# Fortitude (Walpole)/Book 4/Chapter 1

CHAPTER I
THE SEA
I
PETER WESTCOTT was dead.
They put his body into the 11.50 from Paddington.
II
It was a day of high, swinging winds, of dappled skies, if shining gleaming water. Bunches now and again of heavy black clouds clustered on the horizon, the cows and horses in the fields were sharply defined, standing out rigidly against a distant background. The sun came and was gone, laughed and was instantly hidden, turned the world from light to shadow and from shadow back to light again.
Peter's body was alone in the compartment. It was propped up against red velvet that yielded with a hard, clenched resistance, something uncomfortable, had the body minded. The eyes of the body were the high blank windows of a deserted house. Behind them were rooms and passages, but lately so gaily crowded, so eager, with their lights and fires, for hustling life—now suddenly empty—swept of all its recent company, waiting for new, for very different inhabitants.
The white hands motionless upon the knees, the eyes facing the light but blind, the body still against the velvet, throughout the long, long day. . . .
III
There were occasions when some one came and asked for his ticket. Some one came once and asked him whether “He would take lunch.” Once a woman, flushed and excited, laden with parcels, tumbled into his carriage and then, after a glance at the white face, tumbled out again.
​Then, from very, very far away, came the first whispered breath of returning consciousness. The afternoon sun now had banished the black clouds—the wind had fallen—the sky was a quiet blue and birds rose and fell, rivers shone and had passed, roads were white like ribbons, broad and brown like crinkled paper, then ribbons again as the train flung Devonshire, scornfully, behind its back. Peter was conscious that his body was once more to be tenanted. But by whom?
Here was some one coming to him now, some one who, as the evening light fell about the land, dark with his cloak to his face, came softly upon the house and knocked at the door. Peter could hear his knock—it echoed through the empty passages, the deserted rooms, it was a knock that demanded, imperatively, admittance. The door swung back, the black passages gaped upon the evening light and were closed again. The house was once more silent—but no longer untenanted.
IV
Peter was now conscious of the world. That was Exeter that they had left behind them and soon there would be Plymouth and then the crossing of the bridge and then—Cornwall!
Cornwall! His lips were dry—he touched them with his tongue, and knew, suddenly, that he was thirsty, more thirsty than he had ever been. He would never be hungry again, but he would always be thirsty. An attendant passed. What should he drink? The attendant suggested a whisky and soda. Yes . . . a large whisky. . . .
It was very long indeed since he had been in Cornwall—he had not been there since his boyhood. What had he been doing all the time in between? He did not know—he had no idea. This new tenant of the house was not aware of those intervening years, was only conscious that he was returning after long exile, to his home—Scaw House, yes, that was the name . . . the house with the trees and the grey stone walls—yes, he would be glad to be at home again with his father. His father would welcome him after so long an absence.
​The whisky and soda was brought to him and as he drank it they crossed the border and were in Cornwall.
V
They were at Trewth, that little station where you must change for Treliss. It stood open to all the winds of heaven, two lines of paling, a little strip of platform, standing desolately, at wistful attention in the heart of gently breathing fields, mild skies, dark trees bending together as though whispering secrets . . . all mysterious, and from the earth there rose that breath—sea-wind, gorse, soil, saffron, grey stone—that breath that is only Cornwall.
Peter—somewhere in some strange dim recesses of his soul—felt it about his body. The wind, bringing all these scents, touched his cheek and his hair and he was conscious that that dark traveller who now tenanted his house closed the doors and windows upon that breath. It might waken consciousness, and consciousness memory, and memory pain . . . ah! pain!—down with the shutters, bolt the doors—no vision of the outer world must enter here.
The little station received gratefully the evening light that had descended upon it. A few men and women, dim bundles of figures against the pale blue, waited for the train, a crescent moon was stealing above the hedges, from the chimneys of two little cottages grey smoke trembled in the air.
Suddenly there came to Peter, waiting there, the determination to drive. He could not stand there, surrounded by this happy silence any longer. All those shadows that were creeping about the dark spaces beyond his house were only waiting for their moment when they might leap. This silence, this peace, would give them that moment. He must drive—he must drive. . .
In the road outside the station a decrepit cab with a thin rake of a man for driver was waiting for a possible customer. The cab was faded, the wheels encrusted with ancient mud, the horse old and wheezy, but the cabman, standing now thinner than ever against the sky, was, in spite of a tattered top hat, filled with that cheerful optimism that belongs to the Cornishman who sees an opportunity of “doing” a foreigner.
