§ 1
The summer rose to the solstice, and all the island smelled of hay and
flowers, with heavy smells of brine upon the coast. Daniel was not
unhappy. His transplantation had been in some degree effective, and his
old sorrows no longer seemed so actual to him--they belonged to another
life, to another landscape. Besides, his work in the boats absorbed him,
drawing his thoughts away from the past and fixing them in the present
moment with its demands and preoccupations. If you have twenty-two
land-going years behind you it takes some striving to learn the way of
the sea.
His English correspondence was not of a kind to hinder much the good
work of forgetting. His family were not letter-writers, and nor, for
that matter, was he. He heard once from his mother and once from Len,
with scrawls and scratches enclosed to Uncle Dan from Leslie and Ivy.
His father did not write at all, nor did Ernley, nor did Belle. The
country of the Ouse Valley soon began to live for him only in a few
stilted phrases in stiff handwriting on cheap notepaper. By this means
he heard that Belle and Ernley had come back from the long honeymoon
which had followed their marriage in London--a marriage that had taken
place before Dan left England and only a few days after their
reconciliation. He could now, if he liked, picture Belle at the
Crown--but the picture was again only a shadow on glass. He was like a
man standing with his back to a firelit room and staring out of a window
through which he sees sea, sky and islands bright in sunshine; only now
and then the movements of those behind in the room become reflected like
ghosts in the pane--what he really sees are the sea, sky and islands
outside in the sun. This did not mean that he never suffered for Belle,
for the thought of her often troubled him very much. After all he was
still inside the room of his love for Belle, and only looked outside,
through the window, at the sea, sky and islands of Sark. None the less,
he had turned his back on her, and saw only her shadow reflected dimly
in the new landscape that filled his horizon.
Other events in the Ouse Valley troubled him still less, though they
were events which would have disturbed him considerably if they had
not, as it were, happened behind him. Apparently, under his father’s
unguided rule--for Chris only lounged and scoffed and Kitty only
scolded--the George was going quickly along those evil ways Daniel had
so often preached against in the old times. “He have those wicked men
from Lewes giving horses’ names to the sailors,” wrote his mother, “and
the sailors such fools. We shall have the police upon us.” He searched
her letters in vain for any of the tenderness which had been his first
comfort in his sorrow, and which had flickered intermittently through
the month that had gone by before his leaving for Sark. But even this
lack did not trouble him much.
Strangely enough, the only occasions when he felt really and acutely
homesick, not only for his mother and for Belle, but for the whole of
his life in Bullockdean, were the Sunday evenings when he went to
church. None of the islanders went to church in the morning, the morning
services being considered English and shunned accordingly; but every
Sunday evening farmers and fishermen would assemble together in the
ilex-shaded churchyard, dressed in their best blue jerseys and trousers
and peaked boating-caps, and wait outside till the little sharp bell had
stopped ringing, when they all marched in together and filled the back
seats, ready for a quick corporate exit directly the service was over.
“_Bien-aimés frères_,” the clergyman would begin, which Daniel knew was
“dearly beloved brethren” in French. Then would follow the whole of
Evening Prayer that had become Prières du Soir by the same token. It was
a queer, stiff, superstitious rite, in which strong men found comfort as
they bawled French psalms to Anglican chants, and droned together: “_Je
crois en Dieu, le Père tout-puissant, Créateur du ciel et de la
terre_....” To Dan it sometimes brought a strange feeling of loss and
pathos, as if he were indeed singing the Lord’s song in a strange land.
He would shut his eyes during the sermon, which he was far too inexpert
at the language to understand, and try to imagine himself back in
Bullockdean Church, with the soft scent of its old stones in his
nostrils, mixed with the moth-killer in Auntie Harman’s cape and the
general tobacco-and-camphor reek of the Sunday evening congregation. He
tried to think that if he opened his eyes he would see a dozen familiar
backs before him--Auntie Harman’s, Maudie’s, Jess’s, Willie Pont’s, old
Pilbeam’s--and beyond them Mr. Marchbanks in the pulpit, preaching an
English sermon on keeping good company, helping the poor, reading the
Bible, giving honest measure and other religious practices of an English
village. He felt rather guilty with regard to Mr. Marchbanks, for he had
promised to write to him, but had not done so. Also he was uncomfortably
aware that in religious matters he had changed his custom too easily,
and had given up doing many of the good things his friend had taught
him.
