Rachell, limping a little, went back to the kitchen and her kettles. Presently, Michelle, Peronelle and Jacqueline, sobered and dressed, came down and helped her. Colette, they said, when the gun went off had arisen and said her prayers but was now back in bed again singing a quite dreadful comic song.
“Very low and vulgar,” said Peronelle, “goodness knows where she learnt it, but it’s cheering up Toinette—Toinette’s been crying.”
Rachell and her daughters, having put on all the kettles there were, got breakfast ready and then sat down and waited. The girls got up now and then and moved restlessly to the courtyard and back, but Rachell sat perfectly immovable upon the “jonquière.”
“Can’t we go out to the cliff and do something?” asked Peronelle impatiently, but Rachell shook her head.
“Women are only in the way,” she said, and her voice grated harshly. Peronelle, sitting down beside her, knew she was suffering and longed to hug her, but did not dare, she was so aloof and stern. Peronelle did wish that when people were suffering they wouldn’t build stone walls up round themselves so that the people outside couldn’t get at them. . . . It was so dreadful for the people outside. . . . It was horrible waiting like this. Simply horrible. She did hope father would be all right. Father, the darling, was so dreadfully silly. If he could step backwards off a boat into the sea he always did. . . . It was dreadful to love anyone as much as mother loved father. Quite dreadful. She began to pray inside her for André’s safety, and then realized suddenly, with a start, that she had forgotten all about Uncle Ranulph.
“Mother!” she said out loud, “did anyone say good-bye to Uncle Ranulph?—I mean Uncle Jean?”
“Ranulph? Jean?” said Rachell confusedly, and then she looked at Peronelle in horror. “No!” Her mind had been so full of André that she had forgotten all about him. She had not even given him a glance as he went off to face danger, perhaps death, on that awful sea. Ranulph—no, Jean—who had saved Bon Repos for her. And she had thought not so long ago that she loved him a little. Well—that just showed. Beside her love for André, the father of her children, it was just the flicker of a farthing dip to the flame of a bonfire. And yet, she supposed, if she had been a society woman with nothing better to do she might have wrecked André’s home for that flicker. But all the same her heart reproached her. She felt wretched and sick with foreboding. “No,” she said again, “not one of us said a word to him.”
Peronelle suddenly began to sob—a most unusual proceeding with her. “Poor Uncle Ranulph—I mean Jean—how horribly lonely for him. What if he dies thinking we don’t love him?”
At the mere suggestion Jacqueline began to sob too and Michelle, as always when moved, began to scold. “Ridiculous nonsense! Idiots! Talking as though father and Uncle Ranulph were going to be drowned when they’ve only gone to see what’s happened.”
“That’s all. Just to see what’s happened,” said Rachell cheerfully, but she did not smile and still sat there as though she were turned to stone.
“Mother, what did you mean by saying, ‘Not yet Colin, not yet?’ ” asked Jacqueline tactlessly, through sobs. “I heard you from upstairs.”
Rachell swallowed and moistened her lips. “Colin wants to be a sailor. I meant that when he is a man I shall have to let the sea take him, but not yet. He is still only a little boy.”
“But I thought you weren’t going to let him be a sailor?” pursued Jacqueline, “you’ve always said not—Peronelle, what are you kicking me for?”
“I shall let Colin be a sailor if he wants to be,” said Rachell tonelessly, and she seemed to herself to be saying the words to Ranulph. . . . Could he hear?
Silence fell again. Colin’s roars had subsided, and there was no sound but the distant crash and drag of the waves. Outside the wet, sullen dawn spread over the garden.
VIII
Ranulph, as he ran up the lane and along the cliff with André, found himself confused in thought and feeling yet vividly aware of passing sensation. It was still raining and the sting of it against his face, and the wet cliff grass drenching him as he ran made him feel as though he were already plunging through solid water. . . . Water. . . . Water. . . . He would go back to the water. . . . He remembered that moment of hideous pain when Rachell’s eyes passed over him without seeing him. He no longer felt the pain, but he remembered it as a man remembers a signpost pointing him along his road. Feeling as he did Bon Repos was no place for him. . . . A swirling and rushing of wings was round them. . . . La Baie des Mouettes. . . . He remembered Peronelle lying on the turf reading Browning, and his thoughts raced confusedly back to her and to the other children and their mother. . . . He’d saved their home for them.
