Prose Idylls, New and Old Part 13

'Nor will you for a few miles more. Whatever will grow here (and most things will) they will not, except, at least, hereafter the sea- pine of the Biscay sh.o.r.e. You would know why, if you had ever felt a south-westerly gale here, when the foam-flakes are flying miles inland, and you are fain to cling breathless to bank and bush, if you want to get one look at those black fields of shark's-tooth tide- rocks, champing and churning the great green rollers into snow. Wild folk are these here, gatherers of sh.e.l.l-fish and laver, and merciless to wrecked vessels, which they consider as their own by immemorial usage, or rather right divine. Significant, how an agricultural people is generally as cruel to wrecked seamen, as a fishing one is merciful. I could tell you twenty stories of the baysmen down there to the westward risking themselves like very heroes to save strangers' lives, and beating off the labouring folk who swarmed down for plunder from the inland hills.'

'Knowledge, you see, breeds sympathy and love. But what a merciless coast!'

'Hardly a winter pa.s.ses without a wreck or two. You see there lying about the timbers of more than one tall ship. You see, too, that black rock a-wash far out at sea, apparently a submarine outlier of the north horn of this wide rock-amphitheatre below us. That is the Morte stone, the "Death-rock," as the Normans christened it of old; and it does not belie its name even now. See how, even in this calm, it hurls up its column of spray at every wave; and then conceive being entrapped between it and the cliffs, on some blinding, whirling winter's night, when the land is shrouded thick in clouds, and the roar of the breakers hardly precedes by a minute the crash of your bows against the rocks.'

'I never think, on principle, of things so painful, and yet so irrelievable. Yet why does not your much-admired Trinity House erect a light there?'

'So ask the sailors; for it is indeed one of the gateway-jambs of the Channel, and the deep water and the line of coast tempt all craft to pa.s.s as close to it as possible.'

'Look at that sheet of yellow sand below us now, banked to the inland with sand-hills and sunny downs, and ending abruptly at the foot of that sombre wall of slate-hill, which runs out like a huge pier into the sea some two miles off.'

'That is Woollacombe: but here on our right is a sight worth seeing.

Every gully and creek there among the rocks is yellow, but not with sand. Those are sh.e.l.ls; the sweepings of the ocean bed for miles around, piled there, millions upon millions, yards deep, in every stage of destruction. There they lie grinding to dust; and every gale brings in fresh myriads from the inexhaustible sea-world, as if Death could be never tired of devouring, or G.o.d of making. The brain grows dizzy and tired, as one's feet crunch over the endless variety of their forms.'

'And then one recollects that every one of them has been a living thing--a whole history of birth, and growth, and propagation, and death. Waste it cannot be, or cruelty on the part of the Maker: but why this infinite development of life, apparently only to furnish out of it now and then a cartload of sh.e.l.l-sand to these lazy farmers?

But after all, there is not so much life in all those sh.e.l.ls put together as in one little child: and it may die the hour that it is born! What we call life is but an appearance and a becoming; the true life of existence belongs only to spirits. And whether or not we, or the sea-sh.e.l.l there, are at any given moment helping to make up part of some pretty little pattern in this great kaleidoscope called the material universe, yet, in the spirit all live to Him, and shall do so for ever.'

And thereon he rambled off into a long lecture on 'species-spirits,'

and 'individual-spirits,' and 'personal spirits,' doubtless most important. But I, what between the sun, the luncheon, and the metaphysic, sank into soft slumbers, from which I was only awakened by the carriage stopping, according to our order, on the top of Saunton hill.

We left the fly, and wandered down towards the old gabled court, nestling amid huge walnuts in its southward glen; while before us spread a panorama, half sea, half land, than which, perhaps, our England owns few lovelier.

At our feet was a sea of sand--for the half-mile to the right smooth as a floor, bounded by a broad band of curling waves, which crept slowly sh.o.r.ewards with the advancing tide. Right underneath us the sand was drifted for miles into fantastic hills, which quivered in the heat, the glaring yellow of its lights chequered by delicate pink shadows and sheets of grey-green bent. To the left were rich alluvial marshes, covered with red cattle sleeping in the sun, and laced with creeks and flowery d.y.k.es; and here and there a scarlet line, which gladdened Claude's eye as being a 'bit of positive colour in the foreground,' and mine, because they were draining tiles.