Nevertheless, though it made him homesick and regretful, he could not
help finding in the hideous little church, with its pitch-pine pews and
flat, whitewashed ceiling, a friendliness which he had never found at
the Pêche à Agneau. It was here that his mother had married his father,
it was here that he had been baptized; and this unfamiliar language was
the language of his parents’ vows and of the promises his godfathers and
godmothers had made in his name. Also the place was somehow made homely
by the memorials of the drowned with which its walls were
covered--memorials of De Carterets and Carrés and Falles, who had gone
out in their boats and never returned. Unlike the memorials in the Town
Church over in Guernsey they did not bear in high funereal pride the
arms or crests or mottoes of the dead, but only in reproachful
repetition all round the wall, the plaintive cry of the living: “_Ta
voie a été par la mer et tes sentiers dans les grosses eaux_--_Néanmoins
tes traces n’ont pas été connues_....”
§ 2
Later in the summer Daniel was promoted to going out with the visitors.
He would take charge of the engine, while one of his cousins steered,
for though he was growing daily more expert and familiar with the coast,
his sea-lore did not extend to the navigation of those crooked channels
which were the avenues of the caves--with their treacherous stud of
rocks, the _grunes_ and _demies_ of stealthy disaster.
Daniel liked the visitors. They were a relief after the Le Couteurs’
rather primitive companionship. He and his cousins were friendly enough,
for he accepted, being gentle, their rough teasing and laughter and
queer remoteness from all he was accustomed to; nevertheless, it was
good to meet these people with their English talk and their English
ways--to listen to them talking ordinary British politics, instead of
the parish politics of Sark, to realize that there were other foreign
complications besides those caused by the treachery and avarice of
Guernsey. He often heard the sort of talk that he used to hear in his
father’s bar, or in Ernley Munk’s room, when he grew dictatorial over
the port.... Besides, some of the visitors came from places near
home--he once took out a family from Eastbourne and heard them speak of
Alciston.
The visitors liked him too, for his adaptable humility and pleasant
manners--they gave him tips, sometimes very handsome ones, so that
during August he was able to send a pound home every week. His cousins
were inclined to be annoyed, for they themselves did not think much of
Daniel’s manners.
“You only touch your cap--you do not take it off,” said Helier
reproachfully.
“When a lady says she want the boat,” rebuked Uncle Philip, “you should
not say ‘Yes, ma’am,’ as you do--it is not polite, though it may do very
well in England or in Guernsey. You should say: ‘Madame, the boat is
yours,’ and if she asks what time is best to start, you should say:
‘When it pleases madame.’”
In spite of this ornate politeness, on which all the Sark fishermen
prided themselves, the Le Couteurs did not, like Dan, approve of the
visitors in their hearts. They feared lest any of them should want to
settle down on the island--“and we have more English.” Already several
of the farms handed down from the original Forty Tenants were in English
hands, and the local families were being driven more and more to the
edges, into the second estate of the fishermen, who were unrepresented
in the Chef Plès and therefore powerless to withstand the invader.
Perhaps this attitude was partly responsible for the fact that, in spite
of his acceptance of their life and customs, the Le Couteur family did
not really absorb Daniel--he was never quite one of themselves, but
remained English and outside them. His father would always be to them
the stranger who had taken away his mother from her kin, and his mother
would always be the woman who had forsaken her kin for the stranger. He
had been born in their land, but he had been bred far away. Though he
had adopted their customs, they were not really his. Though he no longer
wore his English clothes, and though his colouring was the colouring of
their race, where it touched Brittany rather than Normandy, he had the
broad, flat Saxon features of his fathers, of the men of the Saxon
fleets who had driven out first the monks and then the pirates from
their land.
