CHAPTER VII.
THE NORTH POINT OF PORTLAND.
He ran until he was breathless, at random, desperate, over the plaininto the snow, into space. His flight warmed him. He needed it. Withoutthe run and the fright he had died.
When his breath failed him he stopped, but he dared not look back. Hefancied that the birds would pursue him, that the dead man had undonehis chain and was perhaps hurrying behind him, and no doubt the gibbetitself was descending the hill, running after the dead man; he feared tosee these things if he turned his head.
When he had somewhat recovered his breath he resumed his flight.
To account for facts does not belong to childhood. He receivedimpressions which were magnified by terror, but he did not link themtogether in his mind, nor form any conclusion on them. He was going on,no matter how or where; he ran in agony and difficulty as one in adream. During the three hours or so since he had been deserted, hisonward progress, still vague, had changed its purpose. At first it was asearch; now it was a flight. He no longer felt hunger nor cold--he feltfear. One instinct had given place to another. To escape was now hiswhole thought--to escape from what? From everything. On all sides lifeseemed to enclose him like a horrible wall. If he could have fled fromall things, he would have done so. But children know nothing of thatbreaking from prison which is called suicide. He was running. He ran onfor an indefinite time; but fear dies with lack of breath.
All at once, as if seized by a sudden accession of energy andintelligence, he stopped. One would have said he was ashamed of runningaway. He drew himself up, stamped his foot, and, with head erect, lookedround. There was no longer hill, nor gibbet, nor flights of crows. Thefog had resumed possession of the horizon. The child pursued his way: henow no longer ran but walked. To say that meeting with a corpse had madea man of him would be to limit the manifold and confused impressionwhich possessed him. There was in his impression much more and muchless. The gibbet, a mighty trouble in the rudiment of comprehension,nascent in his mind, still seemed to him an apparition; but a troubleovercome is strength gained, and he felt himself stronger. Had he beenof an age to probe self, he would have detected within him a thousandother germs of meditation; but the reflection of children is shapeless,and the utmost they feel is the bitter aftertaste of that which, obscureto them, the man later on calls indignation. Let us add that a child hasthe faculty of quickly accepting the conclusion of a sensation; thedistant fading boundaries which amplify painful subjects escape him. Achild is protected by the limit of feebleness against emotions which aretoo complex. He sees the fact, and little else beside. The difficulty ofbeing satisfied by half-ideas does not exist for him. It is not untillater that experience comes, with its brief, to conduct the lawsuit oflife. _Then_ he confronts groups of facts which have crossed his path;the understanding, cultivated and enlarged, draws comparisons; thememories of youth reappear under the passions, like the traces of apalimpsest under the erasure; these memories form the bases of logic,and that which was a vision in the child's brain becomes a syllogism inthe man's. Experience is, however, various, and turns to good or evilaccording to natural disposition. With the good it ripens, with the badit rots.
The child had run quite a quarter of a league, and walked anotherquarter, when suddenly he felt the craving of hunger. A thought whichaltogether eclipsed the hideous apparition on the hill occurred to himforcibly--that he must eat. Happily there is in man a brute which servesto lead him back to reality.
But what to eat, where to eat, how to eat?
He felt his pockets mechanically, well knowing that they were empty.Then he quickened his steps, without knowing whither he was going. Hehastened towards a possible shelter. This faith in an inn is one of theconvictions enrooted by God in man. To believe in a shelter is tobelieve in God.
However, in that plain of snow there was nothing like a roof. The childwent on, and the waste continued bare as far as eye could see. There hadnever been a human habitation on the tableland. It was at the foot ofthe cliff, in holes in the rocks, that, lacking wood to build themselveshuts, had dwelt long ago the aboriginal inhabitants, who had slings forarms, dried cow-dung for firing, for a god the idol Heil standing in aglade at Dorchester, and for trade the fishing of that false gray coralwhich the Gauls called _plin_, and the Greeks _isidis plocamos_.
The child found his way as best he could. Destiny is made up ofcross-roads. An option of path is dangerous. This little being had anearly choice of doubtful chances.
He continued to advance, but although the muscles of his thighs seemedto be of steel, he began to tire. There were no tracks in the plain; orif there were any, the snow had obliterated them. Instinctively heinclined eastwards. Sharp stones had wounded his heels. Had it beendaylight pink stains made by his blood might have been seen in thefootprints he left in the snow.
He recognized nothing. He was crossing the plain of Portland from southto north, and it is probable that the band with which he had come, toavoid meeting any one, had crossed it from east to west; they had mostlikely sailed in some fisherman's or smuggler's boat, from a point onthe coast of Uggescombe, such as St. Catherine's Cape or Swancry, toPortland to find the hooker which awaited them; and they must havelanded in one of the creeks of Weston, and re-embarked in one of thoseof Easton. That direction was intersected by the one the child was nowfollowing. It was impossible for him to recognize the road.
On the plain of Portland there are, here and there, raised strips ofland, abruptly ended by the shore and cut perpendicular to the sea. Thewandering child reached one of these culminating points and stopped onit, hoping that a larger space might reveal further indications. Hetried to see around him. Before him, in place of a horizon, was a vastlivid opacity. He looked at this attentively, and under the fixedness ofhis glance it became less indistinct. At the base of a distant fold ofland towards the east, in the depths of that opaque lividity (a movingand wan sort of precipice, which resembled a cliff of the night), creptand floated some vague black rents, some dim shreds of vapour. The paleopacity was fog, the black shreds were smoke. Where there is smoke thereare men. The child turned his steps in that direction.
He saw some distance off a descent, and at the foot of the descent,among shapeless conformations of rock, blurred by the mist, what seemedto be either a sandbank or a tongue of land, joining probably to theplains of the horizon the tableland he had just crossed. It was evidenthe must pass that way.
He had, in fact, arrived at the Isthmus of Portland, a diluvian alluviumwhich is called Chess Hill.
He began to descend the side of the plateau.
The descent was difficult and rough. It was (with less of ruggedness,however) the reverse of the ascent he had made on leaving the creek.Every ascent is balanced by a decline. After having clambered up hecrawled down.
He leapt from one rock to another at the risk of a sprain, at the riskof falling into the vague depths below. To save himself when he slippedon the rock or on the ice, he caught hold of handfuls of weeds andfurze, thick with thorns, and their points ran into his fingers. Attimes he came on an easier declivity, taking breath as he descended;then came on the precipice again, and each step necessitated anexpedient. In descending precipices, every movement solves a problem.One must be skilful under pain of death. These problems the child solvedwith an instinct which would have made him the admiration of apes andmountebanks. The descent was steep and long. Nevertheless he was comingto the end of it.
Little by little it was drawing nearer the moment when he should land onthe Isthmus, of which from time to time he caught a glimpse. Atintervals, while he bounded or dropped from rock to rock, he pricked uphis ears, his head erect, like a listening deer. He was hearkening to adiffused and faint uproar, far away to the left, like the deep note of aclarion. It was a commotion of winds, preceding that fearful north blastwhich is heard rushing from the pole, like an inroad of trumpets. At thesame time the child felt now and then on his brow, on his eyes, on hischeeks, something which was like the palms of cold han
ds being placed onhis face. These were large frozen flakes, sown at first softly in space,then eddying, and heralding a snowstorm. The child was covered withthem. The snowstorm, which for the last hour had been on the sea, wasbeginning to gain the land. It was slowly invading the plains. It wasentering obliquely, by the north-west, the tableland of Portland.
BOOK THE SECOND.
_THE HOOKER AT SEA_.