§ 1
St. Malo guards those seas which lie on the west of Cape de la Hague, in
the gulf which Normandy and Brittany make together. They were part of
his bishopric of wild waves, their islets are crowned with the ruins of
his monasteries and in legend he himself sits upon the Ortac Rock,
watching the fisher-craft go by, lifting for them his intercessions
against the storms. His name wanders through many an uncouth speech--in
Sark he is Magliore, farther down his own coast he is Maclou, and far
away across the sea, where West Barbary sinks into drowned Lyonesse, he
claims St. Meliarne’s banner as it hangs in Mullion Church. And as his
name and legend wander he becomes many strange things--giant and monster
as well as monk and bishop. Nevertheless, we will claim his merits and
intercessions, for those are treacherous seas, and the fanged rocks
devour the little craft on which man goes out to seek his bread. Holy
Malo--Magliore, Maclou, Meliarne, Mullion--pray for us.
On a May morning the colourless sky hung low over St. Malo’s sea, and a
great stillness and cold held everything. There was no life upon the
water, no wind, only a great stillness and cold.
Far away in the south-west, where sky and sea were woven together in
mist, an eye shone--flashed--and disappeared. It might have been the eye
of great Malo himself, looking out on his domains. Once more it broke
out of the mist--beamed, and was gone. It was the only light in all that
dullness, the only colour in all that grey. Again and again it
flashed--departed--came and went.... Daniel, sitting on his bag on the
second-class deck, asked a sailor what it was.
“That?” said the sailor--“that’s the Casquet light.”
“A lighthouse?”
The sailor looked at him commiseratingly.
“Never heard of the Casquets?”
Yes--he had heard his mother speak of them.
“That’s where the boats go down,” said the sailor--“there’s a current
pulls from them rocks, and in a storm the craft goes into them like
moths into a candle.”
“Have there been many wrecks?”
“Many!” the sailor laughed. “Never heard how the _Stella_ went
down?--and she was only the big noise; there was all the little ones
that never got into the papers--all the French trawlers and the island
boats that don’t get written about.”
He went off about his work, leaving Dan staring into the fogs with their
golden eye. Now he could distinguish a tall purplish column--that must
be the lighthouse ... it was like the disused lighthouse at home, on the
cliffs above Birling Gap, but taller--more graceful, more sinister....
He could see the rocks beneath it now, the rocks on which it
stood--huge, smooth, helmet-shaped rocks, like the heads of some monster
coiled under the sea.... The Casquets were falling away into the east,
as the _Cesarea_ throbbed past them through the calm sea ... the sky was
turning red behind them, and they and the column of the lighthouse were
purple against the glow. The orange light winked in a crimson and purple
sky. Colour had suddenly taken possession of the sky, and ran out over
the sea ... the sea was blood-red--the Casquet rocks were black. The
orange light became smoky, furious ... it seemed to fight the kindling
sea and sky ... it gave one last flash upon its pedestal, and went out.
It was sunrise, but the moon had not yet set. Her papery, waning
crescent hung over some new islands which had sprung out of the West.
The _Cesarea_ was ploughing her way towards them--behind her dragged
the white furrows of the sea, and the great stream of the smoke from her
smoke-stack, fuming along the sky among the last stars.
§2
A town lay asleep between two horns. On the end of each horn was a
castle, which also seemed asleep, and behind the town rose a wooded
land, with one high tower above the trees. The decks were crowded all
round Daniel--people pushed about him, swinging bags and cases against
his knees. Bells rang--sailors cried, “By y’r leave”--great coils of
rope ran out into the sea ... voices shouted from the harbour side and
from a little boat riding beside the buoy. Grasping his ticket in one
hand, his bag in the other, he slowly pushed and jostled his way ashore.
This was Guernsey, and a fine place it looked--houses, churches,
streets, and castles, too. But in the cold morning hour of sunrise and
moonset, it seemed foreign and unfriendly. The tall houses with their
steep, French roofs, were not the houses of home ... and yet it was here
his father had met his mother--in a little house in Bordage, she had
told him....
He was on the quay, following the stream of people towards the
turnstiles. A great crane was hoisting luggage from the hold of the
_Cesarea_--he must wait here for his box. He felt a sudden warm
attachment to his box, for it was all that he had of home with him. It
held everything he had in the world, except a few clothes in his bag--it
was a part of Daniel Sheather in a strange land.... Suppose it was
lost--suppose it had not come over with him, but lay behind at
Southampton? He could not bear the thought--his photographs of the
George, of his father and mother, of Chris and Len and Len’s children
... his one or two books--his handkerchiefs and shirts that his mother
had hemmed and marked for him ... he could not start here without them
all--he must have the old things....