§ 3
Autumn came, and the visitors went. The seas and caves were a playground
no longer but a business of storms and fogs. First came the equinoctial
gales--a smashing of wind against the cliffs, with rain like knives. The
sea no longer foamed only at the edges where the great _baveuses_
slobbered the tides. It was a boiling whiteness as far as l’Etac. On the
coast all was thunder; the caves roared with water and wind--the boom of
the Gorey Souffleur could be heard far out in the Russell, and the
screams of the Caverne des Lamentes foretold the winter’s wrecks to
superstition loitering with stiff hair on the Coupée.
The Le Couteurs pulled up their boats. There might be some occasional
fishing in calm intervals, but no real business. The Guernsey steamer
came only twice a week, and sometimes she was unable to land her cargo
and mails. The outer world seemed to recede immeasurably far.
Then, at the passing of the equinox came the fogs. These were more
terrible than the storms. The storms were at least a spectacle, but the
fogs were one continual white blindness on the land. Those were days in
which sight, touch and smell were sunk in one clammy, salt whiteness,
and the only sense which lived was sound. The air was torn with sound,
as the fog-horns hummed from a score of rocks. There was the eternal
moan of Blanchard, out beyond Les Abîmes, there was the thunder of
Platte Fougère--slower, fiercer, seeming to shake the sea; and there was
Sark’s own voice at Point Robert, which inland was like the drone of a
mosquito, but on the coast was like the voice of a trumpet braying
judgment--the judgment of the east coast of Sark. Daniel would sit on
the cliffs, listening while it swelled with the echoes that poured into
it, till at last every cave and rock and cliff-face roared with it, and
out in the fogs upon the water the Grande Moie shook it out of his
castles.
There was not much for him to do in those days--no work in the boats,
and very little on the farm, and all the crowd of them to do it. His
uncles and cousins smoked and snored beside the fire, and Dan sat with
them, bored and lonely. Sometimes he played with Alice Hamon’s
children--funny little things, with their queer French talk; they amused
him, and when he played with them he felt at home. But you could not be
always playing with children.
What else could you do? You could go to the Bel-Air and get drunk. It
was not a very good thing to do, but you did it sometimes, because there
was nothing else. Everyone did it--Uncle Eugene and Uncle Philip,
Helier, Peter, William, the young Eugenes and Philips, all the lot of
them. They sat with the other fishermen and farmers and drank
armagnac--a rather unpleasant brandy, and ampurdan, a kind of heady
port--and told each other long stories about themselves and their
fishing exploits out beyond the _demies_ of Baleine. Dan was not really
fond of drinking, but it was easy to drink too much armagnac--it soon
made his head heavy and then light. Then a strange thing would
happen--he would change. He would cease to be Daniel Sheather of the
George at Bullockdean, and would become Daniel Le Couteur of the Pêche à
Agneau, yarning and quarrelling in debased Norman French, discussing
Sark politics, “_le seigneur_,” “_le ministre_,” and disparaging England
and Guernsey. Some buried local instinct would revive, stripping him of
all his years in the Ouse Valley, of all his line of Saxon forefathers,
leaving him only his inheritance in the Norman Isle. His very face would
change--his features would appear sharper, his eyes brighter, as his
mother’s blood quickened with the drink that had fired his mother’s
father.... He was good company then, was Cousin Daniel. Oh, my Gar, yes!
When he had slept off his excitement and awoke a Sussex man again, he
would feel ashamed. He would reproach himself not only for these
transient disloyalties but for the whole slow system of his forgetting.
There was no good pretending that he felt either for his home or for his
people the same as he had felt when he first came out to Sark. Even the
homesickness of Sunday nights was growing fainter, and “_frères
bien-aimés_” showed signs of becoming the reality of which “dearly
beloved brethren” was only a remembered translation. “The Prayer Book
was written in French. Helier de Cartaret brought it from Jersey, and
then it cross the sea and Queen Victoria say it very good and turn it
into English.” So Uncle Eugene used to babble in his ignorance, and Dan
had secretly scoffed at him. Hadn’t he always known that King Henry the
Eighth had written the Prayer Book to serve out the Pope for wanting to
marry Katharine of Aragon? But now he almost believed in Uncle Eugene’s
version. His very mind was being swallowed up by Sark and his Sark
relations. There were no visitors now to remind him of his own speech
and country ... and after all, he was as much a Sarkie as he was an
Englishman--why should he kick against the pricks? When he was in
England he had never troubled about Sark, so now that he was in Sark,
why should he trouble about England? Thus he ultimately surrendered.
