SEA-LAVENDER.
ON the rim of France, where the Channel widens south- ward, there is a long strip of salt-marsh, reclaimed from the water less by the hand of man than by the action of time and the sea. It has been stayed here and there by dykes, or else it would be continually flooded, and so useless for the fuel and pasture it now supplies. This Debatable Land marks a spot notable in the history of our own race. To the right of it the Somme flows down, spreading in a wide estuary as it nears the sea. At low tide the slow course of the river is defined faintly in the middle of a wide, flat wilderness of sand ; at high tide it is covered by waves which flood the wind- swept barren waste of salt-marsh lying beside the river-bed. When the tide falls, the water stays here and there in pools that reflect the sky, so that wherever you look marsh and sea and sky reproduce each otber to infinity. The arable land ends in a low white cliff to the left, and from that point the limits of sky, sand, and sea appear unbounded. Wherever you look, the skyline is always immensely distant, and the place is full of the mysterious charm that comes with a wide horizon full of crossing lights and changing shadows. It has a suggestion of the continuousness of things, as if, from whatever point you started within these vast limits, you must eventually arrive back there again, because, after all, the world is round, and there is no need to hurry with so wide a sky in front.
Walking along the dyke seaward, among the salt plants and marsh birds, you never seem to find the limit of the marsh, because far off on the horizon there are clusters of roofs standing up out of the water black against the sky. The dyke always looks as if it disappears into the sea about two hundred yards ahead, and yet there is always somebody else in front of you walking away into the sunset. Far away they can be seen against the wet reflections, black like sea- fowl on a beach. And sometimes you meet them coming back, so that undoubtedly the road leads somewhere.
The sea-lavender bed lies low down behind the dyke and below the cliffs. A little white foot-track wanders through it towards some gaunt poplars a long way off. It looks like a bit out of a fairy-tale, except now and then when it is beset by artists. But these are a migratory race who follow the sun, so that generally the lavender-bed is quite deserted. It is a very remarkable colour,—a curious dull purplish pink, something like wet heather in October, an evasive colour that varies with the sun. It looks as if it had never been young, and has a hint of persistence in it, like the faded red often seen in the illuminated borders of a missal. The life has gone from it, but it is singularly penetrating. and holds the light even when the sky is clouded. Below the sunset it takes a wonderful vivid tone, and if you should chance to see the shepherd herding his slow flock across the lavender-bed when the sun drops behind it, you will have a memory to be thankful for on many a grey day to come.
It lies on the outskirts of a little town, to-day of no import- ance, political or commercial, but keeping the memory of greater things in its remains of a feudal age. It has splendid fortifications; the church looks down to the beach over a sheer drop of buttressed wall like a cliff ; the town is squeezed inside a great wall, and the streets twist in and out to the line of the shore. There is a barbican, very much in the way of modern traffic. Time has rubbed all the threat from the crumbling stone, and left the solitary word "Fides" on the face of it, the last relic doubtless of somebody's motto long ago. The final exit from the town is by a great old gate with towers, still called Tour Guillaume, in memory of the Conqueror. Nobody needs the barbican and the gate to-day. The tourists who come for the bathing season stroll under them on their way to the casino, and artists sit down before them in hordes and besiege them. They keep alive a memory of one of the comedies of history that Froissart tells of, when the Lords of Picardy, Artois, Ponthieu, and Boulogne lay here a great season at siege, and made many assaults with "engines and other instruments of war" upon the little town. From August till Lent the siege lasted, and then, since provision was sore minished, the defenders had to treat, and the Lord Philip of Navarre, coming at his leisure soon after to raise the siege, was amazed to find the town yielded to the French. Thereupon ensued much wrath and many arguments, council of war, stratagem with false fires, a night escape, flight, and chase by the French, who reached St. Quentin in hot pursuit. There, however, the prudent burgesses, knowing the ways of their betters, refused admission to the men of war with all possible politeness. Going up to the walls of their city, they put out their heads and said to the Constable and Count St. Pol : "Sirs, we desire you have us excused this time. It is the mind of all the commons of this town that five or six of you shall enter if it please you to do your honour and pleasure and the rest of you to go where they list." Thereupon these Lords, very angry, "gave great and despiteful words, but for all that they of St. Quentin would not open their gates." So there was nothing for it but to go home again, and the Earl of St. Pol, says Froissart, went to his castle "so sore displeased that none durst speak to him." A good many of the comedies of warfare went out when the Maxim gun came in. But though the little town saw many a "sore scrymmyslie" of English and French during the Hundred Years' War, it has a greater interest still to us. English cargo-boats, creeping up the river-month, moor alongside of a long, low quay where a big house stands, black and very old. It was once a "palace," and is now a salt-house, and a wooden board over its door states that William the Conqueror sailed from this port in 1066 to conquer England. The statement may give cause for complacency to both nations : in remembering how France established her most successful colony, and England received the graft of a fighting race upon a warrior stock. There are no better fighters in the world than the Northern French of to-day, and their English kindred are their equals by double descent. The Picard fishermen are curiously English in type, and perhaps the type has not changed so much during eight