The Toilers of the Sea (7 page)

XVIII

COMPATIBILITY OF EXTREMES

The right of primogeniture exists; the tithe exists; the parish exists; the seigneur exists, both the seigneur of a fief and the seigneur of a manor; crying
haro
exists, as witness “The case of crying
haro
between Nicolle, esquire, and Godfrey, seigneur of Mélèches, was heard by the justices, after the court had been opened by the customary prayer” (Jersey, 1864). The
livre tournois
exists; seisin and disseisin exist; the right of forfeiture exists; feudal tenure exists; the redemption of family property exists; the past exists. There is the style of
messire.
There are the bailiff, the seneschal,
centeniers, vingteniers,
and
douzeniers.
There are the vingtaine at St. Savior's and the cueillette at St. Ouen's.
⁵⁴
Every year there is the “constables' ride” to survey the state of the roads. It is headed by the viscount,
⁵⁵
“bearing in his hand the royal staff.” There is the canonical hour, before noon. Christmas, Easter, Midsummer, and Michaelmas are the legal quarter days. Property is not sold, it is granted on lease. A dialogue like this may be heard in court: “Provost, is this the day, the place, and the hour at which the pleadings of the court of the fief and seigneurie have been published?”—“Yes.”—“Amen.”— “Amen.”

The case of “the villager who denies that his holding is in the enclaves” is provided for.

There are “casualties, treasure troves, marriages, etc., from which the seigneur may profit.”

There is “the seigneur's entitlement as guardian until a proper party presents himself.” There are adjournment and act of vassalage, record and double record; there are the court of chief pleas, enfoeffments, acts of seisin, allodial tenure, and rights of regality. All very medieval, you may say. No: this is true liberty. Come here; live; exist. Go where you will, do what you will, be what you will. No one has the right to know your name. If you have a God of your own, preach his faith. If you have a flag of your own, fly it. Where? In the street. It is white: very well. It is blue: all right. It is red: red is a color like any other. Do you want to denounce the government? Stand on a boundary stone and say whatever you want. Do you want to form an association? By all means. Of how many members? As many as you want. What limit is there? None. Do you want to hold a meeting? Carry on. Where? In the public square. Suppose I want to attack royalty? That is no concern of ours. What if I want to put up a poster?
There
are the walls. You may think, speak, write, print, make a speech on anything you like: that is your own affair. You are free to hear anything and read anything, and that implies that you are also free to say anything and write anything. And so there is absolute freedom of speech and of the press. Anyone who wants can be a printer, an apostle, a pontiff. If you want to be pope, that is up to you. For that you have only to invent a religion. Imagine a new form of God, of whom you will be the prophet. No one has any right to interfere. If necessary the police will help you. There are no restrictions. Absolute freedom: it is a magnificent spectacle. You can argue about a judicial decision. Just as you can preach to the priest, you can judge the judge. The papers can say: “Yesterday the court reached an iniquitous decision.” A possible judicial error, surprisingly, has no claim to respect. Human justice is open to dispute just as is divine revelation. Individual independence can scarcely go further. Each man is his own sovereign, not by law but by custom. This is sovereignty so complete and so intrinsic to life that it is no longer felt. Law has become breathable: it is as colorless, imperceptible, and as necessary as air. At the same time people are “loyal.” They are citizens who allow themselves the vanity of being subjects.

All in all, the nineteenth century rules and governs; it finds its way in through all the windows in this medieval world. The old Norman legality is shot through with liberty. This old house is full of the light of liberty. Never was an anachronism so little troublesome.

History makes this archipelago Gothic, but industry and intelligence make it modern. It avoids falling into immobility thanks to the lungs of the people—though this does not prevent there being a seigneur of Mélèches. Feudalism de jure, a republic de facto: such is the phenomenon of the Channel Islands.

There is one exception to this liberty: only one, which we have already noted. The tyrant of England has the same name as Don Juan's creditor: it is Sunday. The English are the people for whom time is money, but Sunday, the tyrant, reduces the working week to six days: that is, it deprives them of a seventh of their capital. And there is no possibility of resistance. Sunday rules by custom, which is more despotic than law. Sunday, that king of England, has as his Prince of Wales the dullness known as spleen. He has the power to create boredom. He closes workshops, laboratories, libraries, museums, and theaters, and almost closes gardens and forests, too. We must not omit to notice, however, that the English Sunday is less oppressive on Jersey than on Guernsey. On Guernsey a poor woman who keeps a tavern serves a glass of beer to a customer on a Sunday: fifteen days in prison. An exile from France, a bootmaker, decides to work on Sunday to feed his wife and children, and closes his shutters so that his hammering will not be heard: if anyone hears him, a fine. One Sunday a painter just arrived from Paris stops in the road to draw a tree; a centenier speaks to him and tells him to cease this scandalous activity, but is merciful enough not to report him to the
gre fe
(record office). A barber from Southampton shaves someone on Sunday: he pays three pounds sterling to the public treasury. The reason is quite simple: God rested on that day. Fortunate, however, is a people that is free six days out of seven. If Sunday is regarded as a synonym of servitude, we can think of countries where the week has seven Sundays.

