The Toilers of the Sea (10 page)

One year around Michaelmas he was observed to stop in a field at Les Huriaux, on the highway to Les Videclins. He gave a whistle, and a moment afterward a crow flew down, followed a moment later by a magpie. The fact was attested by a worthy local citizen, who was later appointed douzenier in the douzaine,
⁷⁹
which had power to make a new survey and register of tenants of the royal fief.

In Le Hamel, in the vingtaine
⁸⁰
of L'Épine, there were some old women who were positive that one morning, at daybreak, they had heard swallows calling Gilliatt's name.

Add to all this that he was ill-natured. One day a poor man was beating a donkey that wouldn't move. The man gave it a few kicks in the belly, and the donkey fell to the ground. Gilliatt ran to pick it up, but it was dead. Thereupon he cuffed the man.

On another occasion, seeing a boy coming down from a tree with a nestful of newly hatched tree-creepers, naked and almost featherless, he took the brood from the boy and carried his malevolence so far as to return the fledglings to the tree. When passersby took him to task, he merely pointed to the father and mother birds, which were crying plaintively above the tree as they returned to their brood.

Gilliatt had a soft spot for birds—and this is, of course, a distinctive mark of a magician. The local children delight in robbing the nests of seagulls on the cliffs. They bring home quantities of blue, yellow, and green eggs, with which they make chimney ornaments. Also very pretty are screens decorated with seabirds' eggs. Since the cliffs are steep, children sometimes slip and fall to their death. There was no limit to Gilliatt's ingenuity in ill-doing. At the risk of his own life he would climb up the sheer cliff faces and hang up bundles of hay, old hats, and other objects to act as scarecrows and prevent the birds from nesting and the children from venturing there.

All this explains why Gilliatt was disliked in the neighborhood— and surely with ample cause.

V

MORE SUSPICIOUS FACTS

Public opinion was divided about Gilliatt.

He was generally believed to be a
marcou,
but some went farther and thought he was a
cambion.
A cambion is a son begotten on a woman by the Devil.

When a woman has borne a man seven male children in a row, the seventh is a marcou. But the sequence must not be spoiled by a daughter.

The marcou has the imprint of a natural fleur-de-lys on some part of his body, and so is able to cure scrofula, just like the king of France. There are marcous in all parts of France, particularly in the Orléanais. Every village in the Gâtinais has its marcou. All that is necessary to cure sufferers is for the marcou to breathe on their sores or let them touch his fleur-de-lys. The cure is particularly successful on the night of Good Friday. Some ten years ago the marcou of Ormes in the Gâtinais, known as the
beau marcou,
who was consulted by people from all over the Beauce region, was a cooper named Foulon, who kept a horse and carriage. To put a stop to his miracles it was found necessary to call in the gendarmes. He had a fleur-de-lys under his left breast. Other marcous have it in different places.

There are marcous on Jersey, Alderney, and Guernsey—no doubt because of France's rights over the duchy of Normandy. Otherwise what is the point of the fleur-de-lys?

There are people afflicted with scrofula in the Channel Islands; and this makes it necessary to have marcous.

Some people who had been present one day when Gilliatt was bathing in the sea thought they saw the fleur-de-lys. When asked about it he merely laughed; for he laughed sometimes like other men. Since then no one had ever seen him bathing: he now bathed only in solitary and dangerous places. Probably by moonlight—which it will be agreed is in itself suspicious. Those who persisted in believing that he was a cambion—that is, a son of the Devil—were clearly wrong. They ought to have known that cambions are rarely met with except in Germany. But fifty years ago ignorance was widespread among the inhabitants of the Vale and St. Sampson.

To believe that anyone on Guernsey is a son of the Devil is evidently absurd.

The very fact that Gilliatt caused disquiet led people to consult him. The countryfolk came to him, apprehensively, to talk about their diseases. This apprehension itself contained an element of faith in his skill; for in the country the more a doctor is suspected of possessing uncanny powers, the more certain is the cure. Gilliatt had his own medicines, inherited from the dead woman, and dispensed them to anyone who asked for them, never taking any money. He cured whitlows by applications of herbs, and the liquor in one of his vials relieved a fever—the chemist in St. Sampson (who in France would be called a pharmacist) thought that it was probably a decoction of cinchona. The less well disposed readily conceded that he was a good devil enough so far as the treatment of his patients with ordinary remedies was concerned. But he would not admit to being a marcou. When someone suffering from scrofula asked if he could touch his fleur-de-lys, he merely slammed the door in his face. He obstinately refused to perform any miracles, which is a ridiculous attitude for a warlock to take. You are not obliged to be one; but if you are you should carry out the duties of the position.

