Kitabı oku: «Prose Idylls, New and Old», sayfa 13
‘The murmuring surge
That on the unnumbered pebbles idly chafed
Could not be heard so high.’
The only sound beside the rustle of the fern before the startled deer was the soft mysterious treble of the wind as it swept over the face of the cliff beneath us; but the cool air was confined to the hill-tops round beneath, from within a short distance of the shore, the sea was shrouded in soft summer haze. The far Atlantic lay like an ocean of white wool, out of which the Hartland Cliffs and the highest point of Lundy just showed their black peaks. Here and there the western sun caught one white bank of mist after another, and tinged them with glowing gold; while nearer us long silvery zigzag tide-lines, which we could have fancied the tracks of water-fairies, wandered away under the smoky grey-brown shadows of the fog, and seemed to vanish hundreds of miles off into the void of space, so completely was all notion of size or distance destroyed by the soft gradations of the mist. Suddenly, as we stood watching, a breeze from the eastward dived into the basin of the bay, swept the clouds out, packed them together, rolled them over each other, and hurled them into the air miles high in one Cordillera of snowy mountains, sailing slowly out into the Atlantic; and behold, instead of the chaos of mist, the whole amphitheatre of cliffs, with their gay green woods and spots of bright red marl and cold black ironstone, and the gleaming white sands of Braunton, and the hills of Exmoor bathed in sunshine, so near and clear we almost fancied we could see the pink heather-hue upon them; and the bay one vast rainbow, ten miles of flame-colour and purple, emerald and ultramarine, flecked with a thousand spots of flying snow. No one knows what gigantic effects of colour even our temperate zone can show, till they have been in Devonshire and Cornwall; and last, but not least, in Ireland—the Emerald Isle, in truth. No stay-at-home knows the colour of the sea till he has seen the West of England; and no one, either stay-at-home or traveller, I suspect, knows what the colour of a green field can be till he has seen it among the magic smiles and tears of an Irish summer shower in county Down.
Down we wandered from our height through ‘trim walks and alleys green,’ where the arbutus and gumcistus fringed the cliffs, and through the deep glades of the park, towards the delicious little cove which bounds it.—A deep crack in the wooded hills, an old mill half buried in rocks and flowers, a stream tinkling on from one rock-basin to another towards the beach, a sandy lawn gay with sea-side flowers over which wild boys and bare-footed girls were driving their ponies with panniers full of sand, and as they rattled back to the beach for a fresh load, standing upright on the backs of their steeds, with one foot in each pannier, at full trot over rocks and stones where a landsman would find it difficult to walk on his own legs.
Enraptured with the place and people, Claude pulled out his sketch-book and sat down.
‘What extraordinary rocks!’ said he, at length. ‘How different from those Cyclopean blocks and walls along the Exmoor cliffs are these rich purple and olive ironstone layers, with their sharp serrated lines and polished slabs, set up on edge, snapped, bent double, twisted into serpentine curves, every sheet of cliff scored with sharp parallel lines at some fresh fantastic angle!’
