That was in the short winter days and long evenings, when all the west was a shrieking black fury, out of which hurtled blasts so overpowering that you could lean up against them as against a wall, and with no more fear of falling, and the roar of great waters was never out of our ears.
In the daytime I would creep to the edge of the cliff, and lie flat behind a boulder, and watch by the hour the huge white waves as they swept round the Moie de Batarde and came ripping along the ragged side of Brecqhou like furious white comets, and hurled themselves in thunder on our Moie de Mouton and Tintageu. Then the great granite cliffs and our house up above shook with their pounding, and Port à la Jument and Pegane Bay were all aboil with beaten froth, and the salt spume came flying over my head in great sticky gouts, and whirled away among the seagulls feeding in the fields behind. When gale and tide played the same way, the mighty strife between the incoming waves and the Race of the Gouliot passage was a thing to be seen. For the waves that had raced over a thousand miles of sea split on the point of Brecqhou, and those that took the south side piled themselves high in the great basin formed by Brecqhou and the Gouliot rocks and Havre Gosselin, and finding an outlet through the Gouliot Pass, they came leaping and roaring through, the narrow black channel in a very fury of madness, and hurled themselves against their fellows who had taken the north side of the Island, and there below me they fought like giants, and I was never tired of watching.
But in the evenings, when the lamp was lit, and the fire of dried gorse and driftwood burnt with coloured flames and lightning forks, my grandfather would get out his books with a sigh of great content, and Krok would settle silently to his work on net or lobster pot, and my mother took to teaching me my letters, which was not at all to my liking.
At first I was but a dull scholar, and the letters had to be dinned into my careless little head many times before they stuck there, and anything was sufficient to draw me from my task—a louder blast outside than usual, or the sight of Krok's nimble fingers, or of my grandfather's deep absorption, which at that time I could not at all understand, and which seemed to me extraordinary, and made me think of old Mother Mauger, who was said to be a witch, and who lost herself staring into her fire just as my grandfather did into his books.
My wits were always busy with anything and everything rather than their proper business, but my mother was patience itself and drilled things into me till perforce I had to learn them, and, either through this constant repetition, or from a friendly feeling for myself in trouble, Krok began to take an intelligent interest in my lessons.
He would bring his work alongside, and listen intently, and watch the book, and at times would drop his work and by main force would turn my head away from himself to that which was of more consequence, when my mother would nod and smile her thanks.
And so, as I slowly learned, Krok learned also, and very much more quickly, for he had more time than I had to think over things, because he wasted none of it in talking, and he was more used to thinking than I was. And then, to me it was still only drudgery, while to him it was the opening of a new window to his soul.
Why, in all these years, he had never learned to read and write—why my grandfather had never thought to teach him—I cannot tell. Perhaps because my mother had learned at the school; perhaps because Krok himself had shown no inclination to learn; perhaps because, in the earlier days, the scanty little farm and the fishing which eked it out took up all the men's time and attention.
However that might be, now that he had begun to learn Krok learned quickly, and the signs of his knowledge were all over the place.
He knew all that wonderful west coast of our Island as well as he knew the fingers of his hand, and before long the ground all round the house was strewn about with smooth flat stones on which were scratched the letters of the alphabet, which presently, according to the pace of my studies indoors, began to arrange themselves into words, and so I was encompassed with learning, inside and out, as it were, and sucked it in whether I would or no.
Well do I remember the puzzlement in old Krok's face when the mischief that dwells in every boy set me to changing the proper order of his stones, and the eagerness with which he awaited the evening lesson to compare the new wrong order of things with his recollections of the original correct one, and then the mild look of reproachful enquiry he would turn upon me.
But my mother, catching me at it one day, sharply forbade me meddling with Krok's studies, and showed me the smallness of it, and I never touched one of his stones again.
Both my mother and my grandfather could read and speak English, in addition to the Norman-French which was the root of our Island tongue, and that was something of a distinction in those days. He had learned it, perforce, during his early voyagings. He had been twice round the world, both times on English ships, and he was the kind of man, steady, quiet, thoughtful, to miss no opportunities of self-improvement, though I do not think there ever can have been a man less desirous of gain. His wants were very few, and so long as the farm and the fishing provided us all with a sufficient living, he was satisfied and grateful. He saw his neighbours waxing fat all about him, in pursuits which he would have starved sooner than set his hand to. To them, and according to Island standards, these things might be right or wrong, but to him, and for himself, he had no doubts whatever in the matter.
You see, long ago, in Guernsey, he had come across Master Claude Gray, the Quaker preacher, and had been greatly drawn to him and the simple high-life he proclaimed. Frequently, on still Sabbath mornings, he would put off in his boat, and, if the wind did not serve, would pull all the way to Peter Port, a good fourteen miles there and back, for the purpose of meeting his friend, and looked on it as a high privilege.
When, at times, he took me with him, I, too, looked on it as a mighty privilege; for Peter Port, even on a Sabbath morning, was, to a boy whose life was spent within the shadow of the Autelets, so to speak, a great and bustling city, full of people and houses and mysteries, and of course of wickedness, all of which excited my liveliest imaginings.
In the evening we would pull back, or run before the west wind if it served, and my grandfather would thoughtfully con over the gains of the day as another might tell the profits of his trading. Master Claude Gray was a man of parts, well read, an Englishman, and it was doubtless from him that my grandfather drew some of that love of books which distinguished him above any man I ever knew on Sercq, not excepting even the Seigneur, or the Sénéchal, or the Schoolmaster, or the Parson.
His library consisted of five books which he valued beyond anything he possessed, chiefly on account of what was in them and what he got out of them; to some extent also, in the case of three of them, for what they represented to him.
The first was a very large Bible bound in massive leather-covered boards, a present from Master Claude Gray to his friend, and brother in Christ, Philip Carré, and so stated in a very fine round-hand on the front page. It contained a number of large pictures drawn on wood which, under strict injunctions as to carefulness and clean hands and no wet fingers, I was occasionally allowed to look at on a winter's Sabbath evening, and which always sent me to bed in a melancholy frame of mind, yet drew me to their inspection with a most curious fascination when the next chance offered.
Another was Mr. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, also with woodcuts of a somewhat terrifying aspect, yet not devoid of lively fillips to the imagination.
Then there was a truly awful volume, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, with pictures which wrought so upon me that I used to wake up in the night shrieking with terror, and my mother forbade any further study of it; though Krok, when he came to be able to read, would hang over it by the hour, spelling out all the dreadful stories with his big forefinger and noting every smallest detail of the pictured tortures.
These two my grandfather had
