Island Magic

by Elizabeth Goudge

  The slope ended in a flat-topped rock and here Michelle lay down, her chin cupped in her lean brown hands, her feet in their shabby shoes kicking behind her. Below was a sheer and terrifying drop to the gulls’ bay.

  There was nothing to be seen as yet, but from the fog came weird cries and screeching and bursts of mocking laughter, and the beating of unseen wings. Michelle laughed aloud. In spite of their eeriness she loved the gulls, and this watchman’s tower over their especial bay was her favourite haunt.

  In the winter the gulls lived in the harbour, where they found shelter from the storms and food among the refuse, but in early February flocks of them migrated to La Baie des Mouettes. The males came first and when, waking in the early morning, the children at Bon Repos heard their screaming, they knew that spring was not far behind. Six weeks later the males were followed by the females and amid scenes of general rejoicings most edifying to behold they settled themselves to the business of nest building. Under the softening influences of domesticity the cries grew less harsh and soft crooning notes were heard amid the screams. When the first babies were hatched the gulls began to laugh, and their ha, ha, ha, ha, echoed among the rocks all the summer through.

  This morning it seemed to Michelle that there was something vaguely terrifying in the screams and laughter and in the middle of her amusement she shivered a little. Had they screeched and laughed like that a year ago when La Bonne Espérance was wrecked in a fog on the rocks outside the bay and went down with all hands? Had there been a wreck last night and had they laughed? Horrible to hear such sounds for your last on earth . . . those and the sound of sucking waves.

  It was a relief to Michelle when a sudden rent in the fog told her that the sun was conquering. She watched spellbound. Slowly, very slowly, the tops of jagged rocks appeared, then a stretch of green water, then a patch of early purple heather growing just below her, then a flurry of white wings as two quarrelling gulls flapped the fog away from them and appeared as though framed in a picture. Now trailing white scarves of mist drifted up to her, curled themselves round her rock and disappeared over the foxgloves, and now, quite suddenly, the sun was out and the whole bay below lay bright and clear and sparkling. Each little wet pebble on the beach shone like a diamond and the large flat rocks by the sea’s edge were patched with bright green seaweed, as though the mermaids had flung rugs over them before they sat down to dabble their tails in the little ripples that whispered between them. The sea, where it lay over beds of seaweed, was wine-dark as the sea round Michelle’s little town, while over the sand it was an intense blue-green. Michelle could even see the scarlet anemones in the pools and the yellow lichen staining the rocks below the heather clumps. And everywhere were the gulls. Soaring, dipping, swerving, diving, backwards and forwards, up and down, round and round. Their wings seemed to trace a pattern over the lovely scene, mist it over with a film of white feathers, seemed to gather all the colour together and make of it one lovely gleaming jewel.

  “Mother’s opal again,” thought Michelle.

  The thought of the opal brought her back to the thought of the two worlds and her own particular problem. How was she to live in two worlds at once and be happy in both? How could she reconcile her interior life with her outward life so that she did not immediately lose her temper when one impinged upon the other? It must be done somehow. She couldn’t go through life alternating between ecstasy and bad temper, it was too exhausting and too trying for one’s family. How was it to be done? She did not know. She would have to find out. She wondered if her father knew. But if he did know he wouldn’t be able to help her very much. Everyone had to find out how to live for themselves—she had discovered that much already. Other people could point the way but one had to tread it for oneself. She sat up and stretched herself. Anyway, she could not lose her temper to-day, the world was much too beautiful. She was safe to be virtuous to-day. Beauty made her exquisitely happy and she was always good when she was happy.

  She turned from the shimmering sea to look at the golden gorse and the regal foxgloves spiring up against the sky. Far up a lark sang, crazy with ecstasy, and, wonder of wonders, on a thistle nearby was a goldfinch singing his squeaky little song, twisting his slim body from side to side with the motion of a born coquette. He was mocking at the gorse bushes—telling them that his burnished helmet was as good as theirs any day. . . . How she loved these things! Each scrap and shred of beauty was a feather in wings that bore her soaring up and up towards the lark at heaven’s gate. Keats began singing in her mind again.