Yes; there must have been strange work here when all these strata were being pressed and squeezed together like a ream of wet paper between the rival granite pincers of Dartmoor and Lundy. They must have suffered enough then in a few years to give them a fair right to lie quiet till Doomsday, as they seem likely to do. But it is only old Mother Earth who has fallen asleep hereabouts. Air and sea are just as live as ever. Ay, lovely and calm enough spread beneath us there the broad semicircle of the bay; but to know what it can be, it should be seen as I have seen it, when, in the roaring December morning, we have been galloping along the cliffs, wreck-hunting.—One morning I can remember well, how we watched from the Hartland Cliffs a great barque, which came drifting and rolling in before the western gale, while we followed her up the coast, parsons and sportsmen, farmers and Preventive men, with the Manby’s mortar lumbering behind us in a cart, through stone gaps and track-ways, from headland to headland.—The maddening excitement of expectation as she ran wildly towards the cliffs at our feet, and then sheered off again inexplicably;—her foremast and bowsprit, I recollect, were gone short off by the deck; a few rags of sail fluttered from her main and mizen. But with all straining of eyes and glasses, we could discern no sign of man on board. Well I recollect the mingled disappointment and admiration of the Preventive men, as a fresh set of salvors appeared in view, in the form of a boat’s crew of Clovelly fishermen; how we watched breathlessly the little black speck crawling and struggling up in the teeth of the gale, under the shelter of the land, till, when the ship had rounded a point into smoother water, she seized on her like some tiny spider on a huge unwieldy fly; and then how one still smaller black speck showed aloft on the main-yard, and another—and then the desperate efforts to get the topsail set—and how we saw it tear out of their hands again, and again, and again, and almost fancied we could hear the thunder of its flappings above the roar of the gale, and the mountains of surf which made the rocks ring beneath our feet;—and how we stood silent, shuddering, expecting every moment to see whirled into the sea from the plunging yards one of those same tiny black specks, in each one of which was a living human soul, with sad women praying for him at home! And then how they tried to get her head round to the wind, and disappeared instantly in a cloud of white spray—and let her head fall back again—and jammed it round again, and disappeared again—and at last let her drive helplessly up the bay, while we kept pace with her along the cliffs; and how at last, when she had been mastered and fairly taken in tow, and was within two miles of the pier, and all hearts were merry with the hopes of a prize which would make them rich, perhaps, for years to come—one-third, I suppose, of the whole value of her cargo—how she broke loose from them at the last moment, and rushed frantically in upon those huge rocks below us, leaping great banks of slate at the blow of each breaker, tearing off masses of ironstone which lie there to this day to tell the tale, till she drove up high and dry against the cliff, and lay, like an enormous stranded whale, grinding and crashing herself to pieces against the walls of her adamantine cage. And well I recollect the sad records of the log-book which was left on board the deserted ship; how she had been waterlogged for weeks and weeks, buoyed up by her timber cargo, the crew clinging in the tops, and crawling down, when they dared, for putrid biscuit-dust and drops of water, till the water was washed overboard and gone; and then notice after notice, ‘On this day such an one died,’ ‘On this day such an one was washed away’—the log kept up to the last, even when there was only that to tell, by the stern business-like merchant skipper, whoever he was; and how at last, when there was neither food nor water, the strong man’s heart seemed to have quailed, or perhaps risen, into a prayer, jotted down in the log—‘The Lord have mercy on us!’—and then a blank of several pages, and, scribbled with a famine-shaken hand, ‘Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth;’—and so the log and the ship were left to the rats, which covered the deck when our men boarded her. And well I remember the last act of that tragedy; for a ship has really, as sailors feel, a personality, almost a life and soul of her own; and as long as her timbers hold together, all is not over. You can hardly call her a corpse, though the human beings who inhabited her, and were her soul, may have fled into the far eternities; and so we felt that night, as we came down along the woodland road, with the north-west wind hurling dead branches and showers of crisp oak-leaves about our heads; till suddenly, as we staggered out of the wood, we came upon such a piece of chiaroscuro as would have baffled Correggio, or Rembrandt, himself. Under a wall was a long tent of sails and spars, filled with Preventive men, fishermen, Lloyd’s underwriters, lying about in every variety of strange attitude and costume; while candles, stuck in bayonet-handles in the wall, poured out a wild glare over shaggy faces and glittering weapons, and piles of timber, and rusty iron cable, that glowed red-hot in the light, and then streamed up the glen towards us through the salt misty air in long fans of light, sending fiery bars over the brown transparent oak foliage and the sad beds of withered autumn flowers, and glorifying the wild flakes of foam, as they rushed across the light-stream, into troops of tiny silver angels, that vanished into the night and hid themselves among the woods from the fierce spirit of the storm. And then, just where the glare of the lights and watch-fires was most brilliant, there too the black shadows of the cliff had placed the point of intensest darkness, lightening gradually upwards right and left, between the two great jaws of the glen, into a chaos of grey mist, where the eye could discern no form of sea or cloud, but a perpetual shifting and quivering as if the whole atmosphere was writhing with agony in the clutches of the wind.
