Island Magic by Elizabeth Goudge

  Island Magic (eBook edition)

  Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC

  P. O. Box 3473

  Peabody, Massachusetts 01961-3473

  eBook ISBN 978-1-61970-866-2

  ISLAND MAGIC. Copyright © 1934 by Elizabeth Goudge.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Due to technical issues, this eBook may not contain all of the images or diagrams in the original print edition of the work. In addition, adapting the print edition to the eBook format may require some other layout and feature changes to be made.

  First eBook edition — April 2016

  Contents

  Copyright page

  Dedication

  Poem

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Dedicated to

  my Mother

  The author’s thanks are due to the compilers of “Guernsey Folk Lore” from which the Island songs have been taken.

  Only the Island which we sow

  (A world without the world) so far

  From present wounds, it cannot show

  An ancient scar.

  White peace, the beautifull’st of things,

  Seems here her everlasting rest

  To fix, and spreads her downy wings

  Over the nest.

  As when great Jove’s usurping reign

  From the great plagued world did her exile,

  And tied her with a golden chain

  To one blest isle;

  Which in a sea of plenty swam

  And turtles sang on every bough;

  A safe retreat to all that came

  As ours is now.

  Sir Richard Fanshawe.

  Chapter 1

  I

  THE little fishing boat rounded the buoy and came in sight of the Island. She was a fat little white-winged boat, resembling an overfed baby seagull as she came skimming along, coquetting with the little waves, dipping up and down with an air of gay contentment.

  She had reason for her gaiety. It was fine summer weather and the sea had been kind to her, it was evening and a harbour bright with the sunset was waiting to welcome her home. She had reason, too, for looking fat, for her interior was full to bursting with fishing tackle, fish, three men, one small boy, and a dog.

  The small boy had caught nothing, but he did not care. Sufficient for him that Hélier Falliot, Guilbert Herode, and Jacquemin Gossilin had let him come with them in their boat for a whole blissful Saturday afternoon; had let him pretend, for four glorious hours, that he was one of their company, a fisherman of the Island, rich in strange oaths and tarry smells. Every rise and dip of the boat, every spurt of foam as she cleaved her way through the clear green water, carried him nearer to awkward explanations with parents who disapproved of Hélier, Guilbert, and Jacquemin, but he did not care; for four blessed hours he had run away, he had been free, a man and a sailor. With deep happiness he spat over the edge of the boat in imitation of Guilbert, and noted with satisfaction that he could spit quite a yard farther than this time last week. Under his breath he practised the new oaths he had learnt from Hélier, and felt within him that glow of delight that comes with the acquisition of knowledge.

  He was a nice small boy, this Colin du Frocq, and, when clean, good to look upon. He was small for his eight years, exquisitely lithe and slender, dark-haired and brown-eyed, with a fair skin tanned by the sun to a warm golden brown, the colour, so said his eldest sister, who loved him, of the nicest kind of brown boiled egg. To add to his other attractions he had little pointed white teeth like a squirrel’s, a very red tongue, whose tip was always to be seen peeping out at the side of his mouth when he was engaged in thought, small ears with the faintest suggestion of a fawn in their shape, and a dimple. He was now curled up in the stern of the boat, sleepy and happy and smelling abominably of fish. Beside him, scratching its underneath, sat his dog, Maximilian, a plumy-tailed, jet black animal of no known breed.

  Now they were slipping along beside the Island. It lay on the sea like a sleeping animal, the rocks at its northern end stretched out like claws. Then gradually, as it emerged from the sunset mist, trees, houses, churches and forts became faintly visible. In the half light it took on the semblance of a faerie land, a withdrawn, unreal country, a mirage in the midst of the sea, showing a little and no more of its beauty, holding the rest jealously locked away. Leaning his head on his arm, sleepily dabbling one lean brown hand in the water, Colin watched as the Island permitted the beauties of its coastline to appear one by one, held them for a moment of time before his eyes, and then, as the boat sped on, drew them back once more into the mist.

