CHAPTER VI. THE GATHERING STORM
The weather cleared up again the next day, and for a fortnight it was lovely. In this region we saw less of the sadness of the dying year than in our own parish, for there being so few trees in the vicinity of the ocean, the autumn had nowhere to hang out her mourning flags. But there, indeed, so mild is the air, and so equable the temperature all the winter through, compared with the inland counties, that the bitterness of the season is almost unknown. This, however, is no guarantee against furious storms of wind and rain.
Not long after the occurrence last recorded, Turner paid us another visit. I confess I was a little surprised at his being able to get away so soon again; for of all men a country surgeon can least easily find time for a holiday; but he had managed it, and I had no doubt, from what I knew of him, had made thorough provision for his cure in his absence.
He brought us good news from home. Everything was going on well. Weir was working as hard as usual; and everybody agreed that I could not have got a man to take my place better.
He said he found Connie much improved; and, from my own observations, I was sure he was right. She was now able to turn a good way from one side to the other, and finding her health so steady besides, Turner encouraged her in making gentle and frequent use of her strength, impressing it upon her, however, that everything depended on avoiding everything like a jerk or twist of any sort. I was with them when he said this. She looked up at him with a happy smile.
“I will do all I can, Mr. Turner,” she said, “to get out of people’s way as soon as possible.”
Perhaps she saw something in our faces that made her add—
“I know you don’t mind the bother I am; but I do. I want to help, and not be helped—more than other people—as soon as possible. I will therefore be as gentle as mamma and as brave as papa, and see if we don’t get well, Mr. Turner. I mean to have a ride on old Spry next summer.—I do,” she added, nodding her pretty head up from the pillow, when she saw the glance the doctor and I exchanged. “Look here,” she went on, poking the eider-down quilt up with her foot.
“Magnificent!” said Turner; “but mind, you must do nothing out of bravado. That won’t do at all.”
“I have done,” said Connie, putting on a face of mock submission.
That day we carried her out for a few minutes, but hardly laid her down, for we were afraid of the damp from the earth. A few feet nearer or farther from the soil will make a difference. It was the last time for many weeks. Anyone interested in my Connie need not be alarmed: it was only because of the weather, not because of her health.
One day I was walking home from a visit I had been paying to Mrs. Stokes. She was much better, in a fair way to recover indeed, and her mental health was improved as well. Her manner to me was certainly very different, and the tone of her voice, when she spoke to her husband especially, was changed: a certain roughness in it was much modified, and I had good hopes that she had begun to climb up instead of sliding down the hill of difficulty, as she had been doing hitherto.
It was a cold and gusty afternoon. The sky eastward and overhead was tolerably clear when I set out from home; but when I left the cottage to return, I could see that some change was at hand. Shaggy vapours of light gray were blowing rapidly across the sky from the west. A wind was blowing fiercely up there, although the gusts down below came from the east. The clouds it swept along with it were formless, with loose fringes—disreputable, troubled, hasty clouds they were, looking like mischief. They reminded me of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” in which he compares the “loose clouds” to hair, and calls them “the locks of the approaching storm.” Away to the west, a great thick curtain of fog, of a luminous yellow, covered all the sea-horizon, extending north and south as far as the eye could reach. It looked ominous. A surly secret seemed to lie in its bosom. Now and then I could discern the dim ghost of a vessel through it, as tacking for north or south it came near enough to the edge of the fog to show itself for a few moments, ere it retreated again into its bosom. There was exhaustion, it seemed to me, in the air, notwithstanding the coolness of the wind, and I was glad when I found myself comfortably seated by the drawing-room fire, and saw Wynnie bestirring herself to make the tea.
“It looks stormy, I think, Wynnie,” I said.
Her eye lightened, as she looked out to sea from the window.
“You seem to like the idea of it,” I added.
“You told me I was like you, papa; and you look as if you liked the idea of it too.”