There were one or two exceptions to this universal dislike. Sieur Landoys of Clos-Landès was clerk and registrar of the parish of St. Peter Port, custodian of the records, and keeper of the register of births, marriages, and deaths. He was vain of his descent from Pierre Landais, treasurer of Brittany, who was hanged in 1485. One day Sieur Landoys swam too far out to sea and was in danger of drowning. Gilliatt dived into the water, almost drowning, too, and saved him. From that day Landoys never spoke ill of Gilliatt. To those who expressed surprise at this he replied: “How can I feel dislike for a man who has never done me any harm and has rendered me such a service?” He even came to form a kind of friendship with Gilliatt. The parish clerk and registrar was a man without prejudices. He did not believe in witches and warlocks. He laughed at those who were afraid of ghosts. He had a boat in which he went fishing in his leisure hours and had never observed anything out of the ordinary, except that once, on a moonlit night, he had seen a woman clad in white leaping out of the sea; and even of this he was not absolutely sure. Moutonne Gahy, the witch of Torteval, had given him a small bag, to be worn under his cravat, which gave protection from spirits. He made fun of the bag and had no idea what it contained; but he did wear it, feeling safer when he had it hanging around his neck.

A few courageous characters, following in the footsteps of Sieur Landoys, ventured to find a number of extenuating circumstances in Gilliatt, a few signs of good qualities such as his sobriety and his abstinence from gin and tobacco, and sometimes went so far as to pay him this generous tribute: “He doesn't drink or smoke or chew tobacco or take snuff.”

But sobriety only counts as a quality if it is accompanied by other qualities.

There was a general aversion to Gilliatt. Nevertheless, as a marcou, he was in a position to be of service. One Good Friday, at midnight— the day and time commonly chosen for cures of this kind—all the scrofulous people on the island flocked to the Bû de la Rue, either as the result of inspiration or by agreement among themselves, and, with clasped hands and pitiable sores, begged Gilliatt to cure them. He refused; and they saw this as another manifestation of his malevolence.

VI

THE PAUNCH

Such a man was Gilliatt.

Girls considered him ugly.

He was not ugly. He might even have been called handsome. His profile had something of the air of a barbarian of antiquity. In repose, he resembled the figure of a Dacian on Trajan's Column. His ears were small and delicate, without lobes, and excellently shaped for hearing. Between his eyes he had that proud vertical furrow that betokens boldness and perseverance. The corners of his mouth turned down, giving it an expression of bitterness. His forehead formed a serene and noble curve. His clear eyes had a firm glance, in spite of the flickering of the eyelids brought on in fishermen by the reverberation of the waves. He had a charming boyish laugh. No ivory could be of a purer white than his teeth. But tanning by the sun had given him almost the coloring of a Negro. You cannot brave the ocean, storms, and night with impunity: at the age of thirty he looked like a man of forty-five. He wore the somber mask of the wind and the sea.

People called him Gilliatt the Cunning One.
⁸¹

There is an Indian fable that tells how Brahma asked Strength, “Who is stronger than you?” The reply was “Cunning.” And there is a Chinese proverb: “What could the lion not do if he were a monkey?” Gilliatt was neither a lion nor a monkey; but his actions gave some warrant to the Chinese proverb and the Hindu fable. He was of ordinary height and ordinary strength, but was able, thanks to his inventive and powerful dexterity, to lift weights that might have taxed a giant and perform feats that would have done credit to an athlete. There was something of the gymnast about him; and he used both his right and his left hand with equal skill.

He did not go shooting, but he fished—sparing the birds but not the fish. So much the worse for these dumb creatures! He was an excellent swimmer.

Solitude produces men of talent or idiots. Gilliatt had something of both. Sometimes his face had the air of astonishment we have already mentioned, and then he might have been taken for a savage. At other times he had a look of profound thought. Ancient Chaldea had men of this kind; at certain times the blankness of the shepherd became transparent, revealing the magus.

After all, he was only a poor man who could read and write. Probably he was on the borderline between the dreamer and the thinker. The thinker wills what happens, the dreamer accepts it. Solitude adds a quality to simple people, and gives them a certain complication. They become imbued, unconsciously, with a sacred awe. The shadowy area in which Gilliatt's mind constantly dwelt was composed, in almost equal parts, of two elements, both of them obscure but very different from each other: within him ignorance and weakness; without, mystery and immensity.

By dint of climbing about on the rocks, scaling the cliffs, coming and going in the archipelago in all weathers, sailing in any kind of craft that came to hand, venturing by day or by night through the most difficult channels, he had become—without seeking any personal advantage, but merely following his fancy and pleasure—a seaman of extraordinary skill.

He was a born pilot. The true pilot is the sailor who navigates the bed of the ocean more than its surface. The waves are an external problem, continually complicated by the submarine configuration of the sea over which the boat is traveling. To see Gilliatt sailing over the shallows and amid the reefs of the Norman archipelago, you might well think that he carried in his head a map of the sea bottom. He was familiar with it all and would venture anywhere.

He knew the various buoys better than the cormorants that perched on them. The imperceptible differences between the four buoys at Les Creux, Alligande, Les Trémies, and La Sardrette were perfectly obvious and clear to him, even in foggy weather. He could distinguish at once the oval-topped post at Anfré, the three-spiked marker at La Rousse, the white ball at La Corbette, and the black ball at Longue-Pierre, and he was in no danger of confusing the cross at Goubeau with the sword set in the ground at La Platte, or the hammer-shaped marker at Les Barbées with the swallowtail marker at Le Moulinet.

