HOW HE LIVED THROUGH THE GREAT STORM
It was a fortunate thing for Gard that the storm--the great storm from
which, for many a year afterwards, local events in Sark dated--came when
it did; two days after Bernel’s visit and the replenishment of his
larder. For if he had been caught bare he must have starved.
Eight whole days it lasted, with only two slight abatements which, while
they raised his hopes only to dash them, still served him mightily.
During the first days he spent much of his time crouched in the lee of
his bee-hive, watching the terrific play of the waves on his own rock
and on the Sark headlands.
He wondered if any other man had seen such a storm under such
conditions. For he was practically at sea on a rock; in the midst of the
turmoil, yet absolutely unaffected by it.
On shipboard, thought of one’s ship and possible consequences had always
interfered with fullest enjoyment of Nature’s paroxysms. It was
impossible to detach one’s thoughts completely and view matters entirely
from the outside. But here--he was sure his rock had suffered many an
equal torment--there was nothing to come between him and the elemental
frenzy. Nothing but--as the days of it ran on--a growing solicitude as
to what he was going to live on if it continued much longer.
Never was Sark rabbit so completely demolished as was that one that
Nance had cooked and sent him. Before he had done with it he cracked the
very bones he had thrown away, for the sake of what was in them, and
finally chewed the softer parts of the bones themselves to cheat himself
into the belief that he was eating.
That was after he had devoured every crumb of his bread, and finished
his three fishes to the extreme points of their tails.
He was, I said, in the very midst of the turmoil yet unaffected by it.
But that was not so in some respects.
Bodily, as we have seen, the storm bore hardly upon him, since
rabbit-bones and fish-tails can hardly be looked upon as a nutritious or
inviting dietary.
But mentally and spiritually the mighty elemental upheaval was wholly
crushing and uplifting.
As he cowered, with humming head, under the fierce unremitting rush of
the gale, and felt the great stones of his shelter tremble in it, and
watched the huge green hills of water, with their roaring white crests,
go sweeping past to crash in thunder on the cliffs of Sark, he felt
smaller than he had ever felt before--and that, as a rule, and if it
come not of self-abnegation through a man’s own sin or folly, is
entirely to his good; possibly in the other case also.
To feel infinitely small and helpless in the hands of an Infinitely
Great is a spiritual education to any man, and it was so to this man.
He felt himself, in that universal chaos, no more than a speck of
helpless dust amid the whirling wheels of Nature’s inexplicable
machinery, and clung the tighter to the simple fundamental facts of
which his heart was sure--behind and above all this was God, who held
all these things in His hand. And over there in Sark was Nance, the very
thought of whom was like a coal of fire in his heart, which all the
gales that ever blew, and all the soddened soaking of ceaseless rain
from above and ceaseless spray from below, could not even dim.
For long-continued and relentless buffeting such as this tells upon any
man, no matter what his strength of mind or body to begin with; and a
perpetually soaked body is apt in time to sodden the soul, unless it
have something superhuman to cling to, as this man had in his simple
trust in God and the girl he loved.
In all those stressful days, so far as he could see, the tides--which in
those parts rise and fall some forty feet, as you may see by the scoured
bases of the towering cliffs--seemed always at the full, the westerly
gale driving in the waters remorselessly and piling them up against the
land without cessation, and as though bent on its destruction.
Great gouts of clotted foam flew over his head in clouds, and plastered
his rock with shivering sponges. The sheets of spray from his south-west
rocks lashed him incessantly. His shelter was as wet inside as out, as
he was himself.
He felt empty and hungry at times, but never thirsty; his skin absorbed
moisture enough and to spare. But, chilled and clammed and starving, on
the fifth day when he had crawled into his wet burrow for such small
relief as it might offer from the ceaseless flailing without, he
broached his bottle of cognac and drank a little, and found himself the
better of it.
On the evening of the third day his hopes had risen with a slight
slackening of the turmoil. He was not sure if the gale had really
abated, or if it was only that he was growing accustomed to it. But
under that belief, and the compulsion of a growling stomach, he crawled
precariously round to the eastern end of the rock where the puffins had
their holes, lying flat when the great gusts snatched at him as though
they were bent on hurling him into the water, and gliding on again in
the intervals. And there, with a piece of his firewood he managed to
extort half-a-dozen eggs from fiercely expostulating parents. The end of
his stick was bitten to fragments, but he got his eggs, and was amazed
at the size of them compared with that of their producers.