At Christmas he had some letters which brought him back to Bullockdean
for a day or two. His mother sent rather spiteful good wishes to her
brothers at the Pêche à Agneau, but no present to her son, for she had
reason to believe, she said, that “good things sent to Sark never arrive
there.” His father, on the other hand, came out of his retirement to the
extent of a gorgeous Christmas card of painted talc, adorned with two
clasped hands and verses about “the heart which yearns for thee at this
glad tide.” Len and Emmie sent cards too, and the ghastly fruit of Ivy’s
first brush-painting lessons at school. His family was prolific in its
seasonable wishes, yearning hearts, and mem’ries of his bright eyes, but
it withheld the more satisfying gift of news. This was unexpectedly
supplied by Jess Harman. She had not written to him since he left home,
and he had seen very little of her during the weeks before he came away.
But now on this first Christmas of his exile she wrote him a long
letter, full of news. That letter nearly stopped his Norman drift. Not
that Jess’s pen was agile enough to bring before him all the life of the
Ouse Valley, coloured and lit up to dazzle his eyes. She revived his
ardour by the simple process of feeding it with facts--long strings of
facts. Each sentence contained a separate and independent fact. Since he
had left England Dan had never had such a string of news.
“Old Gadgett is dead. Maudie gets twenty-five shillings a week now.
Auntie has bought a new bonnet. She has given her old one to the old
gyppo woman that sells clothes-pegs. Mrs. Penny has sent Susie to school
and looks after Miles herself, so I do for the Rector now. I get twelve
shillings a week. I have bought a silk jumper. Mrs. Pont has had the
face-ache. Mrs. Ernley Munk has a dear little baby girl. I should like
to be her nurse, but she has a proper one. It was born in Brighton in a
nursing home. They have visitors at the Crown for Christmas. They are
going to make their own electric light. We are having White-Wilcox in C
for Christmas. The ladies’ choir will help them out.”
So Belle was a baby’s mother now ... that was the picture that stood out
most clearly among all the other pictures--of Maudie behind the bar of
the Crown, of Jess in her new silk jumper, of Mrs. Pont with her
face-ache, of the old gyppo woman in Auntie Harman’s bonnet, of the
choir rehearsing White-Wilcox in C with ladies to help them.... He could
see Belle sitting with her baby in her arms, its little head almost lost
in the hollow of her big breast, her hair hanging on her cheeks as she
stooped over it, busy with the comfortable business of motherhood. He
wondered if she was happy--why of course she was. She was a baby’s
mother and a man’s wife. She was no longer poor distraught, dishevelled
Belle Shackford, with her sorrows and gallantries, but well-protected,
well-to-do Mrs. Ernley Munk of the Crown Inn, where they had visitors
for Christmas and were going to make their own electric light....
It was strange that no one had written before now to tell him of the
baby’s arrival. He supposed that it had not been so scandalously early
as to please his mother--or perhaps she was still jealous of Belle, and
did not want to remind her son of her existence. Ernley might have
written, he reflected bitterly, but perhaps Ernley still felt their
parting awkwardness.... Anyhow, it showed how far he was from
Bullockdean, that the woman he loved should have borne a child without
his having word of it.
That night he dreamed of Belle sitting in a stable with her baby on her
knees, while all round her from invisible throats rose the strains of
White-Wilcox in C, given by the particular magic of dreams an appeal so
haunting and so wild that Daniel awoke with the tears streaming from his
eyes. It was not till some minutes later that he saw anything
incongruous in the fact that the words which had been sung to the
familiar music were not the words of his Anglican memories, but the
writing on the wall of Sark church: “_Ta voie a été par la mer et tes
sentiers dans les grosses eaux. Néanmoins tes traces n’ont pas été
connues._”