The Toilers of the Sea (3 page)

VI

THE ROCKS

In the archipelago of the Channel the coasts are almost everywhere wild. These islands have charming interiors but a stern and uninviting approach. Since the Channel is a kind of Mediterranean, the waves are short and violent and the tide has a lapping movement. Hence the bizarre battering to which the cliffs are subjected and the deep erosion of the coasts. Skirting these coasts, you pass through a series of mirages. At every turn the rocks try to deceive you. Where do these illusions come from? From the granite. It is very strange. You see huge stone toads, which have no doubt come out of the water to breathe. Giant nuns hasten on their way, heading for the horizon; the petrified folds of their veils have the form of the fleeing wind. Kings with Plutonian crowns meditate on massive thrones, ever under attack by the breakers. Nameless creatures buried in the rock stretch out their arms, showing the fingers of their open hands. All this is the formless coast. Draw nearer, and there is nothing there. Stone can sometimes disappear like this. Here there is a fortress, there a crudely shaped temple, elsewhere a chaos of dilapidated houses and dismantled walls: all the ruins of a deserted city. But there is no city there, no temple, no fortress—only the cliffs. As you draw closer or move farther away, as you drift off or turn back, the coast falls to pieces. No kaleidoscope is quicker to disintegrate. The view breaks apart and re-forms; perspective plays its tricks. This block of rock is a tripod; then it is a lion; then it is an angel and unfolds its wings; then it is a seated figure reading a book. Nothing changes form so quickly as clouds, except perhaps rocks.

These forms call up the idea of grandeur, not of beauty. Far from it: they are sometimes unhealthy and hideous. The rocks have swellings and tumors and cysts and bruises and growths and warts. Mountains are the humps on the earth's surface. Madame de Staël, hearing Chateaubriand,
⁶
who had rather high shoulders, speaking slightingly of the Alps, called it the “jealousy of the hunchback.” The grand lines and great majesties of nature, the level of the seas, the silhouette of the mountains, the somber shades of the forests, the blue of the sky are affected by some huge and mysterious dislocation mingled with their harmony. Beauty has its lines; deformity has, too. There is a smile; there is also a distorted grin. Disintegration has the same effects on rocks as on clouds.
This
one floats and decomposes;
that
one is stable and incoherent. The creation retains something of the anguish of chaos. Splendors bear scars. An element of ugliness, which may sometimes be dazzling, mingles with the most magnificent things, seeming to protest against order. There is something of a grimace in the cloud. There is a celestial grotesquerie. All lines are broken in waves, in foliage and in rocks, in which strange parodies can be glimpsed. In them shapelessness predominates. No single outline is correct. Grand? Yes. Pure? No. Examine the clouds: all kinds of faces can be seen in them, all kinds of resemblances, all kinds of figures; but you will look in vain for a Greek profile. You will find Caliban, not Venus; you will never see the Parthenon. But sometimes, at nightfall, a great table of shadow, resting on jambs of cloud and surrounded by blocks of mist, will figure forth in the livid crepuscular sky an immense and monstrous cromlech.

VII

LAND AND SEA MINGLED

The farmhouses of Guernsey are monumental. Some of them have, lining the road, a length of wall like a stage set with a carriage gate and a pedestrians' gate side by side. In the jambs and arches time has carved out deep crevices in which tortula moss nestles, ripening its spores, and where it is not unusual to find bats sleeping. The hamlets under the trees are decrepit but full of life. The cottages seem as old as cathedrals. In the wall of a stone hovel on the Les Hubies road is a recess containing the stump of a small column and the date 1405. Another, near Balmoral, displays on its façade, like the peasant houses of Ernani and Astigarraga,
⁷
a coat of arms carved in the stone. At every step you will come across farmhouses displaying windows with lozenged panes, staircase turrets, and archivolts in the style of the Renaissance. Not a doorway but has its granite mounting-block. Other little houses have once been boats; the hull of a boat, turned upside down and perched on posts and cross-beams, forms a roof. A vessel with its keel uppermost is a church; with the vaulting downward it is a ship; the recipient of prayer, reversed, tames the sea. In the arid parishes of western Guernsey the communal well with its little dome of white stonework set amid the untilled land has almost the appearance of an Arab marabout.
⁸
A perforated beam, with a stone for pivot, closes the entrance to a field enclosed by hedges; there are certain marks by which you can distinguish the hurdles on which hobgoblins and auxcriniers
⁹
ride at night.

All over the slopes of the ravines are ferns, bindweed, wild roses, red-berried holly, hawthorn, pink thorn, danewort, privet, and the long pleated thongs known as Henry IV's collarettes. Amid all this vegetation there multiplies and prospers a species of willow herb that produces nuts much favored by donkeys—a preference expressed by the botanists, with great elegance and decency, in the term Onagriaceae. Everywhere there are thickets, arbors, all kinds of wild plants, expanses of green in which a winged world twitters and warbles, closely watched by a creeping world; blackbirds, linnets, robins, jays; the goldfinch of the Ardennes hurries on its way at full speed; flocks of starlings maneuver in spirals; elsewhere are greenfinches, goldfinches, the Picardy jackdaw, the red-footed crow. Here and there a grass snake.

