CHAPTER VIII.

THE STORM OF OCTOBER, 1859.

The storm, which of all storms, I had the best opportunity of observing, was that which swept in fury over the west of France, from the 24th of October 1859, to the 31st of the same month, the implacable and indefatigable storm, which, with but few and very short intervals, raged furiously for six days and six nights, and strewed our whole western coasts with wrecks. Both before and after that storm, the barometer indicated great disturbances, and the telegraphic communications were cut off by the breaking of the wires, or the magnetic falsifications. Very hot seasons had preceded this tempest, but it brought us a succession of very different weather; rainy, and cold. Even 1860, up to the very day on which I write these lines, is marked by heavy rain storms, and cold winds from the west, and south, which seem to bring us all the rains of the Atlantic, and of the great South Sea.

I watched this tempest from a spot so smiling and peaceful that tempest was the last thing that one would anticipate there. I speak of the little port of Saint George, near Royan, just at the entrance of the Gironde. I had passed an exceedingly quiet five months there, meditating what I should say on the subject which I had treated upon in 1859; that subject at once so serious and so delicate. The place and the book are alike filled with memories very agreeable to me. Could I have written that book in any other place? I know not; but one thing is quite certain: the wild perfume of that country; its aspect, at once staid and gentle, and the vivifying odors of its Brooms, that pungent and agreeable shrub of the Landes, had much to do with that book, and will ever be associated with it in my thought.

The people of the place are well matched with its aspect and its nature. No vulgarity, no coarseness, among them. The farming population are grave in manner, and moral in speech and conduct, and the seagoing population, consists, for the most part, of pilots, a little band of Protestants, escaped from persecution. All around, too, there is an honesty so primitive that locks and bolts are absolutely unknown there. Noise and violence are utterly out of the question among people who are modest and reserved, as seamen seldom are, and who have a quiet and retiring tact not always to be found among a far more pretentious and highly placed people. Though well known to and well respected by them, I yet enjoyed all the solitude which study and labor demanded. I was all the more interested in these people and their perils. Without speaking to them, I daily and hourly watched them in their heroic labors, and heartily wished them both safety and success. I was suspicious of the weather, and looking upon the dangerous channel, I often asked myself whether the sea, so long gentle and lovely, would not, sooner or later, show us quite another countenance.

This really dangerous place has nothing sad or threatening in its aspect. Every morning, from my window, I could watch the white sails, slightly ruddied by the morning beams, of quite a fleet of small coasters, that only waited for a wind to leave the little port. At this port, the Gironde is fully nine miles wide. With some of the solemnity of the great rivers of America, it combines the gaiety of Bourdeaux. Royan is a pleasure place, a bathing town which is resorted to by all Gascony. Its bay, and the adjoining one of St. George, are gratuitously regaled with the wild pranks of the porpoises, that boldly venture into the river, and into the very midst of the bathers, leaping, at once heavily and gracefully, six feet, and more, above the surface of the water. It would seem that they are profoundly convinced of the fact, that no one thereabout is addicted to fishing; that at that point of great daring and great labor, where from hour to hour all hands may be called upon to succor some imperilled vessel, folks will scarcely care to slay the poor Porpoise, for his oil.

To this gaiety of the waters, add the especially harmonious beauty of the two shores, as the abounding vineyards of Medoc look across to the varied culture of the fertile fields of Saintonge. The sky, here, has not the fixed, and sometimes rather monotonous beauty of the Mediterranean, but, on the contrary, is very changeable. From the mingling waters of sea and river, rise variegated mists, which cast back upon the watery mirror, strange gleamings of gorgeous coloring, rod, blue, deepest orange, and most delicately pale green. Fantastic shapes, "a moment seen, then gone for ever," "appearing only to depart, and seen only to be regretted," adorn the entrance to the Ocean with strange monuments of bold collonades, sublime bridges, and, occasionally, triumphal arches.