His rare skill in seamanship was strikingly demonstrated one day when one of those naval tournaments known as regattas was held on Guernsey. This was a competition to navigate a four-sailed boat single-handed from St. Sampson to the island of Herm, a league away, and then back from Herm to St. Sampson. Any fisherman can work a four-sailed boat single-handed, and this does not seem a great challenge; but there were two things that made it more difficult. In the first place, the boat was one of those old broad and heavy boats of Rotterdam build, wide-bellied, that the seamen of the last century called Dutch paunches. This ancient style of Dutch craft, flat and big-bellied, which dispense with a keel and instead have wings to starboard and port that are let down on one or other side, depending on the wind, can occasionally still be met with at sea. The second difficulty was that on the return journey from Herm the boat was to have a heavy ballast of stones. Empty on the outward journey, it was to return fully laden. The prize in this contest was the boat itself, which was to be presented to the winner. It had served as a pilot boat, and the pilot who had rigged it and worked it for twenty years was the stoutest seaman in the Channel. After his death no one had been found capable of managing it, and it had been decided to make it the prize for the winner of a regatta. Although not decked, it had good seagoing qualities and would be a tempting prize for a skillful seaman. Its mast was well forward, increasing the pulling power of its sails. Another advantage of this was that the mast did not get in the way of the cargo.

It was a strongly built vessel—heavy, but roomy, and taking the open sea well: altogether, a good, serviceable craft. There was eager competition for the boat: the challenge was a tough one, but the prize was handsome. Seven or eight fishermen, the most vigorous on the island, entered the contest. One after the other they set out in the boat, but not one of them reached Herm. The last one to try was noted for having rowed a boat across the dangerous narrows between Sark and Brecqhou in heavy seas. Streaming with sweat, he brought the paunch back, saying: “It can't be done.” Then Gilliatt got into the boat, took hold of the oar and then the mainsheet, and put to sea. He did not bitt the sheet, which would have been unwise, but neither did he let it go, which kept him in control of the sail, and, leaving the boom to move with the wind without drifting, he took hold of the tiller with his left hand. In three-quarters of an hour he was at Herm. Three hours later, although a strong south wind had sprung up and was blowing across the seaway, he brought the boat back to St. Sampson with its load of stones. As an extra, in a show of bravado, he had added to his cargo the little bronze cannon that the people of Herm fire off every year on the fifth of November in celebration of the death of Guy Fawkes.

Guy Fawkes, it may be noted in passing, died 260 years ago: long-continued rejoicings indeed!

And so Gilliatt, overloaded and overtaxed as he was, and in spite of the fact that he had the Guy Fawkes cannon on board and the south wind in his sails, brought the paunch back—you could almost say carried it back—to St. Sampson.

Seeing this, Mess Lethierry
⁸²
exclaimed: “There's a bold seaman for you!” And he held out his hand to Gilliatt.

We shall have more to say about Mess Lethierry.

The paunch was awarded to Gilliatt.

This exploit did nothing to injure his reputation for cunning.

There were some who declared that there was nothing surprising about his feat, seeing that Gilliatt had hidden a branch from a wild medlar tree in the boat. But this could not be proved.

From that day on Gilliatt had no other boat than the paunch. In this heavy craft he went on his fishing expeditions. He moored it in the excellent little anchorage that he had all to himself under the very walls of the house at the Bû de la Rue. At nightfall he would throw his nets over his shoulder, walk down through his garden, step over the drystone wall, and jump down from one rock to another and into the paunch. Then off to the open sea.

He brought home good catches of fish, but it was said that the medlar branch was always fixed to the boat. No one had ever seen the branch, but everyone believed in its existence.

When he had more fish than he needed he did not sell them but gave them away.

The poor people of the parish took his fish, but still held it against him, because of the medlar branch. It wasn't right: you shouldn't cheat the sea.

He was a fisherman, but he was not only that. By instinct, or by way of relaxation, he had learned three or four other trades. He was a carpenter, a craftsman in iron, a wheelwright, a boat caulker, and even a bit of an engineer. No one could mend a broken wheel better than he. He made all his fishing equipment in his own fashion. In a corner of the Bû de la Rue he had a small forge and an anvil; and, finding that the paunch had only one anchor, he had made another all by himself. The anchor was first-rate. The ring had the necessary strength; and Gilliatt, without ever having been taught how to do it, had found the exact dimensions of the stock required to prevent the anchor from tripping.

He had patiently replaced all the nails in the planking of the boat by rivets, making it impossible for rust to make holes.

In this way he had greatly improved the seagoing quality of the boat, and was now able to go off occasionally and spend a month or two on some lonely islet like Chousey or the Casquets. People would say: “So Gilliatt is away again”; but no one was upset by his absence.