The ship was breaking up; and we sat by her like hopeless physicians by a deathbed-side, to watch the last struggle,—and ‘the effects of the deceased.’ I recollect our literally warping ourselves down to the beach, holding on by rocks and posts. There was a saddened awe-struck silence, even upon the gentleman from Lloyd’s with the pen behind his ear. A sudden turn of the clouds let in a wild gleam of moonshine upon the white leaping heads of the breakers, and on the pyramid of the Black-church Rock, which stands in summer in such calm grandeur gazing down on the smiling bay, with the white sand of Braunton and the red cliffs of Portledge shining through its two vast arches; and against a slab of rock on the right, for years afterwards discoloured with her paint, lay the ship, rising slowly on every surge, to drop again with a piteous crash as the wave fell back from the cliff, and dragged the roaring pebbles back with it under the coming wall of foam. You have heard of ships at the last moment crying aloud like living things in agony? I heard it then, as the stumps of her masts rocked and reeled in her, and every plank and joint strained and screamed with the dreadful tension.
A horrible image—a human being shrieking on the rack, rose up before me at those strange semi-human cries, and would not be put away—and I tried to turn, and yet my eyes were riveted on the black mass, which seemed vainly to implore the help of man against the stern ministers of the Omnipotent.
Still she seemed to linger in the death-struggle, and we turned at last away; when, lo! a wave, huger than all before it, rushed up the boulders towards us.—We had just time to save ourselves.—A dull, thunderous groan, as if a mountain had collapsed, rose above the roar of the tempest; and we all turned with an instinctive knowledge of what had happened, just in time to see the huge mass melt away into the boiling white, and vanish for evermore. And then the very raving of the wind seemed hushed with awe; the very breakers plunged more silently towards the shore, with something of a sullen compunction; and as we stood and strained our eyes into the gloom, one black plank after another crawled up out of the darkness upon the head of the coming surge, and threw itself at our feet like the corpse of a drowning man, too spent to struggle more.
There is another subject for a picture for you, my friend Claude: but your gayer fancy will prefer the scene just as you are sketching it now, as still and bright as if this coast had never seen the bay darkened with the grey columns of the waterspouts, stalking across the waves before the northern gale; and the tiny herring-boats fleeing from their nets right for the breakers, hoping more mercy even from those iron walls of rock than from the pitiless howling waste of spray behind them; and that merry beach beside the town covered with shrieking women and old men casting themselves on the pebbles in fruitless agonies of prayer, as corpse after corpse swept up at the feet of wife and child, till in one case alone a single dawn saw upwards of sixty widows and orphans weeping over those who had gone out the night before in the fulness of strength and courage. Hardly an old playmate of mine, but is drowned and gone:—
‘Their graves are scattered far and wide
By mount, by stream, and sea.’
One poor little fellow’s face starts out of the depths of memory as fresh as ever, my especial pet and bird-nesting companion as a boy—a little delicate, precocious, large-brained child, who might have written books some day, if he had been a gentleman’s son: but when his father’s ship was wrecked, they found him, left alone of all the crew, just as he had been lashed into the rigging by loving and dying hands, but cold and stiff, the little soul beaten out of him by the cruel waves before it had time to show what growth there might have been in it. We will talk no more of such things. It is thankless to be sad when all heaven and earth are keeping holiday under the smile of God.
‘And now let us return. At four o’clock to-morrow morning, you know, we are to start for Lundy.’
V.—Lundy
It was four o’clock on an August morning. Our little party had made the sleeping streets ring with jests and greetings, as it collected on the pier. Some dozen young men and women, sons and daughters of the wealthier coasting captains and owners of fishing-smacks, chaperoned by our old landlord, whose delicate and gentlemanlike features and figure were strangely at variance with the history of his life,—daring smuggler, daring man-of-war sailor, and then most daring and successful of coastguard-men. After years of fighting and shipwreck and creeping for kegs of brandy; after having seen, too—sight not to be forgotten—the Walcheren dykes and the Walcheren fever, through weary months of pestilence, he had come back with a little fortune of prize-money to be a village oracle, loving and beloved, as gentle and courteous as if he had never ‘stato al inferno,’ and looked Death in the face. Heaven bless thee, shrewd loyal heart, a gentleman of God’s making, not unrecognized either by many of men’s making.