“Per se, certainly, a storm is pleasant to me. I should not like a world without storms any more than I should like that Frenchman’s idea of the perfection of the earth, when all was to be smooth as a trim-shaven lawn, rocks and mountains banished, and the sea breaking on the shore only in wavelets of ginger-beer or lemonade, I forget which. But the older you grow, the more sides of a thing will present themselves to your contemplation. The storm may be grand and exciting in itself, but you cannot help thinking of the people that are in it. Think for a moment of the multitude of vessels, great and small, which are gathered within the skirts of that angry vapour out there. I fear the toils of the storm are around them. Look at the barometer in the hall, my dear, and tell me what it says.”
She went and returned.
“It was not very low, papa—only at rain; but the moment I touched it, the hand dropped an inch.”
“Yes, I thought so. All things look stormy. It may not be very bad here, however.”
“That doesn’t make much difference though, does it, papa?”
“No further than that being creatures in time and space, we must think of things from our own standpoint.”
“But I remember very well how, when we were children, you would not let nurse teach us Dr. Watts’s hymns for children, because you said they tended to encourage selfishness.”
“Yes; I remember it very well. Some of them make the contrast between the misery of others and our own comforts so immediately the apparent—mind, I only say apparent—ground of thankfulness, that they are not fit for teaching. I do think that if you could put Dr. Watts to the question, he would abjure any such intention, saying that only he meant to heighten the sense of our obligation. But it does tend to selfishness and, what is worse, self-righteousness, and is very dangerous therefore. What right have I to thank God that I am not as other men are in anything? I have to thank God for the good things he has given to me; but how dare I suppose that he is not doing the same for other people in proportion to their capacity? I don’t like to appear to condemn Dr. Watts’s hymns. Certainly he has written the very worst hymns I know; but he has likewise written the best—for public worship, I mean.”
“Well, but, papa, I have heard you say that any simple feeling that comes of itself cannot be wrong in itself. If I feel a delight in the idea of a storm, I cannot help it coming.”
“I never said you could, my dear. I only said that as we get older, other things we did not feel at first come to show themselves more to us, and impress us more.”
Thus my child and I went on, like two pendulums crossing each other in their swing, trying to reach the same dead beat of mutual intelligence.
“But,” said Wynnie, “you say everybody is in God’s hands as well as we.”
“Yes, surely, my dear; as much out in yon stormy haze as here beside the fire.”
“Then we ought not to be miserable about them, even if there comes a storm, ought we?”
“No, surely. And, besides, I think if we could help any of them, the very persons that enjoyed the storm the most would be the busiest to rescue them from it. At least, I fancy so. But isn’t the tea ready?”
“Yes, papa. I’ll just go and tell mamma.”
When she returned with her mother, and the children had joined us, Wynnie resumed the talk.
“I know what I am going to say is absurd, papa, and yet I don’t see my way out of it—logically, I suppose you would call it. What is the use of taking any trouble about them if they are in God’s hands? Why should we try to take them out of God’s hands?”
“Ah, Wynnie! at least you do not seek to hide your bad logic, or whatever you call it. Take them out of God’s hands! If you could do that, it would be perdition indeed. God’s hands is the only safe place in the universe; and the universe is in his hands. Are we not in God’s hands on the shore because we say they are in his hands who go down to the sea in ships? If we draw them on shore, surely they are not out of God’s hands.”
“I see—I see. But God could save them without us.”
“Yes; but what would become of us then? God is so good to us, that we must work our little salvation in the earth with him. Just as a father lets his little child help him a little, that the child may learn to be and to do, so God puts it in our hearts to save this life to our fellows, because we would instinctively save it to ourselves, if we could. He requires us to do our best.”
“But God may not mean to save them.”
“He may mean them to be drowned—we do not know. But we know that we must try our little salvation, for it will never interfere with God’s great and good and perfect will. Ours will be foiled if he sees that best.”
“But people always say, when anyone escapes unhurt from an accident, ‘by the mercy of God.’ They don’t say it is by the mercy of God when he is drowned.”
