Chapter NINE: § 1

Daniel’s marriage ended as it had begun--in a strange language. This time Helier de Cartaret’s Prayer Book was open at La Sepulture des Morts, and to a jigging Anglican chant the congregation--much the same as that which had gathered for the wedding--sang “_Voila, tu as fait la mesure de mes jours de quelques palmes, et la durée de ma vie est devant toi comme un rien. Certainement l’homme passe comme une ombre._”

“_Comme une ombre ... comme un rien_”--that was the marriage now which had filled and changed his life--all the memory of those days: the summer days when he had toiled on the sea, the winter days when he had toiled on the land--the summer nights when the moonlight had made the bed a house of silver, the winter nights when the lamp had made the kitchen a house of gold--all now were as the shadows ... which sweep out on the winds to the sea and are lost ... shadows moving under the clouds over Baleine Bay ... whose footsteps are not known....

“_Ecoute ma prière, O Seigneur, Car je suis étranger et voyageur devant toi; comme l’ont été tous mes pères._”

As the Le Couteurs belonged to the aristocracy of the island, the first part of the service was held in Church. A thick rain was falling, and it was not till the last prayers that the congregation came out and stood under the dripping ilex trees. No one wore mourning--black was too difficult to procure, and too short lived in the salt sea air. Daniel had a black band round the arm of his jersey--that was all.

“_L’homme né de la femme est de courte durée...._” The dreadful rhythm of the burial hymn rose in incongruous and courtly French, like a Tartar hermit dressed as a troubadour. The sods of Sark earth rattled on the coffin lid--plain English that. Dan shuddered. For the first time he identified Rose with the coffin and its contents--Rose with her hair like flying anthers, her eyes like the pools in the sea gardens of Tintageu ... the shy, unwilling tears forced themselves out of his closed eyes. He had not wept before, and it was punishment to weep like this before all the island, in the sight of all his cousins, of all the Carrés, and Falles and Hamons and De Cartarets--but he could not help it. There was something in this burial service so close to earth that the anguish of earth was upon him. He saw himself as he saw Rose, as flesh, and all flesh as grass.

When the dues of earth had been paid, the Le Couteurs walked back in straggling groups to the Pêche à Agneau. Daniel went with them, for he was to live there now. The cottage at Moie Fano was too lonely for a man with a young child, so he came back to the place where Sark had given him its first unfriendly greeting. As he walked over the brow of Little Sark, and looking down the slope, saw the still sea, with the currents wandering over it like dim, mysterious paths, it seemed as if the sea rather than the land held the presence of his little Rose. Though the sea had not taken her, as it had taken so many in the island, he thought of her now as on the first night he had known her, crouching in the stern of a boat that was putting out into an unknown sea, embarking--this time solitary--on the strange paths of the sea, where their footsteps are not known.

§ 2

With curious ease he adapted himself to the new life, almost as if his year of marriage had not been. He soon became used to the unaccustomed solitudes, indeed, in a strange way he came to value them--the solitude before sleeping and after waking, and of idle daylight when he lounged on the sward above the cliffs. He never went to the south-east coast, to the cliffs above Gorey and Brenière--in tacit covenant with himself he refused to see the cold roof of the cottage at Moie Fano, or Balmée sleeping like a whale on the golden floor of the sea. Instead, he haunted the western coast, which he had hitherto neglected, except as conductor of the English. From the eaves of Pégâne Bay he looked across the purple Autelets towards Saignie and the tail of Sark; over and beyond, among strange rocks like men-o’-war, lay Herm and haunted Jethou ... and beyond Jethou lay the violet shape of Guernsey--and beyond Guernsey.... He knew the country that lay in the blue and purple mists beyond Guernsey, and once more he found himself thinking of it as home.

His brief naturalization was over. At the Pêche à Agneau he was the same stranger he had been before his marriage. Though he now spoke their language and followed their customs, he had all his old curious sense of difference from the Le Couteur clan. He had never felt that difference between himself and Rose. He and Rose--so different in so many ways--had essentially been one. But now that he was back at the Pêche à Agneau he once more felt that half-amused, half-angry bewilderment at the native mind; he knew that however freely he spoke their tongue, however naturally he followed their ways, his mind would never work as their minds.

He had at least two notable outbreaks of Englishry. One was when he insisted that his son should be baptized Thomas Helier instead of by the name of his wife’s father alone.

“He shall be called after my father too.”

“There is not one of us has ever been called Thomas,” said Uncle Philip.

“Well, there’s nothing like making a start. You need a few fresh names.”

“The Hamons will laugh at us,” said Cousin Philip.

“They’ll do that whatever we call him.”

“It is an English name.”

“And what are Ernest and Peter and Philip, I’d like to know?”

“They are Sark names. Thomas is English.”

“Well, damn it all, Thomas has an English father.”

He marched off contemptuously. Really, for sheer ignorance his mother’s family were hard to beat. However, they could not stop him calling his baby anything he liked. He had half a mind not to call him Helier. Then he remembered Rose, and the way she had said “_notre Helier_.” ... There was no help for it--Helier it must be, though it was Thomas too.

His next lapse was more serious. He found that on the tombstone that was to be put up over Rose’s grave, her name was to stand as “_la chère épouse de Daniel Le Couteur_.” For more than two years he had been Le Couteur now, but somehow he could not bear the thought of his Normanhood carved in stone.

“It shall be Daniel Sheather,” he said.

“Then we do not pay for it,” said Uncle Philip--which settled the matter, since Daniel could not afford to pay for it himself.

Sore and angry at his relations’ benighted attitude, jealous of his own rights and honour, he put two pieces of wood together in the shape of a cross, and carved on them his loving memory of Rose Sheather, wife of Daniel Sheather, formerly of the parish of Bullockdean, Sussex. It was his gesture of defiance, and in a moonless midnight he set it up at the head of Rose’s little mound under the ilex trees.

The result was the ferment of the island. It was an insult to have Rose remembered under her English name, an insult barbed by the fact that it was her true one. The whole inscription was in English, too, which was a challenge, and the cross itself was considered Popish.

That night it disappeared, and Daniel could obtain no redress, since he had set it up without authority.

“If you are wise you will let it alone,” said the Vicar--“our people have strong prejudices here.”

So he damped down his wrath and fiery sense of outrage, but he spent more and more of his free time above the cliffs of the western coast, looking out towards Guernsey and the country beyond Guernsey....

Sometimes he thought he would just pack up and go home. Why should he slave to put money into his cousins’ pockets when they didn’t know how to treat him decently? He was deterred partly by the thought of Thomas Helier, who was well looked after by Alice Hamon, and partly by his own pride. He didn’t want these Sarkies to think they could drive him out. He felt now that most of the Le Couteurs would be glad if he went--they had his child, and in him they had got his mother back again. Daniel himself they did not care for--he was useful to them in the boats, but that was not everything, and they could probably do very well without him, as they had done before. His assistance with the visitors could not make up for his alien company in the house, from which they had hoped his marriage had removed him for ever. Once or twice he was made the subject of a practical joke with fish--the sure sign of local unpopularity. Someone put a plaice in his cap when he took it off in church one Sunday, and on another occasion, creeping into bed tired out after a day in the boats, he found a cold mess of dabs awaiting his naked feet.

“Well, if I go,” he said to himself truculently--“I take the kid with me.”