The other chaperone was a lady of God’s making, too; one who might have been a St. Theresa, had she been born there and then; but as it was, had been fated to become only the Wesleyan abbess of the town, and, like Deborah, ‘a mother in Israel.’ With her tall, slim, queenly figure, massive forehead, glittering eyes, features beaming with tenderness and enthusiasm, and yet overcast with a peculiar expression of self-consciousness and restraint, well known to those who have studied the physiognomies of ‘saints,’ she seemed to want only the dress of some monastic order to make her the ideal of a mediæval abbess, watching with a half-pitying, half-complacent smile, the gambols of a group of innocent young worldlings. I saw Claude gazing at her full of admiration and surprise, which latter was certainly not decreased when, as soon as all had settled themselves comfortably on board, and the cutter was slipping quietly away under the magnificent deer-park cliffs, the Lady Abbess, pulling out her Wesleyan hymn-book, gave out the Morning Hymn, apparently as a matter of course.
With hardly a demur one sweet voice after another arose; then a man gained courage, and chimed in with a full harmonious bass; then a rich sad alto made itself heard, as it wandered in and out between the voices of the men and women; and at last a wild mellow tenor, which we discovered after much searching to proceed from the most unlikely-looking lips of an old dry, weather-bleared, mummified chrysalis of a man, who stood aft, steering with his legs, and showing no sign of life except when he slowly and solemnly filled his nose with snuff.
‘What strange people have you brought me among?’ asked Claude. ‘I have been wondering ever since I came here at the splendid faces and figures of men, women, and children, which popped out upon me from every door in that human rabbit-burrow above. I have been in raptures at the gracefulness, the courtesy, the intelligence of almost everyone I meet; and now, to crown all, everyone among them seems to be a musician.’
‘Really you are not far wrong, and you will find them as remarkable morally as they are physically and intellectually. The simplicity and purity of the women here put one more in mind of the valleys of the Tyrol than of an English village.’
‘And in proportion to their purity, I suppose,’ said Claude, ‘is their freedom and affectionateness?’
‘Exactly. It would do your “naturalist” heart good, Claude, to see a young fellow just lauded from a foreign voyage rolling up the street which we have just descended, and availing himself of the immemorial right belonging to such cases of kissing and being kissed by every woman whom he meets, young and old. You will find yourself here among those who are too simple-minded, and too full of self-respect, to be either servile or uncourteous.’
‘I have found out already that Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, in such company as this, are infinitely pleasanter, as well as cheaper, than the aristocratic seclusion of a cutter hired for our own behoof.’
‘True; and now you will not go home and, as most tourists do, say that you know a place, without knowing the people who live in it—as if the human inhabitants of a range of scenery were not among its integral and most important parts—’
‘What! are Copley Fielding’s South Down landscapes incomplete without a half-starved seven shillings a-week labourer in the foreground?’
‘Honestly, are they not a text without a sermon? a premise without a conclusion? Is it not partly because the land is down, and not well-tilled arable, that the labourer is what he is? And yet, perhaps, the very absence of human beings in his vast sheets of landscape, when one considers that they are scraps of great, overcrowded, scientific England in the nineteenth century, is in itself the bitterest of satires. But, hush! there is another hymn commencing—not to be the last by many.’
* * * * *
We had landed, and laughed, and scrambled, eaten and drunk, seen all the sights of Lundy, and heard all the traditions. Are they not written in Mr. Bamfield’s Ilfracombe Guide? Why has not some one already written a fire-and-brimstone romance about them? ‘Moresco Castle; or, the Pirate Knight of the Atlantic Wave.’ What a title! Or again—‘The Seal Fiend; or, the Nemesis of the Scuttled West Indiaman.’—If I had paper and lubricité enough, and that delightful carelessness of any moral or purpose, except that of fine writing and money-making, which possesses some modern scribblers—I could tales unfold—But neither pirate legends, nor tales of cheated insurance offices, nor wrecks and murders, will make us understand Lundy—what it is ‘considered in its idea,’ as the new argot is. It may be defined as a lighthouse-bearing island. The whole three miles of granite table-land, seals, sea-birds, and human beings, are mere accidents and appendages—the pedestal and the ornaments of that great white tower in the centre, whose sleepless fiery eye blinks all night long over the night-mists of the Atlantic. If, as a wise man has said, the days will come when our degenerate posterity will fall down and worship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs, the relics of their ancestors’ science, grown to them mythic and impossible, as the Easter-islanders bow before the colossal statues left by a nobler and extinct race, then surely there will be pilgrimages to Lundy, and prayers to that white granite tower, with its unglazed lantern and rusting machinery, to light itself up again, and help poor human beings! Really, my dear brothers, I am not in jest: you seem but too likely now-a-days to arrive at some such catastrophe—sentimental philosophy for the ‘enlightened’ few, and fetish-worship (of which nominally Christian forms are as possible as heathen ones) for the masses.—At that you may only too probably arrive—unless you repent, and ‘get back your souls.’