The two crescent-shaped shores of Royan and Saint Georges, with their fine sands afford to the most delicate feet a delightful promenade of which one does not easily grow tired, tempted, and regaled as we are by the perfume of the pines which so enliven the downs with their young verdure. The fine promontories which overlook these shores, and the sandy inland downs send near and far their healthful perfumes. That which predominates on the downs has a something of medicinal, a mingled odor, which seems to concentrate all the sun and the warmth of the sands. The inland heaths furnish the more pungent odors which stir the brain and cheer the heart; thyme, and wild thyme, and marjoram, and sage which our fathers held sacred for its many virtues, and peppermint, and, above all, the little wild violet, exhale a mingled odor surpassing all the spicy odors of the far East.

It seems to me that on these heaths the birds sing more beautifully than elsewhere. Never have I heard elsewhere such a lark as I listened to in July on the promontory of Vallière, as she rose higher and higher, her dark wings gilded and glinting in the rays of the fast setting sun. Her notes coming from a height of probably a thousand feet were as sweet as they must needs have been powerful. It was to her humble nest, to her upward gazing and listening nestlings that she evidently sang her "wood notes wild," her song at once so rustic and so sublime, in which one might fancy that she translated into harmony that glorious sunlight in which she hovered, and called to her nestlings--"Come up hither my little ones, come!"

Out of all these, perfumes and song, soft air, and sea made mild by the waters of the beautiful river, proceeded an infinitely agreeable, though not very brilliant harmony. The moon shone with a softened light, the stars were quite visible, but not very bright, and the atmosphere so mild and pleasant, that it would have been voluptuous, that whole scene and its accessories had there not mingled with all a something, which made one reflect, and substituted active thought for luxuriously idle reverie.

And why so? Do those shifting sands, those many colored and varying hues of the downs, and that crumbling and fossiliferous limestone remind you of the eternal change, that one only rule which here on earth has no exception? Or, is it the silent but undying memory of the persecuted Protestants? It is also, and in still greater power, the solemnity of the roadstead, the frequency of wrecks, the near neighborhood of the most terrible of seas, by which the interior becomes so serious, so suggestive of great and solemn thought.

A great mystery is being enacted here, a treaty, a marriage infinitely more important than any human and royal nuptials; a marriage of interest between ill matched spouses. The lady of the waters of the south-west, swelled and quickened by Tarn and Dordogne and by those fierce brethren the torrents of the Pyrenees, hastens, that amiable and sovereign Gironde, to present herself to her giant spouse, old Ocean, here, more than elsewhere, stern and repulsive. The mud banks of the Charente and the long line of sands which, for fifty leagues, oppose him, put him in bad humor; and when he cannot hurtle fiercely against Bayonne and Saint Jean de Luz, he pitilessly assaults the poor Gironde. Her outlet is not like that of the Seine, between sheltering shores; she falls at once into the presence of the open and limitless ocean. Generally, he repels her; she recoils to the right and to the left, and seeks shelter in the marshes of Saintonge, or among the Medoc vineyards to whose vines she imparts the cool and sober qualities of her own waters.

And now imagine the boldness of the men who throw themselves headlong into the strife between two such spouses; who go in the frail boat to the aid of the timorous craft who wait at the mouth of the pass afraid to venture in. Such is the boldness of my pilots here; a boldness at once so modest, so heroic, so glorious, could it but be fully described.

It is easy to understand that the old monarch of shipwrecks, the antique treasurer and guardian of so much submerged wealth bears no great good will towards the bold ones who venture to dispute with him his prey. If he sometimes allows them to succeed, sometimes also he avenges himself upon them--more malignantly delighted to drown one pilot than to wreck two ships.

But for sometime past no such accident had been spoken of. The exceedingly hot summer of 1859, produced only one wreck in this neighborhood; but I knew not what agitation even then foretold greater disasters. September came, then October, and the brilliant crowd of visitors, loving the sea only when it is calm and smiling, already took its departure. I still remained, partly kept there by my unfinished work, partly by the strange attraction which that season of the year has for me.

In October we had strange eccentric winds, such as seldom blow there; a burning storm-wind from the East, that quarter usually so peaceable. The nights were occasionally very hot, even more so in October than in August; sleepless, agitated, nervous nights; nights to quicken the pulse to the fever pace, and without apparent cause to render one excited and peevish.