“Nearly there,” panted André.
Ranulph turned for a moment and looked at him and André, meeting the look, smiled. They were locked once more into a moment of sudden and intense union. . . . The one-time prisoner and the man who had set him free. . . . What greater bond could there be between two men, thought Ranulph. . . . Then the moment passed and he was only conscious again of the rain and soaking grass and his own laboured breathing.
The little path they were following swerved away from the sea and downhill, taking the curve of Breton Bay. A high hedge of blackberry bushes and sloe trees hid the bay from them but they could hear shouts from below. They plunged downwards, pushing their way through the bushes and grass, and slipping and slithering on the wet ledges of rock that thrust themselves up through the ground. The path reached the level of the bay and ended abruptly in a tumbled mass of seaweed-covered boulders. A landsman would have slipped and broken his leg at the first attempt at crossing those treacherous rocks, but André and Ranulph, Islanders both, leapt and clung like cats until they reached the firm sand of the bay.
A handful of fishermen, with Jacquemin, Hélier and Guilbert among them, were already dragging down their boats to the water’s edge, but they were few for the task in front of them and hailed the appearance of two more pair of hands with a shout. Down on this lovely little curving sandy bay there was hardly a stir of wind and the waves, with the tide going out, were negotiable, but outside the bay a huge sea was still running and Ranulph, looking at it, realized with exhilaration that they were all quite mad. . . . The madness ran in his veins like fire and he could have shouted with delight. He remembered nothing now but the excitement of the moment.
“Where?” he demanded of Guilbert as he took his place beside him and heaved at a boat with the rest.
“Les Barbées,” said Guilbert briefly.
Ranulph looked out to sea, to the left of the bay. Fountains of spray now hid, now revealed, the rocks at the western edge of Les Barbées. . . . Hideous rocks. . . . Wedged between them he could dimly see a ship.
“Looks like a yacht,” he muttered, “who on earth?”
“English,” said Guilbert, and spat contemptuously.
“How do you know?” demanded Ranulph.
“Only the English sail yachts round the Island in spring weather,” said Guilbert savagely, and spat again.
“Fools!” said Ranulph, but was grateful to them. Not for anything would he have missed this glorious exhilaration that was lifting him upon a peak of ecstasy. There was no more speech for they were off and every ounce of strength was needed for the oars. Even in the comparative calm of the bay it was hard work, and Ranulph wondered for a moment what it would be like when they were out beyond the sheltering cliffs. He soon knew. It was like being pitched suddenly into a mill race. The raging wilderness of water seized and caught them, and it took every ounce of strength in the bodies of the men manning the boats to keep their craft head-on to the wreck. Progress seemed impossible. “Hold her! Hold her!” Ranulph heard himself gasping, but his voice was lost in the rush of the waves and the screaming of the gulls. Then, as though by superhuman strength, they held and steadied, and began slowly, slowly, inch by inch, to creep forward.
The current was against them and it seemed to Ranulph that with each straining effort unseen forces were pushing the boat back and back. He felt as though one moment’s relaxation would send them hurtling backwards over an abyss. The spray was dashing over them, blinding and choking them but, thank God, the wind had dropped. To Ranulph, out of practice as he was, the effort of rowing was colossal. He wondered how André in another boat was faring, but remembered that André, though the weaker man of the two, was in better practice. Soon all sense of exhilaration was lost in the agony of his physical distress. A ton weight seemed fastened on the end of his oar, and with the effort of pulling it through his lungs seemed bursting and every muscle in his body dragged out to torture point. The sound of the blood drumming in his ears seemed to drown even the sound of the waves. He could see nothing. A crimson curtain seemed let down in front of his eyes.