Ah, there it was--he sprang forward to claim it, then did not know what
to do. He asked a porter how he was to cross to Sark--where was the Sark
boat? Confusion started--the porter said there was no boat to Sark that
day, another porter said there was--nobody seemed to know. A little
paddle-steamer was pointed out to him as the Sark boat, and one of the
porters was for carrying his box on board, but in the end the noes had
it, for her old man was reported to be over at Pleinmont at his sister’s
wedding.
“But there will be a motor-boat crossing to-night, for visitors have
arrived for the Bel-Air and are to be fetched,” said another porter.
It seemed as if Daniel would eventually reach Sark, though it was just
as well he was not in a hurry. His box and bag were left on the quay,
and he set off into the town to find a meal.
He thought he would like to go to the eating-house in Bordage, where his
father had first met his mother, but though he managed to find the
street and walk the length of it, no eating-house was to be seen. He
felt as if his mother’s romance--his only link with Guernsey--had gone
with it.
He ate his breakfast in a little shop in Hauteville Street, and then set
out to see the town. It did not interest him much. He saw that it was
beautiful and restful and sunny, but his heart was sick for Newhaven
Bridge and the weedy, mussel-smelling mouth of the Ouse--for the little
tilted rows of slate-roofed houses that swarmed over the lower slopes of
the downs--for the street-start of the great white road that led up the
valley towards home....
He went into the Town Church and sat there for a while--but even the
church was foreign. Cold and unworshipful, it had none of the homeliness
of Bullockdean; even in the last dead weeks he had known that
Bullockdean church held warmth and friendship for those who were not too
bruised to seek them--for the old women with their prayer-books and the
young boys and girls who made sheep’s-eyes at each other. But here one
was all among the dead--or rather the dead trappings of the dead, the
coats of arms they would no longer bear, the swords they would no longer
wear.... Memorial after memorial to Le Page and Le Pelley and Le
Marchant and De la Condamine and De Jersey ... griffins, gules,
mullets, bends d’or, and bends d’azur ... this was the Cloud of
Witnesses--the Writing on the Wall of the Town Church.
He was tired after his long journey and dozing night on the second-class
deck, and uncomfortable as he was in his hard pew, he fell asleep--to
dream that he was rowing Belle in a little boat round the Casquets,
which were plastered with the arms of the best Guernsey families. He
woke to find himself being shaken by the verger, who told him that
church was not the proper place to go to sleep in.
Well, where else was he to go?--what could he do till four o’clock, when
the motor-boat started? He wished he had never come to this unfriendly
place, where even the church refused him a lap to sleep in ... where no
one might sleep but the well-born dead. He would be happier at home,
even with Belle living just across the road as Mrs. Munk and the
mistress of the Crown. At least he would have his family at home--here
no one seemed to care. Uncle Philip had not even answered his mother’s
second letter, saying that her son was crossing by Wednesday’s
boat--someone might have come over to meet him in Guernsey, to tell him
how to get to Sark. There lay Sark, a dim, distant land, beyond the
nearer coasts of Herm and Jethou. What should he find in Sark?--a
family, friends, home, love? No, he had left them all on the other side
of the water.
§ 3
The day had grown very hot at noon, and at four o’clock the stones of
the Albert Pier were warm with the sun. A white motor-boat bobbed on the
tide, and the men within her shouted to one another in an outlandish
tongue. They were loading her with crates and packing-cases and some
luggage which had been brought down to the end of the pier. She must be
the Sark boat, and Daniel asked if he could cross in her.
He was told that he could do so for ten shillings. This made him very
angry, for he had only twelve-and-sixpence in the world, and did not
much relish the prospect of starting a new life on a capital of half a
crown. He felt that his cousins, who he understood had a boat of their
own, might have come over and fetched him and spared him this expense.
However, there was no help for it, so he took his seat in the little
boat among the well-to-do visitors who had chartered it, and in a few
minutes she was chug-chugging out of the harbour, past the lighthouse
and Castle Cornet into the Little Russell.
The sea was heavily calm, and the waters had a thick, oily quality--they
went in heavy, dull blue rolls across the Russell, as some force passed
deep under them, never breaking their blue, oily surface. The tide was
low, and the great buoys stood out of it, dripping with seaweed, and the
foundations of rocks, tide-stained and seaweed hung. Used to the Sussex
cliffs, the misty whiteness of Birling Gap, Dan watched in astonishment
those rocks as the little _Rose Carré_ flew past them. The sea was full
of rocks, great rocks like castles, raising their turrets on pillared
bases, pillars that the sea had carved. In colour they were pink and
brown, against the oily blue of the sea and the clearer blue of the sky
that rested on the sea.