  First came the long, low levels of the northern sands, golden as a ripe cornfield, edged with the silver and lilac of sea-poppy and sea-lavender, melting imperceptibly into rolling wind-swept stretches of common. Here and there, peeping from behind the shelter of grey-green hillocks, were cottages, their walls washed with white or rose colour, roofed with grey slate. On the highest point of the common were the stark, upstanding cromlechs, built, some said, by the men of old as tombs for their dead, though the Island peasants vowed they were raised by the fairies as storehouses for their gold. In either case they were as old as time and as haunted—no Island-born peasant would go near them after dark.

  After the common civilization began. The long sea-wall stood grimly fronting the waves, while behind its rampart were heaped the houses of St. Pierre, the Town of the Island. These were higgledy-piggledy houses, some high, some low, built of weather-stained grey granite, their uneven roofs rose-red against the sky. In the midst of them, like a hen amongst her brood, towered the tower of the Town Church. Beyond the town the country began again, but it was a very different country from the wild waste at the northern end of the Island. Here, beyond St. Pierre, were little rocky bays and above them rounded hills tree-covered and parting, now and again, to show green meadows and prosperous farms hid in their hollows. But Colin gave but a glance towards these woods and hills, for Hélier had swung the boat round and they were entering the Harbour.

  The three men had been chattering hard in the Island patois, gesticulating with scarred hands, dark eyes flashing in their weather-beaten faces, but as they entered the Harbour they fell silent, the Island dominating them, the Harbour gathering them in. This Harbour of St. Pierre was not strictly beautiful, but it was perhaps the dearest part of the Island to the Islanders. It stood to them for home after tedious journeyings to inferior islands, for refuge after nights of storm. On one side was the grey mass of the fort, on the other the pier. These two were stretched out like arms, and within their shelter were security and calm water.

  Hélier brought the boat round beside a flight of stone steps carpeted with green seaweed, shouted, flung a rope, sprang lightly out, his bare toes squelching on the wet seaweed. Jacquemin and Guilbert, the spell broken, continued their argument where it had left off, the while they hauled down their sail, disentangled the boy and the dog from the fish and ejected them kindly but swiftly by the scruffs of their necks. Colin stumbled up the steps, slipping and sprawling on their slimy surface, then turned courteously to thank his hosts for their hospitality, for Colin, like all the Islanders, had a beautiful dignified politeness, as natural and unstudied as the so
ng of a bird or the bending of the corn. The three men paused to smile at him, their teeth flashing in their dark faces, their gesticulating hands expressing the amiability of their feelings towards him, then with a final grin and flicker of the fingers they dismissed him into the sunset and became garrulously absorbed in fish. Their talk, rapid, dramatic, rising and falling with a soft musical inflection, drifted after Colin as he skipped and hopped along the Harbour wall with Maximilian at his heels. It would drift through his dreams all night like a purling stream, and the memory of it, when in after years he became a wanderer on the face of the earth, would catch at his heart and make him sick with longing for the sound of the sea lapping against the Harbour wall, for the smell of the boats and the seaweed, and the sight of St. Pierre in the summer dusk. But Colin the boy, running along the wall, knew nothing of the memories of fugitive beauty that would haunt Colin the man; he only knew, as he paused suddenly on one leg and looked at the loveliness around him, that the Harbour looked jolly and that though he felt happy he had a curious pain in his stomach. He had so recently joined the suffering and joyous company of those who comprehend beauty that he did not connect these three facts. This initiatory pang confused him; gazing round him at the familiar scene he wondered why it hurt. There were the Town and the Harbour just as usual, but yet not just as usual. He had not seen them before at just this hour of sunset. The grey granite walls were flushed with a strange golden light, the roofs were shadowed, dim, the protectors of queer mysteries. Little lights twinkled up and down the streets in the shop windows, and the woods against the sky were black. The masts of the ships, black too in the evening light, were etched like the bare trunks of winter trees against a sky of palest translucent green barred with apricot and pearl grey. The waters of the Harbour, holding a bright remembrance of sunlight on the crest of each little ripple, reflected the pale colours of the sky and the dipping wings of the seagulls. Salt and tar and seaweed gave a delicious tang to the air, and the sounds of the Harbour, subdued by the evening hush, seemed to come from very far away. . . . A world of colour and light, transparent and unreal. . . . A world at the bottom of the sea. . . . A beauty so fragile that it would shiver into nothingness at a touch. . . . Somewhere a door banged and a man shouted. . . . It shivered into a thousand splintered rainbow fragments round Colin and his dog, and the two of them went careering towards the town, that queer momentary pang forgotten.