“But people cannot be expected, ought not, to say what they do not feel. Their own first sensation of deliverance from impending death would break out in a ‘thank God,’ and therefore they say it is God’s mercy when another is saved. If they go farther, and refuse to consider it God’s mercy when a man is drowned, that is just the sin of the world—the want of faith. But the man who creeps out of the drowning, choking billows into the glory of the new heavens and the new earth—do you think his thanksgiving for the mercy of God which has delivered him is less than that of the man who creeps, exhausted and worn, out of the waves on to the dreary, surf-beaten shore? In nothing do we show less faith than the way in which we think and speak about death. ‘O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?’ says the apostle. ‘Here, here, here,’ cry the Christian people, ‘everywhere. It is an awful sting, a fearful victory. But God keeps it away from us many a time when we ask him—to let it pierce us to the heart, at last, to be sure; but that can’t be helped.’ I mean this is how they feel in their hearts who do not believe that God is as merciful when he sends death as when he sends life; who, Christian people as they are, yet look upon death as an evil thing which cannot be avoided, and would, if they might live always, be content to live always. Death or Life—each is God’s; for he is not the God of the dead, but of the living: there are no dead, for all live to him.”
“But don’t you think we naturally shrink from death, Harry?” said my wife.
“There can be no doubt about that, my dear.”
“Then, if it be natural, God must have meant that it should be so.”
“Doubtless, to begin with, but not to continue or end with. A child’s sole desire is for food—the very best possible to begin with. But how would it be if the child should reach, say, two years of age, and refuse to share this same food with his little brother? Or what comes of the man who never so far rises above the desire for food that nothing could make him forget his dinner-hour? Just so the life of Christians should be strong enough to overcome the fear of death. We ought to love and believe him so much, that when he says we shall not die, we should at least believe that death must be something very different from what it looks to us to be—so different, that what we mean by the word does not apply to the reality at all; and so Jesus cannot use the word, because it would seem to us that he meant what we mean by it, which he, seeing it all round, cannot mean.”
“That does seem quite reasonable,” said Ethelwyn.
Turner had taken no part in the conversation. He, too, had just come in from a walk over the hills. He was now standing looking out at the sea.
“She looks uneasy, does she not?” I said.
“You mean the Atlantic?” he returned, looking round. “Yes, I think so. I am glad she is not a patient of mine. I fear she is going to be very feverish, probably delirious before morning. She won’t sleep much, and will talk rather loud when the tide comes in.”
“Disease has often an ebb and flow like the tide, has it not?”
“Often. Some diseases are like a plant that has its time to grow and blossom, then dies; others, as you say, ebb and flow again and again before they vanish.”
“It seems to me, however, that the ebb and flow does not belong to the disease, but to Nature, which works through the disease. It seems to me that my life has its tides, just like the ocean, only a little more regularly. It is high water with me always in the morning and the evening; in the afternoon life is at its lowest; and I believe it is lowest again while we sleep, and hence it comes that to work the brain at night has such an injurious effect on the system. But this is perhaps all a fancy.”
“There may be some truth in it. But I was just thinking when you spoke to me what a happy thing it is that the tide does not vary by an even six hours, but has the odd minutes; whence we see endless changes in the relation of the water to the times of the day. And then the spring-tides and the neap-tides! What a provision there is in the world for change!”
“Yes. Change is one of the forms that infinitude takes for the use of us human immortals. But come and have some tea, Turner. You will not care to go out again. What shall we do this evening? Shall we all go to Connie’s room and have some Shakspere?”
“I could wish nothing better. What play shall we have?”
“Let us have the Midsummer Night’s Dream,” said Ethelwyn.
“You like to go by contraries, apparently, Ethel. But you’re quite right. It is in the winter of the year that art must give us its summer. I suspect that most of the poetry about spring and summer is written in the winter. It is generally when we do not possess that we lay full value upon what we lack.”
“There is one reason,” said Wynnie with a roguish look, “why I like that play.”
“I should think there might be more than one, Wynnie.”
“But one reason is enough for a woman at once; isn’t it, papa?”
“I’m not sure of that. But what is your reason?”
“That the fairies are not allowed to play any tricks with the women. They are true throughout.”
“I might choose to say that was because they were not tried.”
“And I might venture to answer that Shakspere—being true to nature always, as you say, papa—knew very well how absurd it would be to represent a woman’s feelings as under the influence of the juice of a paltry flower.”