* * * * *
We had shot along the cliffs a red-legged chough or two, and one of the real black English rat, exterminated on the mainland by the grey Hanoverian newcomer; and weary with sight-seeing and scrambling, we sat down to meditate on a slab of granite, which hung three hundred feet in air above the western main.
‘This is even more strange and new to me,’ said Claude, at length, ‘than anything I have yet seen in this lovely West. I now appreciate Ruskin’s advice to oil-painters to go and study the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, instead of lingering about the muddy seas and tame cliffs of the Channel and the German Ocean.’
‘How clear and brilliant,’ said I, ‘everything shows through this Atlantic atmosphere. The intensity of colouring may vie with that of the shores of the Mediterranean. The very raininess of the climate, by condensing the moisture into an ever-changing phantasmagoria of clouds, leaves the clear air and sunshine, when we do get a glimpse of them, all the more pure and transparent.’
‘The distinctive feature of the scene is, in my eyes, the daring juxtaposition of large simple masses of positive colour. There are none of the misty enamelled tones of Lynmouth, or the luscious richness of Clovelly. The forms are so simple and severe, that they would be absolutely meagre, were it not for the rich colouring with which Nature has so lovingly made up for the absence of all softness, all picturesque outline. One does not regret or even feel the want of trees here, while the eye ranges down from that dappled cloud-world above, over that sheet of purple heather, those dells bedded with dark green fern, of a depth and richness of hue which I never saw before—over those bright grey granite rocks, spangled with black glittering mica and golden lichens, to rest at last on that sea below, which streams past the island in a swift roaring torrent of tide.’
‘Sea, Claude? say, ocean. This is real Atlantic blue here beneath us. No more Severn mud, no more grass-green bay-water, but real ocean sapphire—dark, deep, intense, Homeric purple, it spreads away, away, there before us, without a break or islet, to the shores of America. You are sitting on one of the last points of Europe; and therefore all things round you are stern and strange with a barbaric pomp, such as befits the boundary of a world.’
‘Ay, the very form of the cliffs shows them to be the breakwaters of a continent. No more fantastic curves and bands of slate, such as harmonize so well with the fairyland which we left this morning; the cliffs, with their horizontal rows of cubical blocks, seem built up by Cyclopean hands.’
‘Yet how symbolic is the difference between them and that equally Cyclopic masonry of the Exmoor coast. There every fracture is fresh, sharp-edged, crystalline; the worn-out useless hills are dropping to pieces with their own weight. Here each cube is delicately rounded off at the edges, every crack worn out into a sinuous furrow, like the scars of an everlasting warfare with the winds and waves.’
‘Does it not raise strange longings in you,’ said Claude, ‘to gaze out yonder over the infinite calm, and then to remember that beyond it lies America!—the new world; the future world; the great Titan-baby, who will be teeming with new Athens and Londons, with new Bacons and Shakspeares, Newtons and Goethes, when this old worn-out island will be—what? Oh! when I look out here, like a bird from its cage, a captive from his dungeon, and remember what lies behind me, to what I must return to-morrow—the over-peopled Babylon of misery and misrule, puffery and covetousness—and there before me great countries untilled, uncivilized, unchristianized, crying aloud for man to come and be man indeed, and replenish the earth and subdue it. “Oh that I had wings as a dove, then would I flee away and be at rest!” Here, lead me away; my body is growing as dizzy as my mind. I feel coming over me that horrible longing of which I have heard, to leap out into empty space. How the blank air whispers, “Be free!” How the broad sea smiles, and calls, with its ten thousand waves, “Be free!”—As I live, if you do not take me away I shall throw myself over the cliff.’