​“I want to drive to Treliss,” said Peter.
They bargained. The battered optimist obtained the price that he demanded and cocked his eve, derisively, at the rising moon.
Peter surveyed the cab.
“I'll sit with you on the box,” he said.
The thin driver made way for him. It was a high jolting cab of the old-fashioned kind, a cab you might have sworn was Cornish had you seen it anywhere, a cab that smelt of beer and ancient leather and salt water, a cab that had once driven the fashion of Treliss to elegant dances and now must rattle the roads with very little to see, for all your trouble, at the end of it.
The sleeping fields, like grey cloths, stretched on every side of them and the white road cut into the heart of the distance. It was a quarter to eight and a blue dusk. The driver tilted the top hat over one ear and they were off.
“I know this road as yer might say back'ards. Ask any one down along Treliss way. Zachy Jackson they'll say—which is my name, sir, if yer requirin' a good 'orse any time o' day. Zachy Jackson! which there ain't no man,—tarkin' of 'orses, fit to touch 'im, they'll tell yer and not far wrong either.”
But now with every stumbling step of that bony horse Peter was being shaken into a more active consciousness, consciousness not of the past, very slightly of the present, but rather of an eager, excited anticipation of events shortly to befall him, of the acute sense—the first that had, as yet, come to him—that, very shortly, he was to plunge himself into an absolute abandonment of all the restraints and discipline that had hitherto held him. He did not know, he could not analyse to himself—for what purpose those restraints had been formerly enforced upon his life. Only now—at this moment, his body was being flooded with a warm, riotous satisfaction at the thought of the indulgences that were to be his.
Still this fortress of his house was bare and desolated, but now in some of the rooms there were lights, fire, whispers, half-hidden faces, eyes behind curtains.
The wind struck him in the face. “Enough of this—you're done for—you're beaten—you're broken . . . you're ​going back to your hovel. You're creeping home—don't make a fine thing of it—” the wind said.
The top of the hill rolled up to them and suddenly with the gust that came from every quarter there was borne some sound. It was very delicate, very mysterious—the sound, one might fancy, that the earth would make if all spring flowers were to pierce the soil at one common instant—so fugitive a whisper.
“That's the sea” said Mr. Jackson, waving his whip in the air, “down to Dunotter Cove. There's a wind to-night. It'll blow rough presently.”
Now from their hilltop in the light of a baby moon puddles of water shone like silk, hedges were bending lines of listeners, far on the horizon a black wood, there in one of those precipitous valleys cottages cowering, overhead the blue night sky suddenly chequered with solemn pompous slowly moving clouds. But here on the hilltop at any rate, a bustle of wind—such a noise amongst the hedges and the pools instantly ruffled and then quiet again; and so precipitous a darkness when a cloud swallowed the moon. In the daylight that landscape, to any one who loved not Cornwall, would seem ugly indeed, with a grey cottage stuck here and there naked upon the moor, with a bare deserted engine house upon the horizon, with trees, deep in the little valley, but scant and staggering upon the hill—ugly by day but now packed with a mystery that contains everything that human language has no name for, there is nothing to do, on beholding it, but to kneel down and worship God. Mr. Jackson had seen it often before and he went twice to chapel every Sunday, so he just whipped up his horse and they stumbled down the road.
“Dirty weather coming,” he said.
Peter was disturbed. That whispering noise that had crept across the country frightened him. If it went on much longer it would make him remember—he must not remember.
They turned down into a deep, mysterious lane and the whisper was hidden. Now there was about them only the urgent crowding of the hedges, the wild-flowers flinging their scent on to the night air, and above and below and on every side of the old cab there streamed into the air the ​sweet smell of crushed grass, as though many fields had been pressed between giant's fingers and so had been left.
Peter sat there and about him, like flames licking wood-work, evil thoughts devoured his body. He was going now at last to do all those things that, these many years, he had prevented himself from doing. That at any rate he knew. . . . He would drink and drink and drink, until he would never remember anything again . . . never again. . . . Meanwhile as the cab slowly began to climb the hill again Mr. Jackson was telling a story.
He rolled his r's as though life were indeed a valuable and happy thing, and now and again, waving his thin whip in the air, he would seem to appeal to the moon.