  II

  Past the Town Church Colin took a short cut up a steep, cobbled street that went twisting up the hill like an intoxicated corkscrew. He adored La Rue Clubin and went up it at every possible opportunity; partly because he was forbidden to go near it and partly because its noise and colour fascinated him. Maximilian, too, considered it a delectable spot. Nowhere else on the Island were the smells so rich and so varied, nowhere else was there so large an assortment of mangy cats. On a Saturday evening La Rue Clubin was particularly attractive, for the whole length of it was lined with booths, lit after dark by flaring gas jets and laden with unimaginable glories; great sticks of striped peppermint rock, boiled sweets of all colours of the rainbow, piles of live lobsters and crabs, fish of every possible variety, vegetables, scarlet petticoats, yellow sunbonnets, more crabs, more sugar sweets, all piled along the gutters in a wealth of smell and colour.

  Over the stalls the top storeys of the old tumbledown houses jutted out so far that they nearly met overhead, making La Rue Clubin almost like a tunnel, and confining the noise as though in an echoing cavern. And what a noise! The inhabitants of the tumbledown houses, the very poorest inhabitants of the Island, all issued forth of a Saturday night to buy and sell, to cheat and shout and sing and swear. The women, with green and yellow handkerchiefs tied over their heads and blue aprons over their rags, clattered up and down the cobbles, pouring out conversation. Their men-folk, in blue jerseys and baggy trousers patched in all conceivable colours, shouted themselves hoarse as they brandished crabs aloft or weighed out haricot beans and pink and purple sweets. Sailors from all parts of the globe strolled up and down, pipes in their mouths, gold rings in their ears, their eyes, keen from so much gazing on sun and sea, darting here and there in search of a pretty face or a cheap drink. Every language under the sun was talked in La Rue Clubin, but the Island French preponderated, rising and falling, echoing and swelling like the sea against the enclosing walls. Now, in this drab twentieth century, La Rue Clubin has been condemned as a disgrace, rebuilt, cleaned and turned into a respectable thoroughfare, but on the twentieth of August, 1888, when Colin du Frocq was eight years old, it was neither respectable nor clean, it was merely a wonder and a glory.

  Colin threaded his way slowly through the jostling crowd, his mouth and eyes wide open, an expression of beatific delight on his face, absorbing the joys of La Rue Clubin through every pore. One hand was in his pocket clutching his eight doubles. The Island double was equivalent to one-eighth of a penny in English money, and two of them were presented to Colin every Saturday morning by his father; it was all the wealth he ever had and he saved them up until he had a pennyworth to spend on his beloved mother. Last time he had purchased her a white sugar mouse with pink eyes and a string tail, and she had told him she considered it too beautiful to eat just yet, she would keep it for a little while longer on her mantelpiece, where she could see it as she lay in bed. To her husband she said, “I can’t eat the thing. It is like the cup of water that was brought to David at the cave of Adullam. Perhaps a little later on you could manage it, darling, your teeth are better than mine. . . .” But the mouse was still there. This Saturday Colin purposed to buy her some sweets from the stall at the far end of La Rue Clubin, one of each colour, purple, red, cream, lemon, green, and rose colour, and the rest the striped pepperminty sort that made your mouth feel lovely and cold, as though you had been eating frozen snow. If she asked him where he had bought them he would say “From Le Manouri in La Rue Grand Mielles,” and she would smile and say “Le Manouri’s sweets are so wholesome. One knows they are clean. Not like those disgusting things from La Rue Clubin.” Then she would pick out a lemon-coloured globule from the bag, pop it in her pretty mouth, crunch, and say, “Yes, Le Manouri’s special flavour, I’d know it anywhere.” And her son would smile at her like an angel straight from heaven.