“All right going back,” a voice seemed saying, “the current with us then. Just got to get there.” Get there! But how to get there? How to endure long enough? The drumming in his ears turned to a roaring and his body seemed tearing into little pieces. It seemed to go on for a hundred years. At every stroke it seemed as though the breaking point were reached, and yet at every stroke his will thrust it a little further on—a stroke further on. . . . A shout tore across his consciousness. . . . They were there. . . . Guilbert, the best seaman in the Islands, who knew the surface of the sea as a palmist reads an outstretched hand, had brought them round to the far side of the wreck, out of the current. Ranulph, conscious that the others could hold her now, fell forward over his oar and the red curtain in front of his eyes turned black. A hand dragging at his shoulder roused him again. He looked up and saw the yacht looming up through the spray. . . . There were those fools to be got off her. . . . Only a handful, thank God. . . . He could see them up there, a few blue clad sailors, a woman with a child, and a man clothed in what had once been white ducks. Obviously the imbecile owner. Guilbert was on his feet and throwing a rope. Ranulph tried to get up, but found he could not. Damn! His usefulness was over. Well, he’d helped to get them there. He could see André on his feet grappling with a rope in one of the other boats. André had weathered the gruelling passage better than he—obviously more strength in the man than he had thought.
The rescue of the yacht’s crew was arduous. The waves were still boiling so wildly round the wreck that it was impossible to come near to her. The Island men could only fling ropes and shout to the others to fasten them round them and jump. But except for the white-duck lunatic, his wife and child, the men on the yacht were sailors, and somehow the miracle—and the awestruck Island swore later in the day that it was a miracle—was accomplished. A joyous yell from Jacquemin, rising triumphantly above the sound of the waves curling hungrily round those terrible rocks, announced that one more feat of Island daring was accomplished on the sea. Ranulph, strength rushing into him from that shout, raised his head and saw a little drenched half-unconscious morsel of humanity lying across his feet. It was the child from the wreck. For one awful moment, so astray were his wits, he thought it was Colette. . . . Then her father—and Ranulph was not too exhausted to notice that he was obviously English and a fool—picked her up, and at Guilbert’s shout they bent to their oars again. Ranulph, gripping his oar with hands that seemed now numb and nerveless, wondered if he would get back alive. . . . Well, he knew his time to die had come—he’d known it yesterday. The return journey, with the current in their favour, should be easy, but he had not now one drop left of the strength that had brought him out. Yet he went on rowing, pushing the moment of collapse always one stroke further off, and still one stroke further. He heard again the surge of the blood in his ears and then clear above it Guilbert’s voice shouting “In the bay!” And suddenly, at that triumphant cry, he came to the end of his surface strength and tapped that supply of hidden power that only the using up of the last drop of surface energy brings into play. Life seemed to flow back again. The ghastly hammering and bursting of his heart and lungs lessened. He drove his oar through the water with a stronger stroke and the crimson curtain lifted from before his eyes. He looked up and saw, with the clearness and yet remoteness of a vision, a vivid magical picture of the Island. In a moment of time he seemed to see it all, down to the tiniest detail. The rain had stopped and patches of fragile blue were showing through rents in the clouds that were now thinning into blown wisps of grey gauze. There was a hint of coming sunlight and the little bay, with the waves flinging white flowery half-moons of creaming foam across its smooth sand, shone brilliantly gold and silver against the sombre cliffs. Up above the purple and indigo of caves and rocky caverns the young spring bracken and hawthorn trees frothed vividly green between sea and sky, and above them again blue spirals of smoke from the pink and white fishermen’s cottages streamed away landwards on the wind. For a moment it seemed to Ranulph that the Island, a living presence, slipped between him and this actual scene and showed him all her glories in a moment of time. He saw Bon Repos and the doves dreaming under a hot summer sun, the cobbled streets of St. Pierre and the waters of the harbour lilac under a sunset sky, the round green tunnels of the water-lanes, the market with its fruit and vegetables and curds, the old Church of St. Raphael standing four square to the winds, and the pink rocks and tamarisk trees of L’Autel. The Island! An Undine spirit of earth and water, a sweet, magical, tempestuous thing that had given him life and would rob him of it. Even as his queer moment of vision passed there was a warning shout from Guilbert.