The sight of the great wall of tumbled rocks on his right, and the
sudden remembrance of his previous passage over it, set him wondering if
it might not be possible to find better shelter in some of those
fissures across which he had had to swing himself by the hands on the
previous occasion. For this was the leeward side of the island, and the
huge bulk of it rose like a protecting shoulder between him and the
gale, whereas his bee-hive, on the exposed flank of the rock, got the
full force of it. So he scooped a hole in the friable black soil and
deposited his eggs in it and crawled along to the wall.
The tumbled fragments looked much less fearsome than they had done in
the fog. He found no difficulty in clambering among them now, when he
could see clearly what he was about, and he wormed his way in and out,
and up and down, but could not light on any of those tricky spaces which
had seemed to him so dangerous before.
And then, as he crawled under one huge slab, a black void lay before
him, of no great width but evidently deep. It took many minutes’
peering into the depths to accustom his eyes to the dimness.
Then it seemed to him that the rough out jutting fragments below would
afford a holding, and he swung his feet cautiously down and felt round
for foothold.
Carefully testing everything he touched, he let himself down, inch by
inch, assured that if he could go down he could certainly get up again.
At first the gale still whistled through the crevices among the
boulders, but presently he found himself in a silence that was so mighty
a change from the ceaseless roar to which he was becoming accustomed,
that he felt as though stricken with deafness. Up above him the light
filtered down, tempered by the slab under which he had come, and enabled
him still to find precarious hand and foot hold.
But presently his downward progress was barred by a rough flooring of
splintered fragments, and he stood panting and looked about him.
His well was about twenty feet deep, he reckoned, and there were gaping
slits here and there which might lead in towards the rock or out towards
the sea. He had turned and twisted so much in his descent that it took
him some time to decide in which direction the sea might lie and in
which the rock. And, having settled that, he wriggled through a crevice
and wormed slowly on.
He was almost in the dark now, and could only feel his way. But he was
used to groping in narrow places, and a spirit of investigation urged
him on.
Half an hour’s strenuous and cautious worming, and a thin trickle of
light glimmered ahead. He turned and worked his way back at once.
There was no slit opposite the one he had tried, but presently,
half-way up the well, he made out an opening like the mouth of a small
adit. His back had been to it as he came down, and so he had missed it.
He climbed up and in, and felt convinced in his own mind that this was
no simple work of nature. Nature had no doubt begun, but man had
certainly finished it. For the floor level was comparatively free from
harshness, and the outjutting projections of the sides and roof had been
tempered, and progress was not difficult.
It was very narrow, however, and very low, and quite dark. He could only
drag himself along on his stomach like a worm. But he pushed on with all
the ardour of a discoverer.
Was it silver? Was it smugglers? Or what? Wholly accidental formation he
was sure it was not, though he thought it likely that man’s handiwork
had only turned Nature’s to account.
The fissure had probably been there from the beginning of time, or it
might be the result of numberless years of the slow wearing away of a
softer vein of rock, but some man at some time had lighted on it, and
followed it up, and with much labour had smoothed its natural asperities
and used it for his own purposes. And he was keen to learn what those
purposes were.
To any ordinary man, accustomed to the ordinary amplitudes of life, and
freedom to stretch his arms and legs and raise his head and fill his
lungs with fresh air, a passage such as this would have been impossible.
Here and there, indeed, the walls widened somewhat through some fault in
the rook, bur for the most part his elbows grazed the sides each time he
moved them.
Even he, used as he was to such conditions, began at last to feel them
oppressive. The whole mighty bulk of L’Etat seemed above and about him,
malignantly intent on crushing him out of existence.
He knew that was only fancy. He had experienced it many times before.
But the nightmare feeling was there, and it needed all his will at times
to keep him from a panic attempt at retreat, when the insensate
rock-walls seemed absolutely settling down on him, and breathing was
none too easy.
But going back meant literally going backwards, crawling out toes
foremost; for his elbows scraped the walls and his head the roof, and
turning was out of the question. The men who had made and used that
narrow way had undoubtedly gone with a purpose, and not for pleasure.
And he was bound to learn what that purpose was.