”'Twas down to Dunotter Cove and I, a lad, my father bein' a fisherman, and one night, I mind it as though it were yesterday, there was a mighty wreck. Storm and wind and rain there was that night and there we were, out in it, suddenly, all the village of us. I but a slip of a boy, you must know, which it was thirty year back now and the rain sizzling on the cobbles and the wind blawin' the chimneys crooked. Well—she were a mighty wreck blawn right up against the Dunotter rocks, you understand, and sendin' up rockets and we seein' her clear enough, black out to sea which she seemed enormous in the night time and all. My father and the rest of 'em went out in the boat—we waited and we waited and they didn't come back. . . . They never come back—none of them only a crazed luny. Bill Tregothny—'e was washed up against the rocks down to Bosillian and 'e were just livin' . . . And when it come daylight,”—Mr. Jackson cleared his throat and paused—“when it come daylight there wasn't no wreck—nothing—nor no bodies neither—nothing—only Bill Tregothny the fool. . . .”
Peter had heard no single word of this. His ears were straining for the return of that whisper. They were nearly once again at the hilltop. Then in front of them there would be the sea—at the top of the hill there would be the sea. . . . He was seized with a great terror—frightened like a child in the dark. . . . “Bill Tregothny, you must understand sir, 'ad always been a idiot—always, born so. When 'e was all well again 'e told strange tales about the ​lot of them havin' boarded the vessel and there bein' gold all over the decks—bars of it with the rain fallin' all about it—piled in 'eaps and 'e said the sailors weren't like common sailors yer knew, but all in silks with cocked hats and the gold lyin' all about—
“O course Bill was the idiot you must understand, but it's true enough that there were no vessel in the marnin'—no vessel at all—and my father and the rest were never seen again—nor no bodies neither. . . . And they do say—”
Here Mr. Jackson dropped his voice—
They were just at the top of the hill now. Peter was sitting with his hands clenched, his body trembling.
". . . They do say that up in the potato field over Dunotter they've seen a man all in a cocked hat and red silk and gold lace—a ghost you must understand, sir—which Bill Tregothny says. . .”
The sea broke upon them with an instant, menacing roar. Between them and this violence there was now only moorland, rough with gorse bushes, uneven with little pits of sand, scented with sea pinks, with stony tracks here and there where the moonlight touched it.
But across it, like a mob's menace, fell the thunder, flung up to them from below, swelling from a menace to a sudden crash, then from crash to echo, dying to murmur again. It had in it anger and power, also pity and tenderness, also scorn and defiance. It cared for no one—it loved every one. It was more intimate than any confidence ever made, and then it shouted that intimacy to the whole world. It flung itself into Peter's face, beat his body, lashed his soul—“Oh! you young fool—you've come slinking back, have you? After all these years you've come slinking back. Where are all your fine hopes now, where all those early defiances, those vast ambitions?—Worthless, broken, defeated—worthless, broken, defeated.”
And then it seemed to change:
“Peter—Peter—Hold out a little longer—the battle isn't over yet—struggle on for a little, Peter—I'll help you—I'll bring your courage back to you—Trust me, Peter—trust me. . . .”
Through the rattle of the surf there came the sick ​melancholy lowing of the Bell Rock; swinging over a space of waters it fell across fields, unutterably, abominably sad.
And in the boy there instantly leapt to life his soul. Maimed and bruised and stunned it had been—now alive, tearing him, bringing on to his bending shoulders an awful tide of knowledge: “Everything is gone—your wife, your boy, your friend, your work. . . . We have won, Peter, we have won. The House is waiting for you. . . .”
And above those dreadful voices the thundering echo, indifferent to his agonies, despising his frailties, flinging him, sea-wreck of the most miserable, to any insignificant end. . . .
Peter suddenly stood up, rocking on his box. He seized the whip from the driver's hands. He lashed the miserable horse.
“Get on, you devil, get on—leave this noise behind you—get out of it, get out of it—”
The cab rocked and tossed, Mr. Jackson caught the boy about the shoulders, held him down. The horse, tired and weary, paid no heed to anything that might be happening but stumbled on.
“Good Lord, sir,” Mr. Jackson cried, “you might have had us over—What's it all about, sir?”
But Peter now was huddled down with his coat about his ears and did not move again.
“Catchin' the whip like that—might 'ave 'ad us right into the 'edge,” muttered Mr. Jackson, wishing his journey well over.
As they turned the corner the lights of Treliss burst into view.