East Wind

I

THE east wind was blowing dry sand from the sand hills over the wet shore, toward the dirty brown wavelets almost a mile away to the west. I came down from the fields, past the great white hotel, awaiting its hundred and fifty Easter guests, and by the steep path to the beach. A small boy was with me, holding my hand. An old cap of mine was on his head, the peak pulled over an ear. Under the cap his hair stuck out like part of an old haystack that cattle have eaten.

When last I walked along this shallow coast, the boy had not been born; and now he was seven years of age, and wanting to do all the things that his father had done. It seemed strange that he should be beside me, because this tract of sand hills, this Arabian desert in miniature made beautiful by the Atlantic, had always been to me a place of the solitary spirit, of aloneness. There is a distinction between loneliness and aloneness. A man might be lonely in the vast white hotel on the cliffs; indeed, walking through it just now, I seemed to be voyaging the Atlantic in the Berengaria two years ago — one of the most desolate experiences of life so far. It was the large windows, with their views of only the sea and the sky, and the huge empty drawing-room which gave a momentary illusion of being on a liner in mid-ocean. Almost I expected the floors to become harder to my footsteps, and the line of the sea to sink with that inevitable slow rising and falling which fills the nauseated landsman, desperately trying to acquire sea legs, with a desire to hide away and die.

This does not imply a dislike of hotels, and inns, and taverns; there’s a warm human spirit beginning to appear in most of them to-day, as there used to be before the invention of the railway. Nearly everyone went by train; the inns, old coaching houses, declined. Now that the roads take so many people on wheels again, the hostels — to use a good old English word — have become alive once more. This particular hostel — or hotel, as it calls itself — was somewhat terrifying by its white vastness and its newness; and besides, we had had only one half pint of beer and a small bottle of lemonade to justify our leaving a six-year-old open-bodied sports car alongside luxurious-looking automobiles which surely belonged to champion golfers, film stars, leaders of dance bands, and others of the supertaxed. We saw some of them sitting at the great windows of the dining room as we slunk past. They looked so small as they gazed, as though half lost, at the blankness of sea and sky instead of the traffic of streets and buildings and the noises of towns they had left. We had some bread and cheese and fruit in a rucksack, and did not envy them behind all that glass, with their central heating and polished floors. We were going with the wind and the sand; we were adventurers, about to journey across the Arabian Desert, not knowing how far we should travel, or in what plight return.

The little seven-year-old by my side, with elflike face and haystack hair, was excited when the yellow skeins of sand began to drive against our shoes. ‘Supposin’ we get buried by a huge enormous storm, what will we do until they find our bones?’ he asked, his eyes alight with the memory of some story in the children’s section of the newspaper he pounced upon and read so eagerly every Saturday morning.

‘Well, if this wind keeps up, the sand hills will cover us completely; they may never find even our bones.’

‘Then you and me will be proper skeletons, won’t us?’ Adding to himself in a musing undertone, ‘I’d bestways eat my apples and chocolate biscuits first.’ And then to me, ‘But the sand hills won’t really move, will they?’

‘They are moving all the time,’ I told him. ‘Look over there at that dune. The sand is simply pouring away from it.’

‘It’s like a waterfall, is n’t it? Oh, some sand got in my mouth. It’s a good thing we did n’t bring Robert after all, is n’t it, because he would not only get sand in his mouth, but in his ears and eyes, would n’t he?’

Robert is his three-year-old brother, who had climbed into the car that morning and gripped the wheel, roaring with rage at not being allowed to come. Robert is a very determined young person. He has long yellow curls over his shoulders, and blue eyes set close together, and will probably be a champion boxer or all-in wrestler; he punched and slapped us soundly and screamed at us as we detached him from the car. And the last I saw of him as I went round the corner in the car was a little child lying huddled up in the lane outside the garage, sobbing with his face in his arms, and shaking his curls as the gentle voice of his mother invited him indoors to have an apple — or rather six apples, for Robert is never content with one of anything, and instantly demands six. ‘Would you like a chocolate bicky?’ I said to him, finding him already at the wheel of the car, and trying to start the engine. ‘No — six,’ he promptly replied, and when I gave him one he threw it on the ground. ‘I’ll have six,’ he decided, as the farmer’s dog crunched up the biscuit. So he had six — which means one in each hand.