One day as we sat among the pines, beaten by the wind though somewhat sheltered by the downs, we heard a young voice, singularly clear, piercing, resonant, and, so to speak, metallic. It was the voice of a very young girl, small in figure, but austere in countenance. She was walking with her mother and singing snatches of an old ballad. We invited her to sit down and sing us the whole of it. This old ballad, this rustic little poem admirably expressed the double spirit of the country. Saintonge is, in the first place, essentially rustic and home-loving, with none of the wild adventurous impulses of the Basques. And yet in spite of her sedentary tastes Saintonge turns sailor and goes forth into not unfrequent dangers. And why? The old ballad explains:

The lovely daughter of a king while washing, like Nausica of the Odyssey, loses her ring in the sea; a young lover dives in search of it, and is drowned. She weeps his loss so bitterly that she is changed into the rosemary of the shore, at once so bitter and so odorous. This ballad, heard in that pine wood already shuddering and moaning at the threatening storm, touched and delighted me, but at the same time strengthened my secret presentiments.

Whenever I went to Royan, I might calculate upon being overtaken, unsheltered, in a storm, before I could accomplish that short journey of only a few hours. It pressed upon me in the vineyards of Saint George and the heathy table land of the promontory which I first ascended; and it pressed upon me more heavily still as I traversed the great semi-circular shore of Royan. Even now, in October, the heath exhaled all its perfumes of wild flowers and shrubs, and their perfumes seemed to me more pungent now than ever. On the still unvexed shore, the wind, warmly and gently fanned my cheek, and the no less gentle sea in murmuring ripples strove to kiss my feet. But for both caressing wind and gently murmuring wave, I was too well prepared, too suspicious, to be deceived by them. By way of prelude to the great change, after so many beautiful and almost effeminating evenings, suddenly, in the very middle of the night, burst forth a frightful gale of wind. Again and again this occurred, but especially on the night of the 26th. On that night I felt sure that some great damage must needs be done. Our pilots had gone out on their generous and perilous errand. During those long fluctuations of the equinoctial weather they had hesitated somewhat, delayed some little, then they grew impatient of delay, duty and business called to them aloud, and they resolved to put out, at the risk of some sudden and ruinous gust. I felt that there would be some such; I whispered to myself, "some one perishes now." And too truly was it so.

From a pilot boat, which, in face of the bad weather, put out to rescue a vessel imperilled in the pass, an unfortunate man was swept from the deck, and the boat, herself in utmost peril was unable to lie-to for him. He left three young children and a pregnant wife. What rendered this calamity especially to be regretted, was the fact that this excellent young man, with the generous affection so common among sailors, had married a poor girl rendered incapable of earning her bread by an accident which had mutilated her hands. Alas! How much was she to be pitied, helpless, pregnant, burdened with a young family--and thus suddenly widowed!

A subscription was made for her, and I went to Royan, with my mite towards it. A pilot whom I met there, spoke to me, with real grief and emotion, of the sad accident. "Ah, Sir," said he, "such is our hard profession; it is precisely when wind and sea are most angry, and most threatening, that it is especially incumbent upon us to go forth." The marine commissioner, who keeps the register of the living and the dead of that little community, and who, better than any one else, knows the history and the circumstances of every family there, appeared to me to be exceedingly saddened and anxious. It was plain that he thought, as I did, that this was only the beginning of calamity.

I resumed my journey along the shore, and in the course of it, I had the opportunity to notice and study the dark zone of clouds which hemmed me in on every side, to the extent of, I should judge, not less than eight or ten leagues. On my left was Saintonge, expectant, dull, passive; on my right, Medoc, from which I was separated by the river, lay in a gloomy and misty stillness. Behind me, coming from the west and brooding over the Ocean, was a whole world of cloud and mist, but in my face, and opposing that world of cloud, blew the fresh land-breeze. Sweeping down the course of the Gironde, it seemed that the funereal pall that rose above the Ocean, might be repulsed and dispelled. Still uncertain, I looked behind me to the shoal of Cordovan, from which, pale, fantastic, weird, its tower rose like some spectre that said--"Woe, woe, woe!"

I was not mistaken. I saw quite plainly that the land-breeze not only would be conquered, but that it would be compelled to become the help-mate of its seeming foe. That land-breeze blew quite low over the Gironde, swept away from before it all dwarfish obstacles, but still hovered beneath the high pitched and inky clouds that swept in from the Ocean, and formed for those clouds, as it were, a slippery inclined plane over which they would glide only the more easily and the more swiftly. In a brief space all was still from the landward, every breath died away beneath the thick grey mists; and, unopposed, the upper winds swept the ominous storm-clouds shoreward.