Little waterfalls, their water carried in channels of worm-eaten wood from which water escapes in drops, drive mills that can be heard turning under the boughs. In some farmyards there can still be seen a cider press and the old circle hollowed out of stone in which the apples were crushed. The cattle drink from troughs like sarcophagi: some Celtic king may have rotted in this granite casket in which the Juno-eyed cow is now drinking. Tree-creepers and wagtails, with friendly familiarity, come down and steal the hens' grain. Along the shore everything is tawny. The wind wears down the grass that is burned up by the sun. Some of the churches are caparisoned in ivy, which reaches up to the belfry. Here and there in the empty heathland an outcrop of rock is crowned by a cottage. Boats, laid up on the beach for lack of a harbor, are buttressed by large boulders. The sails seen on the horizon are ocher or salmon yellow rather than white. On the side exposed to rain and wind the trees have a fur of lichen; and the very stones seem to take their precautions, covering themselves with a skin of dense and solid moss. There are murmurings, whisperings, the rustling of branches; seabirds fly swiftly past, some of them with a silver fish in their beak; there are an abundance of butterflies, varying in color according to season, and all kinds of tumults deep in the sounding rocks. Grazing horses gallop across the untilled land; they roll on the ground, leap about, stop short, offer their manes to be tossed by the wind and watch the waves as they roll in, one after the other, perpetually.

In May the old buildings in the countryside and on the coast are covered in wallflowers, and in June in lilacs. In the dunes the old batteries are crumbling. The countryfolk benefit from the disuse of the cannon, and the fishermen's nets are hung out to dry on the embrasures. Within the four walls of the dismantled blockhouse a wandering donkey or a tethered goat browses on thrift and blue thistles. Half-naked children play, laughing; on the roadways can be seen the patterns they have drawn for their games of hopscotch. In the evening the setting sun, radiantly horizontal, lights up the return of the heifers in the hollow ways as they linger to crop the hedges on either side, causing the dog to bark. The wild capes on the west coast sink down into the sea in an undulating line; on them are a few shivering tamarinds. As twilight falls the cyclopean walls, with the last daylight passing between their stones, form long crests of black lacework along the summit of the hills. The sound of the wind, heard in these solitudes, gives a feeling of extraordinary remoteness.

VIII

ST. PETER PORT

St. Peter Port, capital of Guernsey, was originally built of houses of carved wood brought from Saint-Malo. A handsome stone house of the sixteenth century still stands in the Grand'Rue. St. Peter Port is a free port. The town is built on the slopes of a charming huddle of valleys and hills clustered around the Old Harbor as if they had been thrust there by the hand of a giant. The ravines form the streets, with flights of steps providing shortcuts. The excellent Anglo-Norman carriages gallop up and down the steep streets. In the main square the market women, sitting out in the open, are exposed to the winter showers, while a few paces away is a bronze statue of a prince.
¹⁰
A foot of water falls on Jersey every year, ten and a half inches on Guernsey. The fish merchants are better off than the sellers of farm produce: the fish market, a large covered hall, has marble tables with magnificent displays of fish, for the fishermen of Guernsey frequently bring in miraculous drafts. There is no public library, but there is a Mechanics' Institution and Literary Society. There is a college.

The town builds as many churches as it can, and when they are built they must be approved by the Lords of the Council. It is not unusual to see carts passing through the streets of the town carrying arched wooden windows presented by some carpenter to some church. There is a courthouse. The judges, in purple robes, give their judgments in open court. Last century butchers could not sell a pound of beef or mutton until the magistrates had chosen their meat.

There are many private chapels in protest against the official churches. Go into one of these chapels, and you will hear a countryman expounding to others the doctrines of Nestorianism (that is, the difference between the Mother of Christ and the Mother of God) or teaching that the Father is power, while the Son is only a limited power—which is very much like the heresy of Abelard. There are large numbers of Irish Catholics, who are not noted for their patience, so that theological discussions are sometimes punctuated by orthodox fisticuffs.

Sunday is, by law, a day of stagnation. Everything is permitted, except drinking a glass of beer, on Sunday. If you felt thirsty on the “blessed Sabbath day” you would scandalize worthy Amos Chick, who is licensed to sell ale and cider in the High Street. The law on Sunday observance permits singing, but without drinking. Except when praying people do not say “My God”: they say instead “My Good”—the word
good
replacing God. A young French assistant teacher in a boarding school who picked up her scissors with the exclamation “Ah mon Dieu!” was dismissed for “swearing.” People here are more biblical than evangelical.

