§ I
He woke early, to find the room full of sunshine and stir. The stir came
from the sea, which moved in a solemn roar over the rocks below. He sat
up and listened to it--how the murmur swung!--as the wind drove it
landwards, and then let it fall back into a sigh. His heart quickened
with a love of the sea ... after all, had not his fathers sought their
bread upon the waters for many generations?... He slipped out of bed and
looked out of the window. There lay the sea, a soft sun-dazzled blue,
calm enough far from the shore, but all laced with foam round the coasts
and rocks.... Its deep tides swelled over its bed, moving solemnly--only
the edges were in commotion.
He moved to the chair where his clothes were piled, and began to dress
quickly and noiselessly. The sea was drawing him out to it--he must go
down to it, close enough to smell it, to feel its spindrift on his face.
It was queer that the sea had never stirred this emotion in him
before--not at Birling Gap, where the little wavelets rippled on the wet
mirror of the sand--not in the haunted desolation of the Casquets--nor
even in St. Peter Port, with the fishing-boats at anchor under the White
Rock.... It was not till he had come here that the deep had called to
him, not till he had heard its voice from the house where he was born.
He ran out of the house as soon as he was dressed. Either somebody was
up before him, or the door had never been shut, for he found it open.
His footsteps rang on the cobbled stones of the courtyard, in the midst
of which the well was wreathed in climbing roses. Round it the little
houses and barns, their thatched roofs sprouting with stone-crop and
scabias and coloured mosses, had a charming look of Arcady asleep--but
Daniel had ceased to rest in the rustic beauty of the island’s heart, he
wanted the edges, salt and rough, seamed, worn, cavernous, spiked and
deadly, the workshop of the sea.
He found a path that wound over the brow of the cliff, and then stopped
short above a slide of rock. The descent looked easy--the rocks were
granite, rough and sure of foothold, and were moreover broken up into
blocks and ledges. He let himself down, and as he had a strong head,
found little difficulty in the scramble. He was soon only a few feet
above some flat rocks full of pools into which the sea was breaking.
Looking down from above he could see the rich sea life of the pools,
their purple fringes of seaweed, and their great red and green jewels,
which he supposed must be sea-anemones. Below the slabs the tide was
roaring, sending up lashings of foam. He would swing from his hands and
let himself down--it wasn’t much of a drop.
It was more than he thought--a matter of seven feet. He was now well
below the level of high tide, and the rocks were covered with thick
greasy seaweed--the _vraic_ which makes a livelihood for the lonely men
of Pleinmont.... His feet slithered on it, and he found it best to crawl
about from pool to pool. His throat tightened as he looked down into
those little gardens of the sea--their rocks, their trees, their
flowers, their tiny inhabitants swimming in their alleys. He had never
seen anything so lovely, so complete--he forgot that he had come out to
watch the splendour and fury of the waves below. This was fine--he
could mess about here all the morning, but he supposed his uncles would
want him to do some job or other with the boats. My! but they’d have to
teach him a few things ... he to work in a boat, who had always worked
in a bar!
The waters of the little pools swirled suddenly as the sea poured into
them. It was a pity the tide was coming in.... Losh! but it had come in
a good way since he’d been on the slabs ... things moved quicker here
than at Birling Gap.... He’d better.... But he couldn’t. He had dropped
off the rock, which now curved outwards above him, shutting off his
escape that way.
He looked round for other ways, but could see none. The sea was all
round the slabs, breaking over them--there was only the way he had come,
and that was impossible from below. What a fool he had been--he might
have realized that the rock curved inwards at the root.... Perhaps the
tide would fall back before it reached him. No--for the seaweed was
above his head, hanging from the eaves of the rock seven feet above the
slabs.
He felt his skin go rough, and then cold and sweaty. He found himself
shouting for help, but the sea was drowning his voice in a great roar.
He was afraid, mysteriously, of more than death. There was something
horrible and malevolent in this submerging coast--the very smell of
brine and seaweed was sinister with its hint of corruption....
“Help!--Help!”--he could not die here--he would die anywhere but in this
place.
He had faced death before--he had lain sick but disciplined under
shell-fire in France. This was worse--infinitely worse. Shell-fire was
nothing--it was only death. This was worse than death, for he was afraid
not only of death but of the forces that were dealing death to him. “Oh,
deliver us from evil....” He must not die in the slime....
A loud laugh sounded from the rock above.
“Peter!”
“You cry ‘help’?”
“For God’s sake get me out of this.”
“Idiot!” Peter laughed again. “You be drowned if you stay there.”
“I can’t get up.”
“I cannot get down--I go--I fetch a rope.”
“But won’t the tide be up before you’re back?”
“Oh, my Gar, no!”
He walked off with maddening deliberation.
“Peter, don’t leave me here!” Dan called after him foolishly, but Peter
did not stop to listen.
Once more he was alone, and once more the horror was like a hand upon
his throat, choking the breath out of it. His tongue parched and his
eyes swam. He tried to think of other things--far-off homely things of
the Ouse Valley, of nature cloaked and veiled and decent--but they were
as shadows on glass, and could not hold his mind’s eye from its terror,
from the dreadful strange things all round him, from nature indecent and
exposed, shocking and horrifying him as he crouched there on his rock.