II

Yes, it was a good thing the threeyear-old was not with us, for, as we walked on, the sand began to stream faster over the shore from the ragged sand hills. The white warren on the cliffs behind us, whenever we looked over our shoulder, was always a little bit smaller. We were alone on the shore of the world.

It was a rasping east wind, and it was returning the sand, which a thousand centuries of waves had ground from rock and pebble and shale, to the ocean again. Originally this coast was part of the old river bed. When the river moved away to the south, trees sprang up from acorns and other seeds brought down by winter floods on shoal and mud bank. It is said that a forest stood here in ancient times, where moose and red deer roamed, preyed upon by wild dogs, and wolves, and dreadful sabretoothed tigers. Less than three miles away, just across the river estuary to which we were walking, the carbonized roots of some of these trees can still be seen at low tide, embedded in sand, and men digging there have found the bones of these animals.

The east wind was a destructive wind; it was trying to tear down the sand hills which the west wind, from the sea, had piled up. The southwest is a genial, boisterous wind, which adds to the sand hills until they are smoothed by the pouring force and the weight of its swift sea airs. The hillocks and slopes are bound by marram grass, with creeping roots and long rounded hollow stems which sway and shake and ripple in the wind, and draw aimless arcs and circles with their sharp points drooping on the sand. All winds are the enemies of the marram grass. When the southwest gale drives the long rollers in from the west, then the roots of the marram grasses are exposed, to hang ragged down a sandy face or cliff which the day before was a long smooth slope where the naked feet of pilgrims had sunk to the ankle at every step in hot sand. For usually it is in summer that these sand hills are visited, when all sense of time and place is lost, and a man becomes a spirit of sea and air and sky, feeling the everlastingness of life while larks sing shrilly overhead and the bones and skulls of rabbits lying in the desert are of the incandescent whiteness of eternity.

We walked on, and came to the stump of a tree lying in the sand and playing to itself a strange tinkling music, which was puzzling until we went round the other side of it and found hundreds of barnacles clinging there, their dried and shrunken pipes and fragile gray shells faintly clashing in the wind. While the boy listened to this elfin music there came another sound in the wind, like a flung stone whimpering across the ice of a frozen lake; and we saw a small gray and white bird with sharp wings flying round us in a wide circle. It was a ringed plover. As we walked on we saw its mate running before us among the stones and loose sand above the tide line, then standing in grave silence to watch us, before running on again to draw us away from her eggs laid somewhere in a slight hollow amid the stones. The boy wanted to find them, so that he could write in his diary that he had found the third nest of his life; but the eggs were the color of the sand and the stones, and we might look all day and all the next day and never find them.

The timbers of a wooden ship were embedded in the sands before us, and, seeing them, the boy forgot about the ringed plover and went forward to see his first wreck, which he studied gravely, before suggesting that we should come back here in the summer with spades and buckets and dig for the gold which, he declared, might be buried beneath it. For, he said, it might have been a pirate ship, might n’t it? Anyhow, he thought, he would like to bathe by it in the summer and so we must come back even if it was n’t a pirate ship after all. And we must bring Robert to see it, must n’t we, and also all the other children.

III

The hotel was now a small elongated white honeycomb. Perhaps most of the diners had moved into the other room, and were watching the sea and sky through other windows, and wondering, a little wistfully, if they too ought not to go down to the sands by the sea and defy the wind. The thought reminded us that we had not yet eaten.

So we moved toward the shelter of the sand hills, to find a place out of the wind. We stopped to watch how it had strewn dry sand behind the stones and sticks lying on the shore, gradually filling up the idle or windless spaces before and behind the obstacles, thus giving each the effect of a streamline. We found a sandy cliff where the sun was warm and the wind did not eddy, and scratched ourselves holes to sit in; and then, opening our rucksack, we drank milk and ate our food. We were still some way from the estuary, where we hoped to see salmon boats, but the boy said he was not tired, so after our meal we walked on again. While walking toward the sea to find a firm foothold, we saw a beetle hurrying down wind as fast as it could go, to find shelter.

‘But,’ cried the boy, staring at it, ‘if it goes on this way it will get to the sea and then it will have to turn round and run all the way back against the wind. ’T is one mile there, and one mile back; that will be two miles.’ He gave this information and stared at me with round eyes.