When I reached the vineyards of Vallière, near St. George, hosts of people were busily at work, striving to improve the brief time during which they could hope to labor. The first heavy drops of rain came down, solid and smiting as so much molten lead, and in another instant, one was right glad to find a sheltering roof.

I had seen my full share of tempests. I had read my full share of descriptions of them; and I was prepared to expect anything and everything from their fury and from their power. But nothing that I had either seen or read, had prepared me for the effects of _this_ tempest, so fierce, so long-enduring, so implacable in its unceasing and uniform fury. When, from time to time, we have a pause, even the slightest mitigation, even a change, however slight, in the Tempest's moods and manifestations, our over-distended senses also relax, recuperate, prepare themselves for the next assault. But in this case, night after night, day after day, for six weary and wearying nights and days, the storm-fiend never winked an eye or spared a blow. Fierce, strong, angry, implacable; still the storm-fiend raged, untiring, and unsparing. On mine honor, see ye! it was something to daunt the boldest, to suggest despair to the most hopeful. No thunder, no crashing combat of the positive and negative storm-clouds, no loud and animating crash of the meeting and contending waves. All around was one dark, leaden, sinister, ominous, and mysterious pall of cloud and mist, all above us one black sky, terminated in the horizon by a sickly and leaden line brooding over a slowly heaving and mighty mass of leaden looking sea;--so slowly and monotonously heaving that one almost wished for the coming storm-blast to rouse them into a fierce fury, less terrible, less oppressive, than their horribly oppressive monotony. No poetry of a great terror could oppress one like this most prosaic and dark monotony. Still, still and ever, came from the deep bosom of the coming storm the same terribly monotonous--"Woe, woe! Alas, alas, alas!" Our abode was close upon the shore. We were no mere spectators of that scene; we were in it, of it, sharers, actors, thrilled actors in that sublime scene. Every now and then the wild sea came within twenty feet of us; at every rush, she made our very hearth stone quiver beneath our feet. Happily, the ever-rising and terrible sou' west wind struck our windows only obliquely, or we should have been drowned as we gazed, so vast was the torrent, nay the deluge, which every blast bore upon its mighty bosom, alike from the clouds above, and from the vexed and upheaving Ocean below. In haste, and with no small difficulty, we fastened the shutters, and lighted lamps, that we might at least look coming fate in the face. In those apartments which looked out upon the landward, the noise and the perturbation were no jot or tittle inferior. I wrote on, curious to ascertain whether this wild outburst of nature could in reality oppress and fetter a free intellect, and I thus kept my intellect active, agile, cool, thoroughly in self-command. I wrote, I noted, I compared, I drew mine own conclusions. At length, worn out solely by fatigue, and abstinence, and the want of

"Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep,"

I felt myself deprived of that which I believe to be one of the most important of the writer's powers, the quick, sure, delicate sense of rhythm; I felt that my sentences became inharmonious. That sense of rhythm was the first cord in my being to snap, broken, inharmonious, over-strained,--ruined.

The mighty howling of the Tempest had but one variation, in the weird and strange tones of the winds that pitilessly yet mournfully assailed us. The house in which I was seated was directly in their path; and they therefore assaulted it in utmost fury and apparently on every side at once. Now it was the strong, stern blow of the master, impatient to enter his own house; anon some strong hand tried to dash open the shutters; and again came shrill shrieks down the wide chimneys, wailing for the master's exclusion, fiercely threatening, if we did not admit him, and, at length, furious and mighty attempts to force an entry by dislodging the very roof from its rafters. And all these sounds were occasionally dominated by the sad, deep, melancholy, _Heu, heu! Alas, alas!_ Woe, woe, and Desolation. So immense, so potent, so terrible was that _Heu, heu!_ of chorusing wind and sky, that even the voice of the bold storm-blast seemed to us, in comparison, secondary and mild. At length, the wind managed to clear a way for the rain; our house--I had almost said our craft--began to leak; the roof, opening its seams here and there, admitted the rain in torrents.