Beyond again, two broad tide-rivers, spotted with white and red-brown sails, gleamed like avenues of silver, past knots of gay dwellings, and tall lighthouses, and church-towers, and wandered each on its own road, till they vanished among the wooded hills. On the eastern horizon the dark range of Exmoor sank gradually into lower and more broken ridges, which rolled away, woodland beyond woodland, till all outlines were lost in purple haze; while, far beyond, the granite peaks of Dartmoor hung like a delicate blue cloud, and enticed the eye away into infinity. From hence, as our eyes swept round the horizon, the broken hills above the river's mouth gradually rose into the table-land of the 'barren coal-measures' some ten miles off,--a long straight wall of cliffs which hounded the broad bay, buried in deepest shadow, except where the opening of some glen revealed far depths of sunlit wood. A faint perpendicular line of white houses, midway along the range, marked our destination; and far to the westward, the land ended sheer and suddenly at the cliffs of Hartland, the 'Promontory of Hercules,' as the old Romans called it, to reappear some ten miles out in the Atlantic, in the blue flat- topped island of Lundy, so exactly similar in height and form to the opposite cape, that it required no scientific imagination to supply the vast gap which the primeval currents had sawn out. There it all lay beneath us like a map; its thousand hues toned down harmoniously into each other by the summer haze, and 'the eye was not filled with seeing,' nor the spirit with the intoxicating sight of infinitely various life and form in perfectest repose.

I was the first to break the silence.

'Claude, well-beloved, will you not sketch a little?'

No answer.

'Not even rhapsodize? call it "lovely, exquisite, grand, majestic"?

There are plenty of such words in worldlings' mouths--not a c.o.c.kney but would burst out with some enthusiastic commonplace at such a sight--surely one or other of them must be appropriate.'

'Silence, profane! and take me away from this. Let us go down, and hide our stupidities among those sand-hills, and so forget the whole.

What use standing here to be maddened by this tantalizing earth- spirit, who shows us such glorious things, and will not tell us what they mean?'

So down we went upon the burrows, among the sands, which hid from us every object but their own chaotic curves and mounds. Above, a hundred skylarks made the air ring with carollings; strange and gaudy plants flecked the waste round us; and insects without number whirred over our heads, or hung poised with their wings outspread on the tall stalks of marram gra.s.s. All at once a cloud hid the sun, and a summer whirlwind, presage of the thunderstorm, swept past us, carrying up with it a column of dry sand, and rattling the dry bents over our heads.

'What a chill, doleful sigh comes from those reeds!' said Claude. 'I can conceive this desert, beneath a driving winter's sky instead of this burning azure, one of the most desolate places on the earth.'

'Ay, desolate enough,' I said, as we walked down beyond the tide- mark, over the vast fields of ribbed and splashy sands, 'when the dead sh.e.l.ls are rolling and crawling up the beach in wreaths before the gale, with a ghastly rattle as of the dry bones in the "Valley of Vision," and when not a flower shows on that sandcliff, which is now one broad bed of yellow, scarlet, and azure.'

'That is the first spot in England,' said Claude, 'except, of course, "the meads of golden king-cups," where I have seen wild flowers give a tone to the colouring of the whole landscape, as they are said to do in the prairies of Texas. And look how flowers and cliff are both glowing in a warm green haze, like that of Cuyp's wonderful sandcliff picture in the Dulwich Gallery,--wonderful, as I think, and true, let some critics revile it as much as they will.'

'Strange, that you should have quoted that picture here; its curious resemblance to this very place first awoke in me, years ago, a living interest in landscape-painting. But look there; even in these grand summer days there is a sight before us sad enough. There are the ribs of some ill-fated ship, a man-of-war too, as the story goes, standing like black fangs, half-buried in the sand. And off what are those two ravens rising, stirring up with their obscene wings a sickly, putrescent odour? A corpse?'

No, it was not a corpse; but the token of many corpses. A fragment of some ship; its gay green paint and half-effaced gilding contrasting mockingly with the long ugly feathered barnacle-sh.e.l.ls, which cl.u.s.tered on it, rotting into slime beneath the sun, and torn and scattered by the greedy beaks of the ravens.

In what tropic tornado, or on what coral-key of the Bahamas, months ago, to judge by those barnacles, had that tall ship gone down? How long had that sc.r.a.p of wreck gone wandering down the Gulf Stream, from Newfoundland into the Mid-Atlantic, and hitherward on its homeless voyage toward the Spitzbergen sh.o.r.e? And who were all those living men who "went down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of heroes," to give no sign until the sea shall render up her dead? And every one of them had a father and mother--a wife, perhaps, and children, waiting for him--at least a whole human life, childhood, boyhood, manhood, in him. All those years of toil and education, to get him so far on his life-voyage; and here is the end thereof!'