There is a theater. The entrance is a doorway in a deserted street giving access to a corridor. The interior is rather in the style of architecture adopted for haylofts. Satan lives here in very modest style and is poorly lodged. Opposite the theater is the prison, another lodging of the same individual. On the hill to the north, in Castle Carey (a solecism: the right form is Carey Castle), there is a valuable collection of pictures, mainly Spanish. If it were publicly owned it would be a museum. In some aristocratic houses there are curious specimens of the Dutch painted tiles with which Tsar Peter's chimneypiece at Saardam is faced and of those magnificent tile paintings known in Portugal as
azulejos,
products of the high art of tin-glazed earthenware that has recently been revived, finer than before, thanks to initiators like Dr. Lasalle, manufactories like the one at Premières,
¹¹
and pottery painters like Deck and Devers.

The Chaussée d'Antin of Jersey is Rouge-Bouillon; the Faubourg Saint-Germain
¹²
of Guernsey is Les Rohais. Here there are many handsome streets, finely laid out and intersected by gardens. St. Peter Port has as many trees as roofs, more nests than houses, and more sounds of birds than of carriages. Les Rohais has the grand patrician aspect of the fashionable quarters of London and is white and clean. But cross a ravine, pass over Mill Street, continue through a narrow gap between two tall buildings, and climb a narrow and interminable flight of steps with tortuous bends and loose paving, and you find yourself in a bedouin town: hovels, potholes, streets with broken paving, burned-out gable ends, ruined houses, empty rooms without doors or windows in which grass grows, beams traversing the street, piles of rubble blocking the way, here and there a shack that is still inhabited, naked small boys, pale-faced women: you might think yourself in Zaatcha.
¹³
In St. Peter Port a watchmaker is a montrier; an auctioneer is an
encanteur;
a housepainter is a
picturier;
a building worker is a
plâtrier;
a foot doctor is a
chiropodiste;
a cook is a
couque;
to knock at the door is to
taper à l'hû.
Mrs. Pescott is
agente de douanes et
fournisseure de navires
(customs agent and ship's chandler). A barber told his customers of the death of Wellington in these words:
Le com
mandant des soudards
¹⁴
est mort. Women go from door to door selling trifling wares bought in bazaars and markets: this is called
chiner.
The chineuses, who are very poor, are lucky if they earn a few doubles
¹⁵
in a day. A remark by one
chineuse
is significant: “You know, I've done well: I've set aside seven sous this week.” A friend of mine, encountering another
chineuse,
gave her five francs, whereupon she said: “Thank you, sir: now I'll be able to buy wholesale.”

In June the yachts begin to arrive, and the bay is filled with pleasure craft, most of them schooner-rigged, with some steam yachts. Some yachts may well cost their owner a hundred thousand francs a month. Cricket prospers, while boxing declines. Temperance societies are active; and, it must be said, they perform a useful function. They hold processions, carrying banners in an almost masonic display that softens the hearts even of the innkeepers. Barmaids can be heard saying, as they serve customers overfond of drink: “Have a glass, not a bottle.”

The population is healthy, handsome, and well-behaved. The town prison is very often empty. At Christmas the jailer, if he has prisoners, gives them a small family banquet. The local architecture has its peculiarities, of which it is tenacious. The town of St. Peter Port is faithful to the queen, to the Bible, and to sash windows. In summer the men bathe naked. Swimming trunks are an indecency: they attract attention. Mothers excel in dressing their children: it is pretty to see the variety of toilettes they so skillfully devise for the little ones. Children go about alone in the streets, showing a sweet and touching confidence. Small children take the babies. In the matter of fashion Guernsey copies Paris, though not always: sometimes vivid reds or harsh blues reveal the English alliance. Nevertheless we have heard a local dress-maker, advising a fashionable Guernsey lady, say: “I think a ladylike and genteel color is best.”

Guernsey is renowned for the work of its ship's carpenters: the Careening Hard is lined with ships under repair. Vessels are hauled ashore to the sound of a flute. The flute player, say the master carpenters, is a better worker than the workmen. St. Peter Port has a Pollet
¹⁶
like Dieppe and a Strand like London. A respectable gentleman would not be seen in the street with a book or a portfolio under his arm, but he will go to the market on Saturday carrying a basket. A visit by a royal personage provided a pretext for erecting a tower.
¹⁷
The dead are buried within the town. College Street runs past two cemeteries, one on either side. Built into a wall is a tomb of 1610. L'Hyvreuse is a little square planted with grass and trees that can stand comparison with the most beautiful gardens in Paris's Champs-Élysées, with the additional bonus of the sea. In the windows of the elegant shopping mall known as the Arcades can be seen advertisements such as this: “On sale here, the perfume recommended by the 6th Artillery Regiment.”

The town is traversed in every direction by drays laden with barrels of beer and sacks of coal. A stroller about town can read a variety of other notices: “A fine bull to be hired out here, as in the past.”—“Highest prices given for rags, lead, glass and bones.”—“For sale, new kidney potatoes of the finest quality.”—“For sale, pea stakes, some tons of oats for chaff, a complete set of English-style doors for a drawing room and a fat pig. Mon Plaisir farm, St. James's.”—“For sale, good hay, recently threshed, yellow carrots by the hundred, and a good French syringe. Apply to the Moulin de l'Échelle, St. Andrew's.”—“It is forbidden to dress fish or deposit refuse.”—“For sale, a she-ass in milk.” And so on, and so on.