“Capital, Wynnie!” said her mother; and Turner and I chimed in with our approbation.
“Shall I tell you what I like best in the play?” said Turner. “It is the common sense of Theseus in accounting for all the bewilderments of the night.”
“But,” said Ethelwyn, “he was wrong after all. What is the use of common sense if it leads you wrong? The common sense of Theseus simply amounted to this, that he would only believe his own eyes.”
“I think Mrs. Walton is right, Turner,” I said. “For my part, I have more admired the open-mindedness of Hippolyta, who would yield more weight to the consistency of the various testimony than could be altogether counterbalanced by the negation of her own experience. Now I will tell you what I most admire in the play: it is the reconciling power of the poet. He brings together such marvellous contrasts, without a single shock or jar to your feeling of the artistic harmony of the conjunction. Think for a moment—the ordinary commonplace courtiers; the lovers, men and women in the condition of all conditions in which fairy-powers might get a hold of them; the quarrelling king and queen of Fairyland, with their courtiers, Blossom, Cobweb, and the rest, and the court-jester, Puck; the ignorant, clownish artisans, rehearsing their play,—fairies and clowns, lovers and courtiers, are all mingled in one exquisite harmony, clothed with a night of early summer, rounded in by the wedding of the king and queen. But I have talked enough about it. Let us get our books.”
As we sat in Connie’s room, delighting ourselves with the reflex of the poet’s fancy, the sound of the rising tide kept mingling with the fairy-talk and the foolish rehearsal. “Musk roses,” said Titania; and the first of the blast, going round by south to west, rattled the window. “Good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow,” said Bottom; and the roar of the waters was in our ears. “So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle Gently entwist,” said Titania; and the blast poured the rain in a spout against the window. “Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells,” said Theseus; and the wind whistled shrill through the chinks of the bark-house opening from the room. We drew the curtains closer, made up the fire higher, and read on. It was time for supper ere we had done; and when we left Connie to have hers and go to sleep, it was with the hope that, through all the rising storm, she would dream of breeze-haunted summer woods.
CHAPTER VII. THE GATHERED STORM
I woke in the middle of the night and the darkness to hear the wind howling. It was wide awake now, and up with intent. It seized the house, and shook it furiously; and the rain kept pouring, only I could not hear it save in the rallentondo passages of the wind; but through all the wind I could hear the roaring of the big waves on the shore. I did not wake my wife; but I got up, put on my dressing-gown, and went softly to Connie’s room, to see whether she was awake; for I feared, if she were, she would be frightened. Wynnie always slept in a little bed in the same room. I opened the door very gently, and peeped in. The fire was burning, for Wynnie was an admirable stoker, and could generally keep the fire in all night. I crept to the bedside: there was just light enough to see that Connie was fast asleep, and that her dreams were not of storms. It was a marvel how well the child always slept. But, as I turned to leave the room, Wynnie’s voice called me in a whisper. Approaching her bed, I saw her wide eyes, like the eyes of the darkness, for I could scarcely see anything of her face.
“Awake, darling?” I said.
“Yes, papa. I have been awake a long time; but isn’t Connie sleeping delightfully? She does sleep so well! Sleep is surely very good for her.”
“It is the best thing for us all, next to God’s spirit, I sometimes think, my dear. But are you frightened by the storm? Is that what keeps you awake?”
“I don’t think that is what keeps me awake; but sometimes the house shakes so that I do feel a little nervous. I don’t know how it is. I never felt afraid of anything natural before.”
“What our Lord said about not being afraid of anything that could only hurt the body applies here, and in all the terrors of the night. Think about him, dear.”
“I do try, papa. Don’t you stop; you will get cold. It is a dreadful storm, is it not? Suppose there should be people drowning out there now!”
“There may be, my love. People are dying almost every other moment, I suppose, on the face of the earth. Drowning is only an easy way of dying. Mind, they are all in God’s hands.”
“Yes, papa. I will turn round and shut my eyes, and fancy that his hand is over them, making them dark with his care.”
