XIX
It was perceptibly cooler, stale-cool, uneasy air-threads stirring in the straight wood drive. No sun since three o’clock, but a glaring grey gauze overhead. Outside the wood, below the little cliff, a small scoop of bay protected the fisherman’s boats. From the edge they could have stepped on to the roof of his hut, whose tarred shingles were frosted with salt. Set on a ledge out of storms’ reach, brambles padded it from the cliffs side, and it was reached down wooden balks, steep-set and built into the clay. It surprised Carston to see the egg-blue and peacock water changed to the colour of a gun-barrel. Little wind, but the sea was twitching, slapping against the rocks; the colours inland, neither light-veiled or shining, but off a new palette.
Scylla was staring out to sea, and her head lifted in profile made her look at the sky, where it seemed as if some mathematical monster had risen out of the west. For where the sun was turning down-Channel, a ball glared, surrounded by ranks of rose bars, and out from these clouds radiated that reached over to the eastern heavens, across whose spokes strayed loose flakes dipped in every variety of flame, the triangles of empty sky stained all the greens between primrose and jade.
“Herring sky,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
She laughed with a confident joy he understood the first time.
“Southwest wind. Listen!” He heard his heart beating, a hair in his ear, and a trans-finite length away, the stirring that had made uneasy the sea.
“A big storm,” she said, turning on him eyes full of an animal’s pleasure. Round the point where the day before he arrived they had played at Aphrodites, a boat came dipping back, the bowsprit dancing and dripping, where over the deep-travelling reef the sea had begun to coil under and over.
“Harris is back in time. We’re in for it. No more fish.” A note in her brain about the fish problem. More too freshly killed meat. Picus and Felix on the subject. Then the only good poem a bad poet ever wrote, anticipating jazz:
“When descends on the Atlantic
The gigantic
Storm-wind of the equinox.”
He took her hands and they rocked, saying with her:
“From Bermuda’s reefs and edges
Of sunken ledges
On some far-off bright Azore
From Bahama and the dashing
Silver-flashing
Surges of San Salvador.”
Fallen into nature with her. For the first time in his life. Good old Gulf Stream.
Harris the fisherman had downed his mainsheet, flung out an anchor and was rushing a dinghy to shore.
“Take your fish, Madame Taverner, it’s the last you’ll see. I’ve got my pots to get in.”
“We’ll help.”
Two minutes later Carston was in a dinghy in a slightly resentful scoop of sea, and spent an ungrateful hour hauling up lobster-cages filled with kicking, pinching sea cardinals, ink blue; and the humanitarian protest came from Scylla when they were tossed into a cauldron bubbling on the stones, in an angle of the little secret cliff where England rose out of the harvested sea.
The wood was darkish, fearful and sad, until they saw the windows shut and already lit, a fire leaping up made out of the driftwood he had helped haul up. Blue sparks and white and green, wind shifting about outside in the trees, until with a scream the up-Channel gale was loosed and they became creatures couched under a stone that quivered in the uproar and mounted to bed with candles streaming.
Carston lay in bed and heard above the thunder a gull repeating itself. “Ai, ai,” it said, up somewhere in the tumbling sky, a little noise laid delicately upon the universal roar of air. The house was strong, he thought, its stone thrilling but not a window that rattled, tapped by their climbing roses.
There were pockets in the wind when he could hear the sea. A crash, then under-roar and scream of pebbles, the ravelled water dragged. A light-patch fell on his floor, a piece of the late moon racing apparently from a cloud whipped off her, and behind her a star or so, unhurried, observant and indifferent on a night when everything was out and about. He looked out to sea, surprised that it appeared no more than a bright silver lacquer, when water mountains should have been moving in.
Scylla alone wondered how the wood below Gault was bearing it, flooded with salt water, heaped with seaweed, the little stream choked with wrack.
Dark again in Carston’s room. A rain-flaw drummed on the panes. Then with a shriek the wind sprang again. He could not hear the gull, but a few seconds later a crack and a long crash, knew it was a tree gone, and looking out in the next moon-interval, saw something altered in the outline of the wood. It disturbed him to think how hopeless the dawn would be, the “dew silky” quiet changed for grey air, spray-salted on the lips. Would the others enjoy it? Would it blow the nonsense out of them? They might be housebound for days. Oh, God! He was wondering how to prevent this when he fell asleep.