I did take him away, for I knew the sensation and its danger well. It has nothing to do with physical giddiness. Those who are cliff-bred, and who never were giddy for an instant in their lives, have often felt themselves impelled to leap from masts, and tree-tops, and cliffs; and nothing but the most violent effort of will could break the fascination. I cannot but think, by the bye, that many a puzzling suicide might be traced to this same emotion acting on a weak and morbid brain.
We returned to the little landing cove. The red-sailed cutter lay sleeping below us—‘floating double, ship and shadow.’ Shoals of innumerable mackerel broke up, making acres of water foam and sparkle round their silvery sides, with a soft roar (call it ‘a bull’ if you like, it is the only expression for that mysterious sound), while among them the black head of a huge seal was slowly and silently appearing and vanishing, as he got his dinner, in a quiet business-like way, among the unhappy wanderers.
We put off in the boat, and just halfway from the cutter Claude gave a start, and the women a scream, as the enormous brute quietly raised his head and shoulders out of the water ten yards off, with a fish kicking in his mouth, and the water running off his nose, to take a deliberate stare at us, after the fashion of seals, whose ruling passion is curiosity. The sound of a musical instrument, the sight of a man bathing—anything, in short, which their small wits cannot explain at first sight, is enough to make them forget all their cunning, and thrust their heads suicidally into any danger; and even so it fared with the ‘black man,’ as the girls, in their first terror, declared him to be. Some fellow’s gun went off—of itself I should like to believe—but the whole charge disappeared into his sleek round visage, knocking the mackerel from between his teeth; and he turned over, a seven-foot lump of lifeless blubber.
‘Wretch!’ cried Claude, as we dragged the seal into the boat, where he lay with his head and arms hanging helplessly over the bows, like a sea-sick alderman on board a Margate steamer. ‘What excuse can he give for such a piece of wanton cruelty?’
‘I assure you his skin and oil are very valuable.’
‘Pish!—Was he thinking of skin and oil when he pulled the trigger? or merely obeying the fleshly lust of destructiveness—the puppet of two bumps on the back of his head?’
‘My dear Claude, man is the microcosm; and as the highest animal, the ideal type of the mammalia, he, like all true types, comprises in himself the attributes of all lower species. Therefore he must have a tiger-vein in him, my dear Claude, as well as a beaver-vein and a spider-vein; and no more shame to him. You are a butterfly; that good fellow a beast of prey; both may have their own work to do in this age just as they had in the old ones; and if you do not like that explanation, all I can say is, I can sympathise with you and with him too. Homo sum—humani nihil a me alienum puto. Trim the boat, lads, or the seal will swamp us, and, like Samson, slay more in his death than ever he slew in his life.’
We slipped on homeward. The cliff-wall of Lundy stood out blacker and blacker every moment against the gay western sky; greens, greys, and purples, dyeing together into one deep rich monotone, for which our narrow colour-vocabulary has no word; and threw a long cold shadow towards us across the golden sea; suddenly above its dark ridge a wild wreath of low rack caught the rays of the setting sun, and flamed up like a volcano towards the dun and purple canopy of upper clouds. Before us the blue sea and the blue land-line were fading into mournful grey, on which one huge West Indiaman blazed out, orange and scarlet, her crowded canvas all a-flame from the truck to the water’s edge.—A few moments and she, too, had vanished into the grey twilight, and a chill night-wind crisped the sea. It was a relief to hear the Evening Hymn rise rich and full from one voice, and then another and another, till the men chimed in one by one, and the whole cutter, from stem to stern, breathed up its melody into the silent night.
But the hymn soon flagged—there was more mirth on board than could vent itself in old Charles Wesley’s words; and one began to hum a song tune, and then another, with a side glance at the expression of the Lady Abbess’s face, till at last, when a fair wife took courage, and burst out with full pipe into ‘The sea, the sea,’ the ice was fairly broken; and among jests and laughter one merry harmless song after another rang out, many of them, to Claude’s surprise, fashionable London ones, which sounded strangely enough out there on the wild western sea. At last—‘Claude, friend,’ I whispered, ‘you must sing your share too—and mine also, for that matter.’
‘What shall I sing?’
‘Anything you will, from the sublime to the ridiculous. They will understand and appreciate it as well as yourself. Recollect, you are not among bullet-headed South Saxon clods, but among wits as keen and imaginations as rich as those of any Scotch shepherd or Manchester operative.’