He sat there tired and silent on his box, watching the calm beauty of
the sea roll past him and the castles of the rocks. They ran by Jethou,
steering on l’Etac. Sark was coming out of the sea; it looked like a
sea-monster, sleeping on the tide. They drew nearer, and its flanks
broke into bays; passing under l’Etac, the bays broke into caves and
creaks and pinnacles--the island of Brenière stood out, fierce and eaten
with caverns....
“You never been to Sark before?” asked the boatman in charge of the
engine.
Daniel shook his head.
“You go to see friends?”
“I’m going to stay with my uncle, Philip le Couteur. Do you know him?”
“I know him? Oh, my Gar! Yes.”
“Do you know if he’s expecting me?”
“Oh, yes, he is expecting you. He say you come along some day.”
This sounded unnecessarily vague after his mother’s letter--but Daniel
still hoped there would be someone to meet him at the harbour.
“Where is the Pêche à Agneau?” he asked. “Can we see it from here?”
“No--it is on the other side. Now we go past La Coupée.”
Young Sheather looked up at the towering cliffs--carrying their seamed
brownness up against the glitter of the dustless sky. Could anyone live
on this desert place, hard, fierce, scored and scaly as the hide of a
dragon?
“Are there houses on the top?”
“Oh, my Gar, yes! Plenty houses,” and the boatman laughed.
The _Rose Carré_ was running only a few yards from the coast--the Point
du Derrible fell away straight into deep water. Close to Daniel’s
staring eyes was a mass and terror of rocks, columns, caverns, points,
blocks, walls, crags, gullies, every possible formation, heaping itself
round the point, with the water lapping against it, oozing and plopping
in its crannies with a faint glug-glug, rolling in and out of its
caverns with a hollower, booming sound. As the boat ran by, the echoes
of the engine sent up clouds of herring-gulls from the rocks, while on
the smaller rocks beyond the point little parliaments of cormorants sat
solemn and undisturbed.
“Very dangerous here,” said the boatman, laughing again, but Daniel was
not frightened. He did not know enough about seafaring and this
particular coast to be frightened. Later, knowledge would teach him
fear.
The boat dodged her way through the deep channels into the harbour. The
tide just allowed her to creep in. Daniel climbed up the green, oozy
steps on to the quay. The little harbour was ringed all round with
cliffs of that brownish pink with which he was now growing familiar;
there was no way out of it save by a tunnel cut through them.
He looked round in vain for some signs of a greeting. A few boatmen and
fishermen were leaning against the harbour walls, and a cart had come
down from the hotel to fetch the visitors’ luggage, but no one seemed to
have come to meet Daniel Sheather. He felt chilled and lonely; the rich,
rather terrible beauty of the place, so foreign to his Saxon eyes--used
to the tame, sweet landscape of the South Downs, with their gentle
curves and misty colours--added to his feeling of strangeness. This
island was unfriendly--a strange land, though the land of his birth.
He went up to an old man, and asked him if he could tell him the way to
Philip le Couteur’s house, but this led only to a fresh baulk. The old
fisherman could speak no language but his own, the harsh, disfigured
remnant of the speech his Norman ancestors had left him--as they had
left him their red hair and sea-blue eyes. It was a foreign language to
Daniel, though he must have often heard it, indeed must have spoken it
as a child. Luckily a younger man came to help him, and he gathered that
the Pêche à Agneau was at the remotest end of the island, across the
Coupée in Little Sark.
“How am I to get my box there?”
Nobody seemed to know. But everybody seemed very much amused--they
seemed to relish the prospect of Dan being left in the Creux Harbour
with the big, corded box he wanted to carry to the Pêche à Agneau. It
was not a cruel or malicious amusement, merely the delight of primitive
man in another’s misfortune--but it did not help Daniel to feel at home.
At last it was discovered that La Belle Hautgarde had sent their mule
cart to fetch stores which the _Rose Carré_ had brought over. The great
lurching mules came through the tunnel in the midst of the discussion,
and after a good deal of argument with the driver, it was arranged that
Daniel should be taken in the mule cart as far as La Belle Hautgarde,
from which it would not be difficult for the Le Couteurs to fetch his
box.
He accordingly drove off. With a great clatter and clank of hoofs and
wheels the cart went through the tunnel--and then suddenly the landscape
melted ... fierce brown cliffs, rocks, columns and caves gave place to
gentle banks smothered in cow-parsley, campion and bluebells. Trees
bowered over head, their leaves spattered with filtering sunlight. A
soft air blew, thick with the scent of flowers. He had broken through
the frowning walls of Sark and found a flower-garden. It was as if a
fierce, terrible face had suddenly and beautifully smiled.