They were entering the bay and a little careless from exhaustion and victory they had come too close to the rocks that stretched out into the sea from the cliffs at its northern side. A great wave, pouring over the rocks from the heavy sea beyond, hit them just as the calmer waters of the bay had made them relax their vigilance. The boat heeled over, a cold sheet of water drenched and blinded them, and the white-duck Englishman, either from the natural imbecility of his disposition or from shock, let go of the child. She was overboard in an instant and carried swiftly away from the boat by the wash of the wave. Her little wet yellow head seemed to Ranulph to be Colette’s. Before the boat had righted itself he was out of it and after her, so swiftly that with half a dozen strokes he had reached and caught her. But the act was the last of Ranulph’s life. Even as he grabbed her the dreaded cramp seized him. Keeping her head above water, and drifting with every moment farther from the boat, he fought it and watched with anguish the figure of Guilbert, who had plunged after him and was swimming towards him. Would he be in time? He kept his eyes on Guilbert’s arm, curving over his head, cleaving the water with a steady, unhurried stroke, curving over his head again, and with his last effort of will pushed the moment of collapse one stroke further off, and still one stroke further off. . . . Guilbert reached him. . . . “I’m all right,” he said, “take the child.”
One more moment of sight was his. He could see the sailors struggling to right the swamped boat and get her out of the danger zone, he could see Guilbert, swimming strongly, taking the child towards them, he could see the yellow bay with that flowery crescent of foam thrown across it, and then he deliberately abandoned effort and sank like a stone.
IX
It was some five hours later that André, rested and fed, and with dry clothes on, stood alone at the kitchen window looking out across the courtyard. He and Rachell were alone in the house with Ranulph’s dead body. When Jacquemin had come running to Bon Repos with the news of the disaster Rachell had sent all the children out for a walk. She would not let even Peronelle stay and help her though Peronelle, indignant, begged and prayed to stay. They had never seen death. A terrible thing it would be, she said to André afterwards, if Ranulph, who had saved Bon Repos for the children, should, carried in dead, give them their first moment of real horror. . . . He’d never forgive her. . . . So she packed them out of the way.
André at the window looked out on a vivid blue-green world. Every vestige of the storm had disappeared. Th
ere was nothing left of it now but a glorious freshness in the air and the scent of bruised flowers and wet earth. The sky cupped over the scented, shimmering world was blue and cloudless, the shadows in the courtyard and the smoke curling up from the kitchen chimney were blue, and through the garden door could be seen the green sheaves of the hyacinth leaves and the blue scented spikes of the flowers. But André didn’t see it. His eyes, wide and a little haunted, saw nothing but the sands of Breton Bay with his brother’s dead body lying on them and the crescent of waves, so rhythmically and callously flung, fretting at the dead man’s feet. . . . Those hateful little waves. . . . They were like the paws of an animal that has killed its victim and then toys with it.
It had all happened so quickly that even now it seemed to André that he looked out upon a dream whose memory would pass from him as the sun rose higher. In their exhaustion, the confusion of the child’s rescue and the righting of the water-logged boat, it had been a few minutes before any of them realized that Ranulph had disappeared. It had been André and Jacquemin in the second boat who had found him at last, and got him ashore—but too late. For nearly an hour, in Sophie’s little cottage above the bay, they had tried to bring back life, and failed. A wreck at sea had brought Ranulph to the Island and a wreck had taken him away again. André sent Jacquemin on to warn Rachell, but he himself waited to walk behind the hurdle on which Guilbert and Hélier carried Ranulph back to Bon Repos. As they climbed slowly with their burden up the steep path from the bay to the cliff top, and then along past La Baie des Mouettes and down the lane to the farmhouse, the day passed more and more jubilantly from storm to sunshine. The birds were singing madly in the bushes and the pattern of the gulls’ wings, woven across blue sky and torn grey cloud, and white-flecked jade green sea, was one not of fear but of joy. The world had passed from death to life, and the passage through it of the dead body seemed somehow incongruous; something from a dead past lingering too long into the present. In spite of his grief and exhaustion André, walking through the growing glory of the morning, felt suddenly that for him and for Bon Repos this was a day of birth. The years of struggle and fear and suppression were over and a new life was beginning. . . . His eyes went back to the body carried in front of him. . . . A new epoch rooted, as always, in death. “Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die.” The truth of that rule of life came flashing through the bright morning and pierced André like a sword.