  Colin had not at this period of his life, nor at any other, the smallest objection to telling lies. He liked things to be pleasant and agreeable all round, and he had found from painful experience that the giving of truthful answers to direct questions bearing on his recent whereabouts and behaviour invariably led to unpleasantness. Therefore in conversation he aimed always at giving pleasure rather than accurate information, and was throughout his life universally beloved.

  Mère Tangrouille, seated behind her piles of sweets at the far end of La Rue Clubin, surveyed the small boy who stood planted in front of her, his legs wide apart, his head thrown back, the light of battle in his eye, rather as though he were confronting some wild beast. And, indeed, Mère Tangrouille needed some confronting. She was enormous. She was so large that she was completely circular. She had no neck and no waist and was literally as broad as she was long. She always wore dark green with a black bonnet perched on top of her head, and was for ever knitting a large red woollen muffler. Whether it was the same muffler and like Penelope she undid her work each night and started again the next morning, or whether she knitted hundreds of different mufflers, it was impossible to say. Mère Tangrouille’s temper was uncertain. If she had drunk just a little she smiled benignly on Colin, her little black eyes twinkling in her scarlet face, added an extra lemon drop to his pennyworth and called him a little angel on his way to heaven; but if her potations had been heavy she stormed and raved at him, relegated his everlasting soul to a destination in the contrary direction and, did he dare so much as to touch a boiled sweet with the tip of his finger, her great arms shot out like the claws of a crab and dealt him such a box on the ear that stars leaped and danced all up and down La Rue Clu
bin. But Colin was not afraid of her. He was never afraid of anything. His very wish to have things pleasant and agreeable made him able to twist people and things and places with their pleasant side outward. He had done this to Mère Tangrouille. When she was possessed of a demoniacal temper he confronted it, beat it down by sheer courage, pushed it away, and was left with just Mère Tangrouille, a very fine figure of a woman indeed, and his friend. But to-night there was no need for courage, Mère Tangrouille was butter and honey. She beamed at him, all her chins trembled with welcome, her eyes snapped with delight and she uttered soft crooning noises with her head cocked slightly to one side. Colin relaxed his tense attitude. The light of battle died from his eyes and its place was taken by the particular twinkle which he kept for Mère Tangrouille. He brought his feet together and made her a little bow. He inquired politely after the health of Mère Tangrouille—after the health of her cat—after the health of her various disreputable relations. He commented upon the state of the weather and the state of trade, and finally he produced his doubles from the recesses of his pocket and indicated his choice in the matter of boiled sweets.

  “Ah, the little cabbage! Ah, the little cherub!” crooned Mère Tangrouille. Her dirty fat fingers hovered over the sweets and she picked out one purple, one red, one cream, one green, one rose, and four striped balls, then, looking up to wink at Colin, she added two reds and a green as a gift of love. She placed the treasures in a pink bag, handed them to Colin and then, bending sideways with a little chuckle, held out her arms. This was a part of the proceedings that Colin did not relish, but he had got two reds and a green for nothing, and he had already discovered that in life all delight must be paid for in one way or another, and that the wise pay without flinching. Running round the stall he suffered himself to be gathered to Mère Tangrouille’s bosom, to be enveloped by her large person, with its aroma of beer and peppermint, and finally to be kissed upon the mouth. . . . If his mother had seen him she would have died of shock. . . . Colin returned the kiss, grinned at the old lady, withdrew a little hastily so that the performance could not be repeated, and pursued his way.