Then he began to remember ... scents became familiar, that scent of
evening and flowers and warm, sweet grass ... he remembered thatched
roofs with queer crinkled edgings of tiles ... cows with sleek,
mouse-coloured skins ... an avenue of trees ... a windmill.... He had
forgotten the cliffs of Sark, the barriers which, as a child, he could
have seldom or never seen, but he had remembered the heart--the deep
lanes, the trees, the flowers, the daily sights of the child who had
played with the lobster’s claw....
The road narrowed. The island narrowed. Sark was only six feet wide. On
either side the cliffs fell away, down into sinister bays, hundreds of
feet below. Dan was frightened at last--he grasped the sides of the
cart, as it lurched over La Coupée, and then up the steep hill beyond it
into Little Sark.
Once more the island spread, and the fields were full of trefoil,
cropped by cows. Thatched roofs ran long-side the lane. They had come to
La Belle Hautgarde, and Dan must dismount, and go on his own legs to the
Pêche à Agneau.
“What about my box? Where can I leave it?”
“Leave it--where should you leave it, if not here?” asked the driver,
who had deposited the box in the lane. “The sons of Philip Le Couteur
will come and fetch it some time.”
“But is it safe?”
“Yes, it is safe. We are honest in Sark--we are not English.”
Dan did not know whether he ought to take offence at this last remark,
but he had not much spirit left, and risky and grotesque as it seemed to
leave his box lying in the road, he submitted to the inevitable, and
walked off, to find as best he could his way to his uncle’s house.
§ 4
Perhaps the driver was right in his distinctions between Sark and
England, for the box was still lying unharmed and apparently unnoticed
in the lane when Daniel and two of his cousins called for it after
supper. Dan and they were still in the stage of suspicious
investigation--Peter was not unlike his English cousin, with his black
hair and eyes, though instead of Dan’s flat Saxon features he had the
sharp nose and chin of the Guernsey-diluted Le Couteurs; but Helier
belonged to the Norman type of his Hamon mother, and had thick curly red
hair and blue eyes and a ruddy freckled skin. Luckily both boys could
speak English fluently, though the Saxon drawl and the French clip
nearly built Babel out of the conversation.
“There your box--it is safe,” said Peter. He seized one end and swung it
up--Dan laid hold of the other and could scarcely lift it. This was
humiliating.
“Let me,” said Helier, and swung up the other end. They both swung the
box to their shoulders, and signalled to Dan to come round to the side
and take his lesser share of the burden.
“We carry it like a coffin,” said Peter, and they both laughed.
The Pêche à Agneau was only a couple of furlongs from La Belle
Hautgarde, below the brow of the hill, looking out nearly west towards
the Moie de la Bretagne. Like most dwellings in Sark, it was a
collection of small, separate cottages gathered round a well. Philip Le
Couteur and his family lived in one cottage, Eugene Le Couteur and his
family in another, and the third cottage was inhabited by a daughter who
had married back into the Hamons, and whose husband was in partnership
with Philip and Eugene. There must have been more than twenty souls in
that little desolate group of houses on the cliff edge, and it was not
surprising that accommodation was scarce and Daniel had to sleep in the
same room as his cousin Peter.
He found the mass of his cousins exceedingly confusing; they were so
numerous that they seemed to have exhausted the supply of Christian
names on the island--Eugene and Philip Le Couteur each had a son called
Philip, and the community also contained three Eugenes and two Peters.
Add to this a strong family likeness, born of generations of
intermarriage (which had not seemed, however, to affect the hardiness of
the stock), an incomprehensible speech and the complete promiscuity of
all three families, and the result was utter bewilderment for poor
Daniel.
However, they had given him an excellent supper of fish, bread and
butter, and gâche--a soft, sweet cake full of currants, which he liked
very much. When supper was over and the box had been fetched home, they
left him to himself and the welcome freedom to go straight to bed.
He felt tired and strained, not only with the journey, but with the
effort of adapting himself to such entirely new surroundings, though
doubtless memory and hereditary both helped him a little. He was too
tired for satisfying sleep--also he had been given what his Uncle Philip
called an English bed, which meant a bed with broken springs, uneven
legs, and mattress stuffed with what felt like lumps of wood. His cousin
slept in a Sark bed, which was like a large flat box without a lid, full
of gaily-coloured bedding. Dan realized that, though his uncles were
exceedingly well-to-do, the discomfort of this new life would probably
be much greater than that of the poverty-stricken George. However, he
was of an adaptable nature, and shrugged down into the misery of the
English bed, pulling the ends of the pillow over his ears and the
blanket over his eyes, to shut out the strange world which moonlight was
now making stranger.