centuries. The French and the English are said to be the most patriotic nations in Europe, the reason for this quality being the steady objection of either race to learn anybody else's language. English cargo-boats come to St. Valery and spend two or three days there, their owners in perfect amity with the French inhabitants, yet neither able to understand the other's speech. The character of the people is very like that which marks the fisherfolk in little South Coast towns of England. They are a peaceable, thrifty, hard-faring people, probably not so unlike their remote forefathers as we are apt to imagine, for since modern life has taken to centralising, the quiet corners of the world are so un- touched by " progressives " that one could almost think they had slid back instead of advancing. Now, as in days long past, St. Valery depends much on the sea. Food and foes both come that way, and there is a little old street in the fishing quarter, almost perpendicular in its steepness, called Rue des Pilotes, where both houses and people have the same air of having been exactly as they are now for several centuries. You can see right through the houses, upper and lower stories too, by standing still in the middle of the street, so small and primitive are the domestic needs of the inhabitants. There have been bold and hardy seamen on both sides of the Channel since before the Conqueror set sail for England. Some of them lived, no doubt, in this same Rue des Pilotes ; others were forefathers of the West Country seamen who race up Channel to French ports at full speed before a tearing wind in defiance of laws, elements, and owners' risks, often breaking a record they dare not publish for fear of righteous wrath on the part of owners who engaged them to carry cargo securely, and not to do defiance to the gales and currents of the Channel in the honour of English seacraft. That highway of the sea, to-day peaceful enough, was the scene of many lively exploits in the roomy days before fleets and Constitutions were too highly organised. When Sir Roger de Coverley saw Henry IV.'s tomb in Westminster Abbey, he remarked that there was fine reading in the casualties of that reign. Among those casualties was the capture in these same narrow seas of the little Prince James of Scotland on his way to France, whither he was going "to learn that tongue and eke courtesy." The age had a, liberal habit in regard to the capture of Kings. Henry's grandfather had held two of them prisoner at once in the little city by the Thames, and perhaps Prince James bad. reason to regret his captivity the less inasmuch as it afforded him the opportunity of studying Chaucer and of seeing from his prison-window at Windsor "Beauty enough to make a world to doat"
when Joan Beaufort walked below in her garden. English seamen proved obstreperous neighbours in those days. Cap. grave has an entertaining passage which tells how two Englishmen—Sir John Prendergast and William Long- " kept so well the seas that no Englishman had harm." But they got into trouble for it at home, for many of the King's house "had envy" with Sir John, so that be was compelled to take refuge in Westminster, where he was "so streyted that he dwelled in the porch of the church night and day." William Long managed to evade interference at home for some time; he "kept still the sea, until the Chancellor sent for him, and bight him he should no harm have." "But when he had him," goes on the chronicler with fine simplicity, "he sent him to the Tower." The highway was not secure for all the King's lieges. Perhaps it was after the suppression of William Long that another of these casualties occurred, when the Bishop of Hereford in 1404 was captured here by irreverent Flemings, who haled him up and down Channel until he was rescued by the faithful. Jealousies of race may be stronger at times even than respect for commerce and the Church, for the Channel seamen were engaged in skirmishing and marauding in this same year, while the Burgomasters of Bruges were groaning over the damage done to the wool industry by these international bickerings. They publicly deplored the troubles arisen between England, France, and Belgium "by means of certain freebooters and pirates of the sea, Belial's own sowers of tares and sons of iniquity," said the burgesses with feeling, having suffered in their pockets through the reprehensible practices of the said sons of Bella].
The balance of States is a marvel as continual as the poise of the stars. To avoid collision with such material for combustion is an affair requiring little short of angelic foresight even when your particular State happens to be
"A water-walled bulwark, still secure
And oonfident from foreign purposes,"
because, in spite of designs for modern Utopias (from which may heaven preserve us !) and societies for the propagation of the principal virtues, the so-called divinity of the human race is not always uppermost in the population of Europe, and the fighting qualities of our race are not yet worn thin. Just beyond the Tour Guillaume there is a crumbled mass of masonry called Harold's Tower. In all probability it never had anything to do with Harold ; but that is irrelevant. You can sit on it at the turn of the tide, and watch the fishing fleet homing after the day's work, a crowd of sails dark against the opalescent sea below the sunset. When they are past the marsh they drop into line, each following other in turn along the hidden bed of the river that curves unseen in an S-line amid the shallows. When each boat rounds the curve her sails slip down as if by their own will, and she glides slowly into her place on the shingle, while the mother-of- pearl reflections die out of the wet sands, and the sky darkens over the lavender-bed. Such little boats they must have been when the fleet dropped down these shallows all those centuries ago to conquer England!
When the breeze crackles among the scentless, barren blossoms of the sea-lavender, by the road where armed warriors clattered in years long past, the marsh seems like a manuscript of history alive with the sense of old things deep- rooted out of sight in the life of to-day ; and looking across the lavender-bed to the narrow seas beyond, you consider with amazement the men who read history, and then set out to dig a Channel Tunnel
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