Chapter TWO: § 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!’”