Still worse, the fury of the Tempest, by a desperate effort, loosened one of the hinges of a shutter, which still remained closed, but from that moment shook, creaked, shrieked, in the most dismal fashion that you can imagine. To make it fast I had to open the window, and that moment that I did so, though sheltered by the shutter, I felt myself in the very centre of the whirlwind, half-deafened by the frightful force of a sound equal to that of a cannon fired close to one's ear. Through the cracks of the shutter I perceived what gave me a clear notion of the tremendous power that was raging landward, skyward, seaward, horizontally, upward, and downward. The waves, meeting and battling, smote each other so fiercely that they could not descend again. Gust after gust from beneath them, carried them landward; mighty and vast as they were, they were borne landward as though so many feathers, by the upheaving force of those mighty blasts.

How would it have been, if, shutters and windows being driven in, our poor room had _shipped_ one of those vast billows which the storm-wind thus hurled upon the adjacent heaths? We were, in fact, exposed to the strange chance of being shipwrecked on the land. Our house, so close to the shore, might at any moment have its roof or even its upper story carried right away by wind and wave. The villagers often told us that that was, in fact, their nightly thought and their nightly terror, and they advised us to seek a more inland shelter. But we still comforted ourselves with the thought that the longer this tempest had lasted, the sooner it must come to an end; and, to the undoubtedly reasonable advice thus given to us, our reply was, still, "To-morrow, to-morrow."

The overland news that came to us, told of nothing but wrecks, still wrecks. Close by us, on the 30th of October, a vessel from the South Sea, with a crew of thirty hands, foundered, with a loss of all hands and her rich cargo--and this at the very entrance of the roadstead. After having passed through so many storms and calms, after having safely weathered so many rocks and shoals, she had arrived within sight, within hail, almost within touch of a little beach of fine sand, the fine-weather bathing place of delicate and timid women. Well! That seemingly gentle little sandy beach, upheaved into a huge and impassable sandbar--was the grave of the good ship, which ran upon it with frightful force, and was crushed, shivered into small pieces--converted from a "thing of life," into a mutilated corpse. What became of the crew? Not a trace of them has ever been found; they were probably swept, vainly struggling, from the deck, and swallowed up by the sands.

This tragical event very naturally led us to suspect that many similar ones had occurred, elsewhere, and nothing was thought of or talked of but probable calamities. But the sea seemed by no means at the end of her work. We on shore had had quite enough of it. Not so our enraged sea. I saw our pilots, sheltering themselves behind a rocky wall from south-west, keep an anxious look-out seaward, and shake their heads in ominous doubt of what was even yet to come. Happily for them, no craft made her appearance in the offing--or they were there to risk, most probably to lose, their lives. And I, also, looked anxiously out upon that sea, on which I looked no less in hate than in anxiety. True, I was in no real danger, but for that very reason I was all the more despairingly the victim of _ennui_. That sea had a look at once hideous and terrible; her vagaries were as absurd as her strength was irresistible. Nothing there reminded one of the fanciful descriptions of the poets. By a strange contrast, the more I felt myself depressed, and as it were, lifeless, the more vigorously and vehemently did she seem to feel and manifest her life; as though, galvanized by her own furious motion, she had become animated by some strange, fantastic soul. In the general rage, each wave seemed animated by its own special and sentient rage; in the whole uniformity, (paradoxical as it may seem, it, yet, is quite true) there was, as it were some diabolical swarming. Was all this attributable to my worn brain and wearied eyes? Or were the reality and the impression alike true? Those waves reminded me of some terrible _mob_, some horrid rabblement, not of men, but of howling dogs, a myriad of howling and eager dogs, wolves--maddened and furious dogs and wolves. Dogs and wolves, do I say? Let me rather say, a dread concourse of nameless, and detestable, and spectral beasts, eyeless and earless, but with hugely yawning jaws, foaming and eager for blood, blood, still more blood!

Monsters! what more do ye require? Are ye not surfeited with wrecked ships and slain men? Do we not from all sides hear of your horrid triumphs? What more, I ask, do ye demand? And the horrid phantoms answer--"Thy death, universal Death, the destruction of the Earth, a return to black Night and ancient Chaos."