“And it will not be fancy, my darling, if you do. You remember those odd but no less devout lines of George Herbert? Just after he says, so beautifully, ‘And now with darkness closest weary eyes,’ he adds:
Thus in thy ebony box
Thou dost enclose us, till the day
Put our amendment in our way,
And give new wheels to our disordered clocks.”
“He is very fond of boxes, by the way. So go to sleep, dear. You are a good clock of God’s making; but you want new wheels, according to our beloved brother George Herbert. Therefore sleep. Good-night.”
This was tiresome talk—was it—in the middle of the night, reader? Well, but my child did not think so, I know.
Dark, dank, weeping, the morning dawned. All dreary was the earth and sky. The wind was still hunting the clouds across the heavens. It lulled a little while we sat at breakfast, but soon the storm was up again, and the wind raved. I went out. The wind caught me as if with invisible human hands, and shook me. I fought with it, and made my way into the village. The streets were deserted. I peeped up the inn-yard as I passed: not a man or horse was to be seen. The little shops looked as if nobody had crossed their thresholds for a week. Not a door was open. One child came out of the baker’s with a big loaf in her apron. The wind threatened to blow the hair off her head, if not herself first into the canal. I took her by the hand and led her, or rather, let her lead me home, while I kept her from being carried away by the wind. Having landed her safely inside her mother’s door, I went on, climbed the heights above the village, and looked abroad over the Atlantic. What a waste of aimless tossing to and fro! Gray mist above, full of falling rain; gray, wrathful waters underneath, foaming and bursting as billow broke upon billow. The tide was ebbing now, but almost every other wave swept the breakwater. They burst on the rocks at the end of it, and rushed in shattered spouts and clouds of spray far into the air over their heads. “Will the time ever come,” I thought, “when man shall be able to store up even this force for his own ends? Who can tell?” The solitary form of a man stood at some distance gazing, as I was gazing, out on the ocean. I walked towards him, thinking with myself who it could be that loved Nature so well that he did not shrink from her even in her most uncompanionable moods. I suspected, and soon found I was right; it was Percivale.
“What a clashing of water-drops!” I said, thinking of a line somewhere in Coleridge’s Remorse. “They are but water-drops, after all, that make this great noise upon the rocks; only there is a great many of them.”
“Yes,” said Percivale. “But look out yonder. You see a single sail, close-reefed—that is all I can see—away in the mist there? As soon as you think of the human struggle with the elements, as soon as you know that hearts are in the midst of it, it is a clashing of water-drops no more. It is an awful power, with which the will and all that it rules have to fight for the mastery, or at least for freedom.”
“Surely you are right. It is the presence of thought, feeling, effort that gives the majesty to everything. It is even a dim attribution of human feelings to this tormented, passionate sea that gives it much of its awe; although, as we were saying the other day, it is only a picture of the troubled mind. But as I have now seen how matters are with the elements, and have had a good pluvial bath as well, I think I will go home and change my clothes.”
“I have hardly had enough of it yet,” returned Percivale. “I shall have a stroll along the heights here, and when the tide has fallen a little way from the foot of the cliffs I shall go down on the sands and watch awhile there.”
“Well, you’re a younger man than I am; but I’ve seen the day, as Lear says. What an odd tendency we old men have to boast of the past: we would be judged by the past, not by the present. We always speak of the strength that is withered and gone, as if we had some claim upon it still. But I am not going to talk in this storm. I am always talking.”
“I will go with you as far as the village, and then I will turn and take my way along the downs for a mile or two; I don’t mind being wet.”
“I didn’t once.”
“Don’t you think,” resumed Percivale, “that in some sense the old man—not that I can allow you that dignity yet, Mr. Walton—has a right to regard the past as his own?”