  “Feel we these things?—that moment have we

  passed into a sort of oneness, and our state

  Is like a floating spirit’s.”

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Glories infinite

  Haunt us, till they become a cheering light

  Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast

  That whether there be shine or gloom o’ercast

  They always must be with us or we die.”

  Rocking herself backwards and forwards she began thinking, her thoughts slipping easily into her mind, without struggle or effort, as they had done in her dream. She was getting there . . . she was going to solve the problem . . . unity . . . oneness . . . she must be bound so fast to beauty that she had it with her both in the shine of the little town and the gloom of her bodily life. . . . But what was this winged beauty? . . . The sea and the gorse and the goldfinch were only feathers in her pinions. . . . What was she herself? . . . Beauty is truth. . . . Yet the orbed drop of light that hung at the top of the steps of thought in her dream had been love. . . . Were love and truth and beauty the same? . . . Just different facets of the orbed drop? . . . What was that drop of light and how could she melt into its radiance? . . . She realized with a pang that she had only come round in a circle to the earlier thoughts of the morning; she had got nowhere . . . not yet . . . but in a moment she would . . . just let her sit still for a moment longer. . . .

  “Michelle! Michelle!”

  Peronelle and Jacqueline were racing towards her, waving their arms above their heads, their black-stockinged legs twinkling as they bounded over tussocks of wild thyme. Peronelle, bursting with her usual attack of early morning exuberance, seized Michelle, dragged her up the slope on to level ground and swung her round. Jacqueline, with the best of intentions, pulled her pig-tail. Michelle wrenched herself free savagely. Idiots! Fools! How dare they seek her out in her special sanctum? Was there nowhere on earth where she could be by herself? Was even La Baie des Mouettes to be desecrated by her commonplace family? Her lovely train of thought had been leading her up and up, in a moment she would have got there, and now—it was all shattered. She felt sick with rage.

  “Sals petits cochons! Why can’t you leave me alone?” she stormed. “Sals petits cochons! You’re never to follow me here again. Do you hear? La Baie des Mouettes is mine, mine! I don’t want you here. I don’t want you!”

  Peronelle, used as she was to Michelle’s sudden rages, was completely taken aback. To have “sal petit cochon” hurled at your head was, for an Islander, an unforgivable insult. The remark was forbidden in the du Frocq family. She went a little white and felt as though a butterfly was fluttering in her stomach.

  Jacqueline, always morbidly attracted by the seamy side of life, was pleasurably interested.

  “Who taught you that?” she asked eagerly. “Did grandpapa? What does it mean, exactly? Why is it so insulting?”

  Peronelle recovered herself and proceeded to lose her own temper thoroughly and enjoyably.

  “Michelle, you’re perfectly horrid. You want your mouth washed out with soap and water—that’s what you want. Talking like that in front of Jacqueline! You’re worse than grandpapa’s coachman. And you, Jacqueline, wanting to know what it means, you’ve a nasty mind. Of course, she didn’t learn it from grandpapa. He never uses bad language except at the coachman. She picked it up from Colin. Sh
e ought to be ashamed of learning bad habits from a boy like that. Come along home, both of you. I’m ashamed of you. Talking about dirty pigs on a lovely morning like this—” she paused for breath.

  A lovely morning? Despair seized poor Michelle. Only a moment ago she had felt she was safe not to lose her temper in the midst of so much beauty. Beauty? It was around her but it wasn’t in her. She wasn’t beautiful, she who had wanted to be bound fast to beauty, she was a dirty, vulgar, ugly little prig. She began to sob.

  “What’s the matter now?” demanded Peronelle, exasperated, “and why have you got your everyday frock on? It’s Sunday.”

