IV.  SEA-MAGIC AND RUNNING WATER BY FIONA MACLEOD

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SEA-MAGIC AND RUNNING WATER.

IV.  THE TWO VOICES.

Of the delight of the sea no man or woman, from Sappho to the latest sea-singer of the Gael, has ever chanted more than a small choric cry of rapture in an unapproachable pæan: the pæan of the worship and joy and dread love of the sons and daughters of men since time was. To many there is no rapture like the rapture of the sea, no beauty like its beauty, no enchantment greater, no spell so subtle and so strong.

But even for these, as for many of those who do not feel this enchantment or know the spell, it is possible to touch in the magic of the sea a sorrow as deep as any human sorrow when time has healed the sting of the first lash; a melancholy more profound than that inhabiting the most waste places or the desolate regions of the poor in great cities.

This knowledge, which has been intimate to so many, never so poignantly came home to me as when, one day in the spring of this year, while on those wild Breton coasts of the Tréguier headland, I was shown an ancient sundial which had been found in the 127 sea, on a day when the tide had fallen away to an unprecedented distance. It had belonged to the mediæval manor to whose successor I was now a visitor — a successor itself perilously close to that ever climbing, grey, muttering waste.

When the dial was cleared of the weedy tangle which had so long held it in its place beneath the ceaseless tumult of tides and driven surge, the inscription, faint as it was, was at last deciphered. It ran —

Les jours passent, la Douleur reste.

“The days pass, grief endures.” Is not that at times the very burden of the sea? And how could that memory of mortal sorrow, wedded to the inexplicable sadness of the ancient waters, come with a more searching pitifulness than from an old sundial long sunken from the rose-sweet manor-garden beneath the cold and barren drift of the tides?

It was a grey day when I read this inscription on the brine-bitten dial: the grey wind of the east laboured across heavy seas, that here and there turned over green flanks, and sank in a swirling seethe, spreading idly 128 in long ragged traceries on the grey flats and green-grey hollows. Not a sea-bird rose on white wing, or complained with hoarse scream or shrill reiterated cry along the wild and deserted shore. Les Jours passent, le Douleur reste. It was the dull chime of the sea put into human speech.

Later, in the manor-garden, among the roses already falling after days of rain, I could hear the slow, monotonous beat of the sea. The words of a singer of to-day came into my mind: —

“Love is a barren sea, bitter and deep —
         .         .         .         .         .         .         .         .         .
  We gave love many dreams and days to keep,
  Saying, ‘If thou wilt, thrust in thy sickle, and reap:’
  All is reaped now; no grass is left to mow.”

I could not shake off the depression which had come upon me, and even when in the little chapel, alone there save for one old woman sitting with bowed head so that I could see nothing of her but a blurred darkness in the shadow, I heard the solemn words of the Franciscan hymn —

“O Beata Solitudo!
  O Sola Beatitudo!”

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The sadness of that melancholy magic did not pass, but only deepened into a more solemn inward cadence.

But in the morning, when I woke, the sound and call of the sea came with a lifting wing. Out on the tossing wilderness of blue and white all the tides of happiness in the world seemed to be on the moving dazzle of exultant life.

Then I thought no more of that sad sea-music of the grey dusk, of the days that pass and of the sorrow that stays. But, instead, I turned with a new gladness to a volume lying near, that had in it my book-plate motto —

Le Temps passe, la Beauté survit.

Here I felt was the truer, or at lest the better, reading of the obscure voice of the many waters. To the artist, what words could have so high and deliberate dignity, so deep an inward fortifying?

And all that day, through sun and shine and lifting and resting wind, if I heard one deep muffled voice sighing, Le Temps passe, I heard a deeper and unmuffled voice answering, La Beauté survit.