He tried even to think of Belle, whom he had tried so hard not to think
of for a month or more; the thought of her might give him a more
wholesome sickness. But even Belle to-day was as a shadow on glass--his
most poignant thought of her could not draw him away into the dignities
of human sorrow. He could only cower and grovel before the horror of the
sea, and those things which the sea exposes on some evil coasts. He now
knew that he was not afraid of death--that death itself was only a
shadow on glass.
Peter returned just as the slabs were coming awash. He brought with him
a rope and two Philips, and they soon had Daniel up beside them among
the pink stars of the thrift. He was trembling all over, which amused
them very much, and the next moment was violently sick, which amused
them more than ever. Their English cousin was very funny--oh, my Gar,
yes!
§ 2
Daniel was rather ashamed of himself and of the terror he had shown. He
did not like the way his cousins laughed at him--the way they had of
saying for days and weeks afterwards: “You go down to-day to Rouge
Caneau? You like it down there on the rocks.” But he never could bring
himself to look upon his terror as quite unreasonable; during the next
few weeks he felt it again more than once--down in the bays, below the
high-tide level, among the hanging seaweed and cold slipperiness of the
rocks. He felt as he sometimes used to feel at home in the churchyard--a
feeling of “run away or the ghosts will get you” ... though here it was
not ghosts, but something which prowled in that wet place between the
tides, and lived in the caves that for half the day were full of water
and for the other half were full of wind.
But he was not always afraid, for there was also the warm, flowery heart
of the island, with its farms and its windmill, and its ilex-sheltered
lanes. There was the loveliness of the Dixcart valley, where the ferns
stand four feet high beside the stream--there were the marguerites
pouring over the edge of the cliffs, and the foxgloves making purple
flame at Les Orgeries and on the headland which the English call the
Hog’s Back and the islanders call Château des Quenévés. The coasts were
lovely, too--as long as you kept away from their roots--with their
columns of rosy rock, their promontories like horned beasts, and above
all with their distant view of islands and the golden coast of France.
Daniel soon learned to know this new complete little country--to know
with thoroughness its five or six miles of road, with less assurance its
twenty-five miles of coast. He was right in thinking that his cousins
would want him to help them in their boats, and he learned to be useful
quicker than either he or they had expected. Fundamentally adaptable and
with sea-going blood in his veins, he soon learned, in spite of his
initial terror, to handle a boat whether propelled by oars or engine.
His uncles owned quite a little fleet--a cutter, two large motor-boats,
a small motor-boat, and several rowing-boats. They used these for
fishing, taking goods and passengers to and from Guernsey and even
Jersey, and also for taking visitors on pleasure-trips round the island
and to visit those caves which could be reached only from the sea.
Daniel was happy enough on the sea--for those were the days of summer
calm, when the teeth of the coast were harmless as the teeth in the jaws
of a sleeping animal. He loved the soft, wind-driven glide of the boat
over the still waters of Havre Gosselin, he loved the gentle rocking
beyond La Pêcheresse, or those moments at anchor off La Genetière, when
he and his cousins let down the lobster-pots to the bed of the sea, or
drew them up after old-man lobster had had time to fulfil his certain
folly, and would be found sitting grey and disconsolate in his wicker
prison.
His uncles never went a-fishing. Philip had charge of the Guernsey
trade, and went to and fro about five days out of seven, either with
goods or passengers; and Eugene, who was about ten years older, and had
been beaten by the winds into still older looks, nowadays spent most of
his time on land, attending to the farm with his son-in-law Hamon,
though he was fond of boasting the exploits of his seafaring days.
Eugene Le Couteur was the most uncivilized member of all that household,
whose civilization ranged from the two old uncles, unable to read or
write and with English limited to a few guide-book phrases for the
visitors--to cousin Thomas, Philip’s son, who had once been to England,
and ever since had worn a bowler hat on Sundays. Uncle Eugene hated
England and the English; the only place he hated more than England was
Guernsey, and he never wearied of complaining of the opportunity which
had been missed during the Great War, when the Royal Navy could have
smashed Guernsey as easy as a crab’s back.
“We could have smashed Guernsey, but Germany we could not smash--it was
a waste.”
“We did smash Germany, uncle,” said Dan--who had come to pick up enough
of the island speech to help him through a conversation.
“We did not smash Germany quite small--they are still there, and owe us
a lot of money. We should have smashed Guernsey quite small, so that
they could not owe us any money.”
“Well, we smashed Germany quite small enough,” grumbled Daniel, annoyed
at this reflection upon him as a soldier. He was the only one of the
household who had seen service in France, though Helier and young Eugene
had both been on a mine-sweeper, “and each time we blow up they give us
a new pair of trousers.”
“But what do we want to smash Germany for at all?” continued Uncle
Eugene, in waxing indignation--“Germany has never done us any harm. I
have never seen a German. When the war start, a silly, vagabond man come
along to me and want to take my big boys to fight the Germans. I say: ‘I
do not want to fight the Germans. They never done me any harm. They
never put their lobster-pots on the Minquier Rocks. I am ready to fight
the French whenever they put their lobster-pots on the Minquier Rocks,
and I am ready to fight Guernsey always. But I have never seen a German,
so why should I fight them?’ He say: ‘Then they will come and kill you.’
I say: ‘They will not. If they come to Sark they come to the north side,
to the Eperqueries. If they should try to cross the Coupée into Little
Sark--oh, my Gar! let them try, and they will see!’”