  Glancing up through her tears Michelle noted miserably that her sisters were arrayed in all the starched superiority of Sunday. Their stiff white muslin frocks, gathered into toby frills at the neck and wrists, were worn over coloured sateen petticoats, Peronelle’s pink and Jacqueline’s buttercup yellow, and their curls were tied at the napes of their necks with large bows to match. The sight of them added to Michelle’s misery. She had forgotten it was Sunday. She hated Sunday. She had to wear her best frock and she always felt a fool in her best frock. She had to go to church, and kneel on a hard wooden stool that hurt her bony knees and listen to a stupid sermon, when she might have been out on the cliffs in the sunshine. She had, in company with her starched family, to have Sunday dinner with grandpapa in his town house, and she hated both grandpapa and the sensations of fullness induced by his dinners of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding followed by apricot tart and Stilton cheese and plum cake. Above all, she hated the hypocrisy of the Victorian Sunday—grandpapa bending over in his pew and blowing piously into his top hat to impress his patients, when everyone knew he was as shocking an old heathen as ever lived—and people putting on their best clothes out of sheer vanity and then pretending it was all done to please God. If she were God she’d send a downpour of rain every single Sunday to take the starch out of their dresses and turn the roses in their bonnets to pulp.

  Without a glance at her sisters she trailed miserably homewards, sobbing as she went.

  Jacqueline followed, giving little hops and skips, and singing softly under her breath. It was one of her happy mornings—she was happy sometimes. She had woken up apparently healed of the tetanus and on such a lovely morning death and the grave seemed very far away. Moreover, she had her best frock on and she knew she looked sweet in her best frock. The Jacqueline she had seen in the glass this morning looked exactly like the Jacqueline she had created in her imagination. Pink cheeks and yellow and white frock. She had looked like sunlight and roses—much, much prettier than Peronelle, whose pale face pink did not really suit. She was undoubtedly the prettiest of the family. So utterly at peace with the world did her self-satisfaction make her that Michelle’s sobs troubled her not at all—though she still wanted to know why “sal petit cochon” should be so insulting.

  Peronelle, on the other hand, now that her anger had evaporated, was terribly troubled. She walked along with her golden eyes dark with sorrow and her heart heavy. At every heave of Michelle’s thin shoulders she felt as though someone had stuck a dagger into her. It was no good asking Michelle what was the matter for Michelle could never explain her troubles. Michelle and Jacqueline were always suffering from mysterious griefs that Peronelle could not understand. Peronelle herself was always completely happy unless anyone she loved had a pain, when she was completely miserable. But what there was for anyone to be unhappy about if they hadn’t got a pain Peronelle simply could not understand. The world, minus pain, seemed to her a completely delectable spot. Michelle, she supposed, had a pain in her soul. But why? Peronelle never had pains in her soul. They were to her wholly incomprehensible and rather silly. But she could not endure her darling Michelle to be unhappy and, greatly daring, for Michelle would box her ears as likely as not, she slipped up to her and put her arm round her waist.

  But Michelle had had all the stuffing knocked out of her, and she did not box Peronelle’s ears. Instead, she flung both arms round her and kissed her passionately on the left ear. By the time they reached the lane they were walking all three abreast, with arms entwined, singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in three entirely different keys—none of the du Frocqs were musical.

  The Christian soldiers, however, progressed no further than the third verse, for as they came to Bon Repos Colin shot out from the archway, with the speed of a stone from a catapult, shouting.

  “There’s been a wreck! Last night in the fog! Somewhere right out at sea. They’re all drowned, as likely as not, Sophie says. There’s not been a wreck for six months. Jupiter, what fun! A wreck, I tell you. A wreck, a wreck! Hurrah! Hurrah!”

  II

  It is necessary to go back an hour in this family chronicle in order to introduce Colette.

  The closing of the door, as Michelle crept out, had awakened Colette. She found herself, on waking, right at the bottom of the bed with the blankets over her head. This, however, did not disturb her, for it was where she always found herself on waking. No matter how firmly she was placed at night with her head on the pillow, the clothes turned down to the level of her chest and her arms outside, by morning she had reached the bottom of the bed. How it was she did not die of asphyxiation has never been explained.

