heard her.
I often wonder whether she knew how I had loved her.
This is how matters stood with me on that summer afternoon, when I
sat on the edge of the cliff in a kind of dull, miserable dream.
Suddenly, at the moment when the huge mass of clouds had covered the
entire surface of the water between Flinty Point and Needle Point
with their rich purple shadow, it seemed to me that the waves began
to sparkle and laugh in a joyful radiance which they were making for
themselves. And at that same moment an unwonted sound struck my ear
from the churchyard behind me--a strange sound indeed in that
deserted place--that of a childish voice singing.
Was, then, the mighty ocean writing symbols for an unhappy child to
read? My father, from whose book, _The Veiled Queen_, the extract
with which this chapter opens is taken, would, unhesitatingly,
have answered 'Yes.'
'Destiny, no doubt, in the Greek drama concerns itself only with the
great,' says he, in that wonderful book of his. 'But who are the
great? With the unseen powers, mysterious and imperious, who govern
while they seem not to govern all that is seen, who are the great? In
a world where man's loftiest ambitions are to higher intelligences
childish dreams, where his highest knowledge is ignorance, where his
strongest strength is to heaven a derision--who are the great? Are
they not the few men and women and children on the earth who greatly
love?'