'Say rather, the beginning thereof,' Claude answered, stepping into the boat. 'This wreck is but a torn sc.r.a.p of the chrysalis-coc.o.o.n; we may meet the b.u.t.terflies themselves hereafter.'

And now we are on board; and alas! some time before the breeze will be so. Take care of that huge boom, landsman Claude, swaying and sweeping backwards and forwards across the deck, unless you wish to be knocked overboard. Take care, too, of that loose rope's end, unless you wish to have your eyes cut out. Take my advice, lie down here across the deck, as others are doing. Cover yourself with great-coats, like an Irishman, to keep yourself cool, and let us meditate little on this strange thing, and strange place, which holds us now.

Look at those spars, how they creak and groan with every heave of the long gla.s.sy swell. How those sails flap, and thunder, and rage, with useless outcries and struggles--only because they are idle. Let the wind take them, and they will be steady, silent in an instant--their deafening dissonant grumbling exchanged for the soft victorious song of the breeze through the rigging, musical, self-contented, as of bird on bough. So it is through life; there is no true rest but labour. "No true misery," as Carlyle says, "but in that of not being able to work." Some may call it a pretty conceit. I call it a great worldwide law, which reaches from earth to heaven. Whatever the Preacher may have thought it in a moment of despondency, what is it but a blessing that "sun, and wind, and rivers, and ocean," as he says, and "all things, are full of labour--man cannot utter it."

This sea which bears us would rot and poison, did it not sweep in and out here twice a day in swift refreshing current; nay, more, in the very water which laps against our bows troops of negro girls may have hunted the purblind shark in West Indian harbours, beneath glaring white-walled towns, with their rows of green jalousies, and cocoa- nuts, and shaddock groves. For on those white sands there to the left, year by year, are washed up foreign canes, ca.s.sia beans, and tropic seeds; and sometimes, too, the tropic ocean snails, with their fragile sh.e.l.ls of amethystine blue, come floating in mysteriously in fleets from the far west out of the pa.s.sing Gulf Stream, where they have been sailing out their little life, never touching sh.o.r.e or ground, but buoyed each by his cl.u.s.ter of air-bubbles, pumped in at will under the skin of his tiny foot, by some cunning machinery of valves--small creatures truly, but very wonderful to men who have learned to reverence not merely the size of things, but the wisdom of their idea, and raising strange longings and dreams about that submarine ocean-world which stretches, teeming with richer life than this terrestrial one, away, away there westward, down the path of the sun, toward the future centre of the world's destiny.

Wonderful ocean-world! three-fifths of our planet! Can it be true that no rational beings are denizens there? Science is severely silent--having as yet seen no mermaids: our captain there forward is not silent--if he has not seen them, plenty of his friends have. The young man here has been just telling me that it was only last month one followed a West Indiaman right across the Atlantic. "For," says he, "there must be mermaids, and such like. Do you think Heaven would have made all that water there only for the herrings and mackerel?"

I do not know, Tom: but I, too, suspect not; and I do know that honest men's guesses are sometimes found by science to have been prophecies, and that there is no smoke without fire, and few universal legends without their nucleus of fact. After all, those sea-ladies are too lovely a dream to part with in a hurry, at the mere despotic fiat of stern old Dame a.n.a.lysis, divine and reverend as she is. Why, like Keats's Lamia,

'Must all charms flee, At the mere touch of cold Philosophy,'

who will not even condescend to be awe-struck at the new wonders which she herself reveals daily? Perhaps, too, according to the Duke of Wellington's great dictum, that each man must be the best judge in his own profession, sailors may know best whether mermaids exist or not. Besides, was it not here on Croyde Sands abreast of us, this very last summer, that a maiden--by which beautiful old word West- country people still call young girls--was followed up the sh.o.r.e by a mermaid who issued from the breakers, green-haired, golden-combed, and all; and, fleeing home, took to her bed and died, poor thing, of sheer terror in the course of a few days, persisting in her account of the monster? True, the mermaid may have been an overgrown Lundy Island seal, carried out of his usual haunts by spring-tides and a school of fish. Be it so. Lundy and its seals are wonderful enough in all reason to thinking men, as it looms up there out of the Atlantic, with its two great square headlands, not twenty miles from us, in the white summer haze. We will go there some day, and pick up a wild tale or two about it.