  Finding herself awake and in the best of health she scrambled up the bed and emerged at the top like a chicken coming out of an egg. Her yellow curls, slightly damp from the night’s immersion, increased her resemblance to a newly-hatched chicken.

  She scaled her pillow and sat on top of it to rub the sleep out of her large goggle eyes with her fat fists. Then she laughed. Her laugh was not beautiful but as a mirth-provoker it was most effective. It started as a low rumble in her tummy, travelled up her throat with the sound of a soda-water syphon ejecting fluid, and arrived in her mouth as a series of shrill squeaks. . . . She had a habit of laughing when she was quite by herself which was most uncanny. This particular specimen brought Peronelle in from the next room. Peronelle was giggling. Everybody giggled when they heard Colette laugh.

  It was Peronelle’s morning duty to help Colette perform her toilet. They both enjoyed this enormously for both of them, young as they were, took the deepest interest in the adornment of their persons. They were very alike. Both had yellow hair and merry eyes, and the sunny disposition that came to them from Rachell, but while Peronelle was slim and dainty as a fairy, Colette was as circular as an apple dumpling. So stout was she that she had bracelets of fat round her wrists like a little baby, and rolls of it in the back of her neck like a young pig. . . . Her appetite was something startling.

  In one thing only did she resemble her father and Michelle. She had, unperceived as yet, the gift of thought. But while in them thought was a rather torturing joy, a thing of conflict rather than rest, in her it was a gift of placid and happy wonder. She had another gift, peculiar to herself, the gift of piety. She was amazingly pious. Rachell was rather worried about it. None of her other children were pious—quite the contrary. Surely it was a bad thing to be too good too early? She feared a reaction would set in, and she preferred children to be bad first, at the spanking age, and good later, rather than good first and bad later. However, she consoled herself by reflecting that it would be difficult for any child as fat as Colette to be really bad—she had not the agility necessary for running away.

  “May I get up, ’Nelle?” inquired Colette, bouncing solidly on her pillow. She never, good little angel, did anything without permission.

  “You may, duckie,” said Peronelle. She took Colette in her arms and, staggering and panting beneath the colossal weight, carried her to the washstand. Colette was perfectly able to walk everywhere by herself, and the exercise would have got her fat down, but Peronelle, intensely maternal, loved the feel of her little sister in her arms.

  She pulled Colette’s nightgown over her head and poured cold water into the basin. Warm water to wash in in the mornings wa
s an unheard of luxury in the du Frocq household. They always washed in cold water, even in those rare winters when they had to break the ice in their jugs first.

  Colette shrank a little as the cold sponge touched her warm satiny flesh, but she blew out her cheeks and screwed up her eyes and made no complaint. She was glad, however, when her ablutions were over and Peronelle had dressed her in her woollen vest, best frilly knickers and her white muslin dress over a blue petticoat. The dress was starched, and stuck out all round so that she measured more from side to side than she did from top to bottom.

  Then Peronelle did Colette’s hair, brushing the curls round her fingers so that they lay all over Colette’s head like a lot of fat sausages.

  When she was ready, all but her shoes, Colette trotted to her bed and knelt down to say her prayers. She bowed her head and covered her face, spreading out her fingers so that her hands resembled fat starfish. The soles of her pink feet, stuck out behind her, were turned up appealingly to heaven, and her toes wriggled ever so slightly with the fervency of her prayer.

  What she prayed about Peronelle, standing at the window divided between mirth and reverence, could not imagine, but she went on muttering for some time. Then she got up and put on her shoes. . . . Colette, like the Mohammedans, never prayed in shoes.

  “May I go out into the garden, ’Nelle?” she asked.

  “Yes, darling, but don’t get your frock dirty.”

  “No, I will not get my frock dirty, ’Nelle,” said Colette, and made solidly for the door.

  She went downstairs with the utmost caution, lowering herself always on to the right foot first and holding on to the banisters. . . . She had once fallen and it had hurt.

  Then she took a little stool, her very own little stool, from the hall and ran across the courtyard and through the door in the wall into the garden.