Sooner or later these last restrictions will be swept away. No doubt the spirit of orthodoxy is tenacious. No doubt the trial of Bishop Colenso, for example, is a serious matter. But consider the progress that England has made in liberty since the days when Elliott
⁵⁶
was brought before the assizes for saying that the sun was inhabited.

There is an autumn for the fall of prejudices. It is the time for the decline of monarchies.

That time has now arrived.

The civilization of the Norman archipelago is moving forward and will not stop. That civilization is autochthonous, which does not prevent it from being hospitable and cosmopolitan. In the seventeenth century it felt the effects of the English revolution, and in the nineteenth century of the French revolution. It has twice felt the profound emotions of independence.

Besides, all archipelagos are free countries. It is the mysterious work of the sea and the wind.

XIX

A PLACE OF ASYLUM

These islands, formerly to be dreaded, have become gentler. Once they were mere reefs: now they are refuges. These places of distress have become havens of rescue. Those who have escaped from disaster emerge here. All those who have suffered shipwreck, whether in a storm or in a revolution, come here. These men, the sailor and the exile, wet with different kinds of foam, dry themselves together in this warm sun. Chateaubriand,
⁵⁷
young, poor, obscure, and without a country, was sitting on a stone on the old wharf on Guernsey, when a good woman said to him: “What do you want, my friend?” It is very sweet—almost a mysterious relief—for one banished from France to hear in the Channel Islands the language that is civilization itself, the accents of our provinces, the cries to be heard in our ports, the songs of our streets and countryside:
remi
niscitur Argos.
⁵⁸
Louis XIV thrust into this ancient Norman community a valuable band of good Frenchmen speaking pure French: the revocation of the Edict of Nantes
⁵⁹
revitalized the French language in the islands.

Frenchmen who have been exiled from France like to spend their time in this archipelago in the Channel, dreaming, as they walk about amid the rocks, the dreams of men who are waiting for something— drawn by the charm of hearing their native tongue. The marquis de Rivière—the same man to whom Charles X said: “By the way, I forgot to tell you that I had made you a duke”—wept at the sight of the apple trees in Jersey, and preferred Pier Road in St. Helier to London's Oxford Street. The duc d'Anville, who was a Rohan and a La Rochefoucauld, also lived in Pier Road. One day Monsieur d'Anville, who had an old basset hound, had occasion to consult a doctor in St. Helier about his health and thought that the doctor would be able to do something for his dog. He asked him, therefore, for a prescription for his basset. The doctor gave his advice, and the following day the duke received a bill in the following terms:

Two consultations:
for the duke, one louis
for his dog, ten louis.

These islands have offered shelter to men afflicted by destiny. All kinds of misfortunes have passed this way, from Charles II fleeing from Cromwell to the duc de Berry on his way to encounter Louvel.
⁶⁰
Two thousand years ago Caesar, who was to meet his fate at the hands of Brutus, came here. Since the seventeenth century these islands have had fraternal feelings for the whole world; they glory in hospitality. They have the impartiality of a place of asylum.

Royalists, they welcome the vanquished republic; Huguenots, they admit the Catholic exile. They even show him the politeness, as we have observed, of hating Voltaire as much as he does. And since, in the view of many people, and particularly of state religions, to hate our enemies is the best way of loving ourselves, Catholicism should be much loved in the Channel Islands. For a newcomer escaped from shipwreck and spending some time here in the course of his unknown destiny, these solitudes sometimes bring on a profound despondency: there is despair in the air. And then suddenly he feels a caress, a passing breath of air that raises his spirits. What is this breath of air? A note, a word, a sigh, nothing. This nothing is enough. Who in this world has not felt the power of this: a nothing!

Some ten or twelve years ago a Frenchman who had recently landed on Guernsey was wandering along one of the beaches on the west coast—alone, sad, bitter, thinking of the country he had lost.
⁶¹
In Paris you stroll about; on Guernsey you roam. The island seemed to him lugubrious. Everything was covered in mist, the breakers thundered onto the shore, the sea was discharging immense quantities of foam on the rocks, the sky was hostile and black. Yet it was spring; but the spring of the sea has a wild name: it is called the equinox. It is more a hurricane than a zephyr; and there are memories of a day in May when, under this blast, the foam leapt up to twenty feet above the top of the signal mast on the highest platform of Castle Cornet. This Frenchman felt as though he was in England; he knew not a word of English; he saw an old Union Jack, torn by the wind, flying on a ruined tower at the end of a deserted promontory; there were two or three cottages nearby; in the distance there was nothing to be seen but sand, heath, moorland, and spiny furze; a few batteries, low built, with wide embrasures, showed their angles; the stone dressed by man had the same melancholy aspect as the rocks worn down by the sea. The Frenchman felt rising within him the deepening feeling of internal mourning that is the beginning of homesickness; he looked and listened; not a ray of sun; cormorants on the hunt, clouds fleeting by; everywhere on the horizon a leaden weight; a vast livid curtain falling down from the zenith; the specter of spleen in the shroud of the tempest; nothing anywhere that resembled hope, and nothing that resembled his native land. The Frenchman was pondering on all this, more and more cast down; then suddenly he raised his head. From one of the cottages, half-open, there came a clear, fresh, delicate voice, the voice of a child, and the voice was singing:

La clef des champs, la clef des bois,
La clef des amourettes!
62

XX

Not all reminiscences of France in the archipelago are as happy as these. One Sunday on the charming island of Sark an acquaintance of ours heard in a farmyard this verse of an old French Huguenot hymn, very solemnly sung in chorus by religious voices with the grave tones of Calvinism:

Tout le monde pue, pue, pue
Comme une charogne.
Gniac', gniac', gniac' mon doux Jésus
Qui ait l'odeur bonne.

Everyone stinks, stinks, stinks
Like carrion.
There is only my sweet Jesus
Who smells sweet.

It is a melancholy and almost painful thought that people died in the Cévennes to the sound of these words. This verse, though involuntarily high comic, is tragic. We laugh at it: we ought to weep. At this verse Bossuet, one of the Forty of the French Academy, cried: “Kill! Kill!”

In any case, to fanaticism, hideous when it is the persecutor, august and touching when it is the persecuted, the outward hymn is nothing. It has its own grand and somber internal hymn that it sings mysteriously in its soul, whatever the words. It permeates even the grotesque with sublimity, and, whatever may be the poetry and prose of its priests, it transfigures that prose and that poetry with the immense latent harmony of its faith. It corrects the deformity of formulas by the greatness of trials accepted and torments endured. Where poetry is lacking it substitutes conscience. The libretto of martyrdom may be dull: what matter if the martyrdom is noble!

XXI

Fishermen, great eaters of fish, have large families. This law holds good in the Norman archipelago, where there may be up to seven or eight children per cottage. This gives rise to particular problems, involving true matters of conscience. What is the first duty of a pilot? He is a pilot, and he has a duty to mariners in distress. He is a father, and he has a duty to his children. He is himself in distress. Risking your life is of no consequence when you are on your own; but the question changes when you are part of a family unit. In a hurricane and in darkness, when out at sea a ship is in distress and there is a chance that anyone going to its aid may not return, the pilot finds himself caught between two shipwrecks, the shipwreck of the seamen in danger who without him will perish, and the shipwreck of his children, who without him will die. It is a fearful dilemma. He has to think of his family. This means that heroism is for sale; a man is not an angel of salvation free of charge; he has his price.

Frequently, such is the strange asperity of man, the price is negotiated at sea, in clouds, in lightning, off a reef. One party is selling life, the other is buying it. It is a question of take it or leave it. The benefit is not to be given away free. The man who is drowning finds the price proposed too high. There is a dispute over a few coppers on the threshold of this formidable good action.

It is certain at any rate that one night, in the midst of a storm, someone who was on the summit of a cliff, battered by wind and rain, heard below him, in the deep, raging sea, the following dialogue, interrupted by the sinister interventions of the wind. Two black shapes could be distinguished in the darkness, two vague shapes of vessels bobbing up and down, close together, on the foam, and speaking to one another:

“Where have you come from?”

“Take care. Don't come too close. My mizzen mast may fall on you.”

“Where have you come from?”

“I don't know.”

“Where are you making for?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you want me to rescue you?”

“Take care. I have more than one mast. It may fall on you.”

“Do you want me to rescue you?”

“How many of you are there in your boat?”

“Three men.”

“If my mast fell on your boat you would be drowned. Go away.”

“If I go away you are lost.”

“God will preserve us!”

“Do you want me to take you in to Guernsey? I am a pilot.”

“Where is Guernsey?”

“There.”

“You are wrong. It is Jersey.”

“I am not wrong. It is Guernsey.”

“God will preserve us!”

“What ship are you?”

“La Galante.”

“Where from?”

“Portrieux.”

“Whither bound?”

“Newfoundland.”

“What have you on board?”

“Nineteen men. Plus my cargo.”

“Do you want me to rescue you?”

“Who are you?”

“Pilot Number Six.”

“Your name?”

“Létivier.”

“Where are you from?”

“St. Peter-in-the-Wood.”

“God will preserve us!”

“Do you want me to rescue you?”

“How much?”

“Fifty pounds.”

“Will you take twenty-five?”

“No. Fifty.”

“No. Twenty-five.”

“I'm off, then.”

“Right: off you go.”

“You're just off the coast: it's a stony bottom. Do you hear the alarm bell yonder? In a quarter of an hour you'll be done for.”

“Will you take forty pounds?”

“No. Forty-five.”

“All right: forty-five.”

And so Létivier saved
La Galante.
Such is the grim bargaining process.