‘Let’s turn it back,’ I suggested. But at the touch of a finger up went its tail, and the wind caught that little black sail and skidded it a couple of yards before it found its feet again, to hurry on to escape its enemy, the wind.

‘Well, perhaps the sea trout will find it and eat it, and that’s something,’ said the boy. So we walked on, the beetle forgotten, and came to another wooden wreck, half sunk away in sand. We passed a little red tower standing at the edge of the sand hills, called by sailors the Blinker, because at night the oil lamp in its lantern winks toward the dangerous sand bars at the mouth of the estuary, to give pilots a bearing.

It was obvious that the Blinker had been needed on that coast, for after another half mile we came across a third wreck bedded in the sand, with seaweed hanging on its timbers from which the iron nails had long since rusted.

The sand was now uneven, and giving way to patches of shingle, telling that the tides ran strongly here. Soon we saw the northern shore of the estuary in front of us, and two small boats with men waiting at the edge of the sea. We hurried forward, because these were salmon boats and the tide had turned and they would not be able to fish much longer. Each boat had a crew of four, and while one man held the rope on shore, the boat was rowed in a semicircle by two men, while the fourth man threw the net over the stern. The boat returned to the shore when the two hundred yards of net had been dropped, and then began the slow haul-in against the tide. The wind was very cold now that we had stopped walking, and we helped to haul. And then, as the tidedistorted arc of the net grew smaller, we stood apart and watched.

IV

There was a swirl as the seine or purse came near the shore, and at once the four men seemed to change their natures, and indeed their nationality, becoming almost Spanish in the quick and eager way they spoke. It was said that many of the fishermen of the village across the water had Spanish blood in them, from ancestors who had been wrecked on this coast after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The skipper told them to take it easy so that the heel rope, weighted with lead, should come in slowly along the bottom and give no chance for the fish to escape. The purse of the net was lifted up on to the shore, and in it two salmon slapping about. One man put his boot under a fish and kicked it away from the edge of the sea, where it slapped the sand, and, heaving itself upright on its pectoral fins, tried to writhe away down to the water. Meanwhile one of the crew of the other boat fifty yards away — the net of which was being hastily repiled — had thrown a wooden billet through the air, and with this the fish were thumped on the base of the skull and killed.

Salmon usually come into fresh water in schools, each school following a leader; and so as soon as the net of the other boat had been shaken out and repiled they shot another draft. One of the men gave a shout, having seen a fish leap near the shore. The sweeps were bent as the boat cleft the water. When the net was hauled in, there was one fish in it, about eighteen pounds in weight. It was a female fish, like the other two. Female salmon usually come into the rivers together in spring; they are more slender and graceful in shape than the males, with smaller heads, and their underjaws have not the kyp or hook which males have. When taken in the net they seemed to struggle with only part of their power, as though they were still dreamy with the depths of ocean pale green travelers from the rocky glooms of undersea twilight, having come hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles across the Atlantic. The boy whispered to me that perhaps the fishermen would give us a salmon if we told them they might be the little smolts, no longer than a man’s hand, which we had fed two years before in the river at home, before they had gone down to the sea; for there is a pool above the bridge in the deer park where every year hundreds of trout and samlets await the daily showers of artificial food.

‘But the fishermen must sell them to buy food and clothes for their children,’ I told him. ‘Now for that big fish there, eighteen pounds weight, they will get thirty-six shillings.’

‘Thirty-six shillings!’ he repeated. ‘Why, that’s an awful lot of money, is n’t it? They must be rich, must n’t they?’

It was explained that perhaps it was the first fish the boat had taken that week, and also that there was a license of five pounds to be paid every season, which lasted only from April to the end of August. Most of the fishermen have a hard time to live.

‘Well,’ the little boy whispered in my ear, ‘I have got some pennies at home, and perhaps we could find out if they don’t catch any more fish and we could give them my pennies, could n’t we?’

The wind was blowing colder, the sun was behind clouds, the fishermen went home on the tide, and we went all the way back along the sands, the boy’s feet getting heavier and heavier, apples and biscuits and figs eaten, and all the milk drunken, until the only thing to do was to get on Father’s back and dream of coming here again in the summer, when the wind was gone and the sand was shining, and dig for that treasure underneath the wreck with all the other children. Return we shall, to find our treasure in the silver of the waves and the golden glance of the sun.