The Essential E. F. Benson: 53+ Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
while in the troughs of the waves as they rode in, there appeared and disappeared again the scattered rocks from some remote cliff-fall, that were strewn about the beach. Sometimes a wave would strike one of these full, and be shattered against it, spouting heavenwards in a column of solid water; oftener the breakers swept over them unbroken, until with menace of their toppling crests they flung themselves with huge tongues of hissing water on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs. Then with the scream of the withdrawn shingle the spent water was furiously dragged back to the base of the next incoming wave, and was caught up again to hurl itself against the land. Sometimes a sudden blast of wind would cut off the crest of the billow even as it curled over, and fling it, a monstrous riband of foam, through the air, sometimes two waves converging rose up in a fountain of water, and fell back without having reached the shore. This way and that, rushing and rolling, in hills and valleys of water, the maddened sea crashed and thundered, and every moment the spray rose more densely from the infernal cauldron. Then as the tide rose higher, the waves came in unbroken, and hurled their tons of water against the face of the cliff itself. Above, continuous as a water-fall, rose the roar and scream of the gale, ominous, insensate, bewildering: it was as if the elements were being transferred back into the chaos out of which they came.
Nadine and Hugh, clinging together for support, stood there for some minutes, half-way down the side of the cliff, watching the terror and majesty of the spectacle, she utterly absorbed in it and cruelly unconscious of him. Then, since they could no longer get down to the base of the cliff, they skirted along it till they came to the sandy foreshore of the bay. There from water-level they could better see the hugeness of the tumult, the strange hardness and steepness of the wave-slopes. It was as if a line of towers and great buildings were throwing themselves down upon the sands, and breaking up into walls and eddies of foam-sheeted water, while behind them there rose again another street of toppling buildings, which again shattered itself on the beach. Great balls of foam torn from the spent water trundled by them on the sands, and bunches of brown seaweed torn from the rocks were flung in handfuls at their feet. Once from the arch in the sky westwards, a dusky crimson light suddenly burned, turning the wave crests to blood, and then as the darkness of the early winter sunset gathered, they turned, and were blown up the steep cliff-path again, wet and buffeted. Conversation had been altogether impossible, and they could but communicate with pointing finger, and nodding head. Yet, somehow, to be together thus, cut off by the rise of winds and waves, from all sense of the existence of others, in that pandemonium of tempest, gave to Hugh at least a closer feeling of intimacy with Nadine, than he had ever yet known. She clung to him, she sheltered under his shoulder, unconsciously, instinctively, as an animal trusts his master, without knowing it is trusting. And that to his aching hunger for her was something....
But the gale was to bring them closer together yet.
Chapter X
All the evening and all night long the gale continued. Now and then the constant scream of it would leap upwards a couple of octaves as a shriller blast struck the houses and again for a moment the mad chant would drop into silence. From time to time like a tattoo of drums the rain battered at the window-panes, but through it all, whether in hushes of the wind or when its fiercest squall descended, the beat of the surf sounded ever louder. And all through the night, the result perhaps of his agitated talk with Nadine in the morning, or of his intimate gale-encompassed isolation with her in the afternoon, Hugh turned and tossed midway between sleeping and waking. Sometimes he seemed to himself to be yelling round the house among the spirits of the air seeking admittance, sometimes it seemed to him that he was being beaten on by the hammer of the surf, and whether he was homelessly wandering outside among the spirits of the wind, or was being done to death by those incessant blows of the beating waves, it was Nadine that he sought. And as the night went on the anguish of his desire grew ever more acute, and the beating of the waves a more poignant torture, until while yet no faintest lightening of winter's dawn had touched the gross blackness of the night, he roused himself completely, and sat up in bed and turned on his light.
To him awake the riot outside was vastly magnified compared with the dimmer trouble of his dream; so was his yearning for Nadine. His windows looked eastwards away from the quarter of the gale, and getting out of bed, he lifted a sash, and peered out. Nothing whatever could be seen; it was as if he gazed into the darkness of the nethermost pit, out of which blown by the blast of the anger of God came the shrieks of souls that might not rest, driven forever along, drenched by the river of their unavailing tears. Even though he was awake the strange remote horror of nightmare was on him, and it was in vain that he tried to comfort himself, by saying, like some child repeating a senseless lesson, "A deep depression has reached us traveling eastwards from the Atlantic." He tried to read, but still the nightmare-sense possessed him, and he fancied he had to read a whole line, neither more nor less, between the poundings of the waves. Then as usually happens towards the end of these Walpurgis nights, he got back to bed again, and slept calmly and dreamlessly.
He and Seymour alone out of the party put in an appearance at breakfast time: it seemed probable that the others were compensating themselves for a disturbed night by breakfasting upstairs, and afterwards the two went out together to look at the doings of the night. By this time the wind had considerably moderated, the rain had ceased altogether, and the thick pall of cloud that had last night overlain the sky was split up into fragments and islands, and flying vapors, so that here and there pale shafts of sunlight shone upon land and sea. But the thunder of the surf had immeasurably increased, and when they went to the cliff-edge which he and Nadine had passed down yesterday afternoon, they looked upon an indescribable confusion of tremendous waters. The tide was low, but the bay was still packed with the sea heaped-up by the wind, and the end of the reef with its big scattered rocks was out beyond the walls of breaking water. The sea appeared to have been driven distraught by the stress of the night; cross currents carried the waves in all directions: it almost seemed that some, shrinking from the wall of cliff in front, were trying to beat out to sea again. Quite out, away from land, they jousted and sparred with each other, not jestingly, but, it seemed, with some grim purpose, as if they were practising their strength for deeds of earnest violence, as for some fierce civil war among themselves. It was round the furthest rocks of the reef that this sport of billowy giants most centered: right across the bay ran some current that set on to the end of the reef, and there it met with the waves coming straight in-shore from the direction of the blowing of the gale. Then they spouted and foamed together, yet not in play: some purpose, so regular were these rounds of combat, seemed to underlie their wrestlings.
Hugh threw away a charred peninsula of paper, once a cigarette, which the wind had smoked for him. He never had felt much sense of comradeship in the presence of Seymour, and their after-breakfast stroll had no more virtue than was the reward of necessary politeness.
"There is something rather senseless in this display of wasted energy," said Seymour. "Each of those waves would probably cook a dinner, if its force was reasonably employed."
Hugh, in spite of his restless night, had something of Nadine's thrilled admiration for the turmoil, and felt slightly irritated.
"They would certainly cook your goose or mine," he remarked.
Seymour wondered whether it would be well to say, "Do you allude to Nadine as our goose?" but, perhaps wisely, refrained.
"That would be to the good," he said. "Goose is a poor bird at any time, but uneatable unless properly roasted."
Hugh did not attend to this polite rejoinder, for he had caught sight of something incredible not so far out at sea, and he focused his eyes instantly on it. For the moment, what he thought he had seen completely vanished; directly afterwards he caught sight of it again, a fishing-boat with mast broken, reeling drunkenly on the top of a huge wave. His quick, long-sighted eye told him in that one moment of slewing deck that it presented to them, before it was swallowed from sight in the trough of the next wave, that there were two figures on it, clinging to the stump of the broken mast.
"Look," he said, "there is a boat out there."
It rose