But, lo! a black line creeps up the western horizon. Tom, gesticulating, swears that he sees 'a billow break.' True: there they come; the great white horses, that 'champ and chafe, and toss in the spray.' That long-becalmed trawler to seaward fills, and heels over, and begins to tug and leap impatiently at the weight of her heavy trawl. Five minutes more, and the breeze will be down upon us.

The young men whistle openly to woo it; the old father thinks such a superst.i.tion somewhat beneath both his years and his religion, but cannot help pursing up his lips into a sly 'whe-eugh' when he has got well forward out of sight.

Five long minutes; there is a breath of air; a soft distant murmur; the white horses curve their necks, and dive and vanish; and rise again like snowy porpoises, nearer, and nearer, and nearer. Father and sons are struggling with that raving, riotous, drunken squaresail forward; while we haul away upon the main-sheet.

When will it come? It is dying back--sliding past us. 'Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.' No, louder and nearer swells 'the voice of many waters,' 'the countless laugh of ocean,' like the mirth of ten thousand girls, before us, behind us, round us; and the oily swell darkens into crisp velvet-green, till the air strikes us, and heels us over; and leaping, plunging, thrashing our bows into the seas, we spring away close-hauled upon the ever-freshening breeze, while Claude is holding on by ropes and bulwarks, and some, whose sea-legs have not yet forgot their craft, are swinging like a pendulum as they pace the deck, enjoying, as the Norse vikings would have called it, 'the gallop of the flying sea-horse, and the shiver of her tawny wings.'

Exquisite motion! more maddening than the smooth floating stride of the race-horse, or the crash of the thorn-hedges before the stalwart hunter, or the swaying of the fir-boughs in the gale, when we used to climb as schoolboys after the lofty hawk's nest; but not so maddening as the new motion of our age--the rush of the express-train, when the live iron pants and leaps and roars through the long chalk cutting; and white mounds gleam cold a moment against the sky and vanish; and rocks, and gra.s.s, and bushes, fleet by in dim blended lines; and the long hedges revolve like the spokes of a gigantic wheel; and far below, meadows, and streams, and homesteads, with all their lazy old- world life, open for an instant, and then flee away; while awe- struck, silent, choked with the mingled sense of pride and helplessness, we are swept on by that great pulse of England's life- blood, rushing down her iron veins; and dimly out of the future looms the fulfilment of our primaeval mission, to conquer and subdue the earth, and s.p.a.ce too, and time, and all things,--even, hardest of all tasks, yourselves, my cunning brothers ever learning some fresh lesson, except that hardest one of all, that it is the Spirit of G.o.d which giveth you understanding.

Yes, great railroads, and great railroad age, who would exchange you, with all your sins, for any other time? For swiftly as rushes matter, more swiftly rushes mind; more swiftly still rushes the heavenly dawn up the eastern sky. 'The night is far spent, the day is at hand.' 'Blessed is that servant whom his Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching!'

But come, my poor Claude, I see you are too sick for such deep subjects; so let us while away the time by picking the brains of this tall handsome boy at the helm, who is humming a love-song to himself sotto voce, lest it should be overheard by the grey-headed father, who is forward, poring over his Wesleyan hymn-book. He will have something to tell you; he has a soul in him looking out of those wild dark eyes, and delicate aquiline features of his. He is no spade- drudge or bullet-headed Saxon clod: he has in his veins the blood of Danish rovers and pa.s.sionate southern Milesians, who came hither from Teffrobani, the Isle of Summer, as the old Fenic myths inform us.

Come and chat with him. You dare not stir? Perhaps you are in the right. I shall go and fraternize, and bring you reports.

He has been, at all events, 'up the Straits' as the Mediterranean voyage is called here, and seen 'Palermy' and the Sicilians. But, for his imagination, what seems to have struck it most was that it was a 'fine place for Jack, for a man could get mools there for a matter of three-halfpence a-day.'

'And was that all you got out of him?' asked Claude, sickly and sulkily.

'Oh, you must not forget the halo of glory and excitement which in a sailor's eyes surrounds the delights of horseback. But he gave me besides a long glowing account of the catechism which they had there, three-quarters of a mile long.'

'Pope Pius's catechism, I suppose?'

So thought I, at first; but it appeared that all the dead of the city were arranged therein, dried and dressed out in their finest clothes, 'every sect and age,' as Tom said, 'by itself; as natural as life!'

We may hence opine that he means some catacombs or other.