So he set his teeth, and wormed himself slowly along, with pinched face
and tight-shut mouth, and nostrils opened wide to take in all the air
they could and let out as little as possible. And, even at that, he had
to lie still at times, pressed flat against the floor, to let some
fresher air trickle in above him.
But at last he came to what he sought, though no whit of it could he see
when he got there. By the sudden cessation of the pressure on his sides
and head, he was aware of entrance into a larger space, and, with
forethought quickened by the exigences of his passage, he lay for a
moment to pant more freely and to think.
His body was in the passage. He knew where the passage led out to. What
lay ahead he could not tell.
If it was a chamber, as he expected, there might quite possibly be other
passages leading out of it. And so it would be well to make sure of
recognizing this one again before he loosed his hold on it. So he
pulled off one boot, and feeling carefully round the opening, placed it
just inside as a landmark.
Then he groped on along the right-hand wall to learn the size of the
chamber, and was immediately thankful that his own passage was safely
marked, for he came on another opening, and another, and another, and
labelled them carefully in his mind, “One, two, three.”
It was truly eerie work, groping there in that dense darkness and utter
silence, and trying to the nerves even of one who had never known
himself guilty of such things. But, being there, he was determined to
learn all he could.
He clung to his right-hand wall as to a life-rope. If he once got mazed
in a place like that he might never taste daylight and upper air again.
Of the size of the chamber he could so far form no opinion. He would
have given much for a light. His flint and steel were indeed in his
pocket, but he was sodden through and through, and had no means whatever
of catching a spark if he struck one.
Then, as he groped cautiously along past the third opening, his progress
was stayed, and not by rock.
He was on his knees, his hands feeling blindly, but with infinite
enquiry, along the rough rock wall, when he stumbled suddenly over
something that lay along the ground. Dropping his hands to save himself
from falling, they lighted on that which lay below, and he started back
with an exclamation and a shudder. For what he had felt was like the
hair and face of a man.
He crouched back against the wall, his heart thumping like a ship’s
pump, and the blood belling in his ears, and sat so for very many
minutes; sat on, until, in that silent blackness, he could hear the
dull, far-away thud of the waves on the outer walls of the island.
Then, by degrees, he pulled himself together. If it was indeed a man, he
was undoubtedly dead, and therefore harmless; and having learned this
much he would know more.
So presently he groped forward, felt again the round head and soft hair,
and below it and beyond it a heap of what felt like small oblong
packages done up in wrappings of cloth and tied round with cord.
He picked one up and handled it inquisitively, with a shrewd idea of
what might be, or might have been, inside. The cord was very loose, as
though the contents had shrunk since it was tied. As he fumbled with it
in the dark, it came open and left him no possible room for doubt as to
what those contents were. He sneezed till the top of his head seemed
like to lift, and the tears ran down his cheeks in an unceasing stream.
What had once been tobacco had powdered into snuff, and his rough
handling of the package had scattered it broadcast.
He turned at last, and lay with his head in his arms against the wall
until the air should have time to clear, and meanwhile the sneezing had
quickened his wits.
Here was possible tinder, and by means of those dried-up wrappings he
might procure a light. If it lasted but five minutes it might enable him
to solve the problem on which he had stumbled.
He groped again for the opened package, and found it on the dead man’s
face. The wrapper was of tarred cloth, almost perished with age, dry and
friable. Shaking out the rest of the snuff at arm’s length, he picked
the stuff to pieces and shredded it into tinder. Then he felt about for
half-a-dozen more packages, carefully slipped their cords and emptied
out their contents, and getting out his flint and steel, flaked sparks
into the tinder till it caught and flared, and the interior of the
cavern leaped at him out of its darkness.
He rolled up one of the empty wrappers like a torch, and lit it, and
looked about him.
His first hasty glance fell on the dead man, and he got another shock
from the fact that his feet were lashed together with stout rope, and
probably his hands also, for they were behind his back, and he lay face
upward. His coat and short-clothes and buckled shoes spoke of long
by-gone days, and the skin of his face was brown and shrivelled, so that
the bones beneath showed grim and gaunt.
Beyond him was a great heap of the same small packages of tobacco, and
alongside them a pile of small kegs. Gard lit another of his torches,
and stepped gingerly over to them. He sounded one or two, but found them
empty. Time had shrunk their stout timbers and tapped their contents.