“That would be scanned,” I answered, as we walked towards the village. “Surely the results of the past are the man’s own. Any action of the man’s, upon which the life in him reposes, remains his. But suppose a man had done a good deed once, and instead of making that a foundation upon which to build more good, grew so vain of it that he became incapable of doing anything more of the same sort, you could not say that the action belonged to him still. Therein he has severed his connection with the past. Again, what has never in any deep sense been a man’s own, cannot surely continue to be his afterwards. Thus the things that a man has merely possessed once, the very people who most admired him for their sakes when he had them, give him no credit for after he has lost them. Riches that have taken to themselves wings leave with the poor man only a surpassing poverty. Strength, likewise, which can so little depend on any exercise of the will in man, passes from him with the years. It was not his all the time; it was but lent him, and had nothing to do with his inward force. A bodily feeble man may put forth a mighty life-strength in effort, and show nothing to the eyes of his neighbour; while the strong man gains endless admiration for what he could hardly help. But the effort of the one remains, for it was his own; the strength of the other passes from him, for it was never his own. So with beauty, which the commonest woman acknowledges never to have been hers in seeking to restore it by deception. So, likewise, in a great measure with intellect.”
“But if you take away intellect as well, what do you leave a man that can in any way be called his own?”
“Certainly his intellect is not his own. One thing only is his own—to will the truth. This, too, is as much God’s gift as everything else: I ought to say is more God’s gift than anything else, for he gives it to be the man’s own more than anything else can be. And when he wills the truth, he has God himself. Man can possess God: all other things follow as necessary results. What poor creatures we should have been if God had not made us to do something—to look heavenwards—to lift up the hands that hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees! Something like this was in the mind of the prophet Jeremiah when he said, ‘Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercise loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the Lord.’ My own conviction is, that a vague sense of a far higher life in ourselves than we yet know anything about is at the root of all our false efforts to be able to think something of ourselves. We cannot commend ourselves, and therefore we set about priding ourselves. We have little or no strength of mind, faculty of operation, or worth of will, and therefore we talk of our strength of body, worship the riches we have, or have not, it is all one, and boast of our paltry intellectual successes. The man most ambitious of being considered a universal genius must at last confess himself a conceited dabbler, and be ready to part with all he knows for one glimpse more of that understanding of God which the wise men of old held to be essential to every man, but which the growing luminaries of the present day will not allow to be even possible for any man.”
We had reached the brow of the heights, and here we parted. A fierce blast of wind rushed at me, and I hastened down the hill. How dreary the streets did look!—how much more dreary than the stormy down! I saw no living creature as I returned but a terribly draggled dog, a cat that seemed to have a bad conscience, and a lovely little girl-face, which, forgetful of its own rights, would flatten the tip of the nose belonging to it against a window-pane. Every rain-pool was a mimic sea, and had a mimic storm within its own narrow bounds. The water went hurrying down the kennels like a long brown snake anxious to get to its hole and hide from the tormenting wind, and every now and then the rain came in full rout before the conquering blast.
When I got home, I peeped in at Connie’s door the first thing, and saw that she was raised a little more than usual; that is, the end of the conch against which she leaned was at a more acute angle. She was sitting staring, rather than gazing, out at the wild tumult which she could see over the shoulder of the down on which her window immediately looked. Her face was paler and keener than usual.
“Why, Connie, who set you up so straight?”
“Mr. Turner, papa. I wanted to see out, and he raised me himself. He says I am so much better, I may have it in the seventh notch as often as I like.”
“But you look too tired for it. Hadn’t you better lie down again?”
“It’s only the storm, papa.”
“The more reason you should not see it if it tires you so.”
“It does not tire me, papa. Only I keep constantly wondering what is going to come out of it. It looks so as if something must follow.”
“You didn’t hear me come into your room last night, Connie. The storm was raging then as loud as it is now, but you were out of its reach—fast asleep. Now it is too much for you. You must lie down.”
“Very well, papa.”
I lowered the support, and when I returned from changing my wet garments she was already looking much better.
After dinner I went to my study, but when evening began to fall I went out again. I wanted to see how our next neighbours, the sexton and his wife, were faring. The wind had already increased in violence. It threatened to blow a hurricane. The tide was again rising, and was coming in with great rapidity. The old mill shook to the foundation as I passed through it to reach the lower part where they lived. When I peeped in from the bottom of the stair, I saw no one; but, hearing the steps of someone overhead, I called out.