Then he held up his flickering light and looked quickly round this
prison-house which had turned into a tomb, and shivered, as a dim idea
of what it all meant came over him.
It was a large, low, natural rock chamber, and all round the walls were
black slits which might mean it passages leading on into the bowels of
the island. To investigate them all would mean the work of many days.
The dead man, the perished packages, the empty kegs--there was nothing
else, except his own boot lying in the mouth of the largest of the black
slits, as though anxious on its own account to be gone.
The still air was already becoming heavy with the pungent smoke of his
torches. He stepped cautiously across to the body again, and picked a
couple of buttons from the coat. They came off in his hand, and when he
touched the buckles on the shoes they did the same. Then he turned and
made for his waiting shoe just as his last torch went out.
The smell of the fresh salt air, when he wriggled out into the well, was
almost as good as a feast to him. He climbed hastily to the surface,
and, as he crept out from under the topmost slab, took careful note of
its position, and then scored with a piece of rock each stone which led
up to it. For, if ever he should need an inner sanctuary, here was one
to his hand, and evidently quite unknown to the present generation of
Sark men.
He recovered his eggs, and crept round the shoulder of the rock. The
gale pounced on him like a tiger on its half-escaped prey. It beat him
flat, worried him, did its best to tear him off and fling him into the
sea. But--Heavens!--how sweet it was after the musty quiet of the
death-chamber below!
Inch by inch, he worked his way back in the teeth of it, and crawled
spent into his bee-hive. Then, ravenous with his exertions, he broke one
of his eggs into his tin dipper, and forthwith emptied it outside, and
the gale swept away the awful smell of it.
The next was as bad, and his hopes sank to nothing.
The third, however, was all right. He mixed it with some cognac and
whipped it up with a stick, and the growlers inside fought over it
contentedly.
He was almost afraid to try another. However, he could get more
to-morrow. So he broke the fourth, and found it also good, so whipped it
up with more cognac, and felt happier than he had done since he nibbled
his rabbit-bones.
As he lay that night, and the gale howled about him more furiously than
ever, his thoughts ran constantly on the dead man lying in the silent
darkness down below.
It was very quiet down there, and dry; but this roaring turmoil, with
its thunderous crashings and hurtling spray, was infinitely more to his
taste, wet though he was to the bone, and almost deafened with the
ceaseless uproar. For this, terrible though it was in its majestic fury,
was life, and that black stillness below was death.
To the tune of the tumult without, he worked out the dead man’s story in
his mind.
It was long ago in the old smuggling days. Some bold free-trader of Sark
or Guernsey had lighted on that cave and used it as a storehouse. Some
too energetic revenue officer had disappeared one day and never been
heard of again. He had been surprised--by the free-traders--perhaps in
the very act of surprising them--brought over to L’Etat in a boat, been
dragged through the tunnel, or made to crawl through, perhaps, with
vicious knife-digs in the rear, and had been left bound in the darkness
till he should be otherwise disposed of. His captors had been captured
in turn, or maybe killed, and he had lain there alone and in the dark,
waiting, waiting for them to return, shouting now and again into the
muffling darkness, struggling with his bonds, growing weaker and weaker,
faint with hunger, mad with thirst, until at last he died.
It was horrible to think of, and desperate as his own state was, he
thanked God heartily that he was not as that other.
Morning brought no slackening of the gale. It seemed to him, if
anything, to be waxing still more furious.
He had only two eggs left, and they might both be bad ones, but he would
not have ventured round the headland that day for all the eggs in
existence.
He broke one presently, in answer to a clamour inside him that would
brook no denial, and found it good, and lived on it that day, and mused
between times on the strange fact that a man could feel so mightily
grateful for the difference between a bad egg and a good one.
His sixth egg turned out a good one also, and the next day there came
another hopeful lull, which permitted him to harry the puffins once
more, and gave him a dozen chances against contingencies.
On the eighth day the storm blew itself out, and he looked hopefully
across at the lonely and weather-beaten cliffs of Sark for the relief
which he was certain they had been aching to send him.
The waves, however, still ran high, and, though he did not know it till
later, there was not a boat left afloat round the whole Island. The
forethoughtful and weather-wise had run them round to the Creux and
carried them through the tunnel into the roadway behind. All the rest
had been smashed and sunk and swallowed by the storm.