The Beach of Dreams: A Romance
by H. De Vere Stacpoole · English · Gutenberg #20084 · 402,363 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Beach of Dreams: A Romance
Author: H. De Vere Stacpoole
Release date: December 10, 2006 [eBook #20084]
Most recently updated: February 5, 2018
Language: English
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THE
BEACH OF DREAMS
A ROMANCE
BY
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
AUTHOR OF "THE MAN WHO LOST HIMSELF," "THE GHOST GIRL,"
"THE GOLD TRAIL," "THE BLUE LAGOON," ETC.
THE NATIONAL BOOK CO.
PUBLISHERS
28 WEST 44TH ST., NEW YORK
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COPYRIGHT, 1919 BY STREET & SMITH
COPYRIGHT, 1919 BY JOHN LANE COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America
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CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE ALBATROSS 9
II. NORTH-WEST 14
III. THE GASTON DE PARIS 22
IV. DISASTER 41
V. VOICES IN THE NIGHT 48
VI. DAWN 53
VII. THE COAST 66
PART II
VIII. THE AWAKENING 73
IX. THE WOOLEY 80
X. THE CROSS 94
XI. THE CACHE 103
XII. THE QUARREL 117
XIII. WHERE IS BOMPARD? 124
XIV. THE DEATH TRAPS 132
XV. THE STROKE 143
XVI. ALONE 146
XVII. FRIENDS IN DESOLATION 153
PART III
XVIII. GOD MADE FRIENDSHIP 159
XIX. THE BIRDS 167
XX. VÆ VICTIS 171
PART IV
XXI. TIME PASSES 181
XXII. A NEWCOMER 185
XXIII. RAFT 194
XXIV. A DREAM 203
XXV. STORIES ON THE BEACH 211
XXVI. THE GREAT WIND 225
PART V
XXVII. THE CORRIDOR 233
XXVIII. NIGHT 248
XXIX. THE SUMMIT 253
XXX. THE BAY 259
XXXI. THE SHIP 264
XXXII. THE OPIUM SMOKERS 272
XXXIII. MAINSAIL HAUL 277
XXXIV. THE CARCASSONNE 281
PART VI
XXXV. MARSEILLES 289
XXXVI. THE LEPER 301
XXXVII. A NEW HOME 313
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THE BEACH OF DREAMS
CHAPTER I
THE ALBATROSS
The fo'c'sle, lit by a teapot lamp, shewed the port watch in their
bunks, snoring, all but Harbutt and Raft seated on a chest, Harbutt
patching a pair of trousers, Raft smoking.
Raft was a big red-headed man with eyes that seemed always roving over
great distances as though in search of something. He was thirty-two
years of age and he had used the sea since twelve--twenty years. His
past was a long succession of fo'c'sles, bar-rooms, blazing suns, storms
and sea happenings so run together that all sequence was lost. Beyond
them lay a dismal blotch, his childhood. He had entered the world and
literally and figuratively had been laid at the door of a workhouse; of
his childhood he remembered little, of his parentage he knew nothing. In
drink he was quiet, but most dangerous under certain provocations.
It was as though deep in his being lay a blazing hatred born of
injustice through ages and only coming to light when upborne by
balloon-juice. On these occasions a saloon bar with its glitter and
phantom show of mirth and prosperity sometimes called on him to dispense
and destroy it, the passion to fight the crowd seized him, a passion
that has its origin, perhaps, in sources other than alcohol.
He was talking now to Harbutt, scarcely lowering his voice on account of
the fellows in the bunks. Snoring and drugged with ozone a kick would
only have made them curse and turn on the other side, and as he talked
his voice made part of that procession of noises inseparable from the
fo'c'sle of a ship under sail against a head sea. He had been holding
forth on the food and general conditions of this ship compared with the
food and conditions of his last, when Harbutt cut in.
"There's not a pin to choose between owners, and ships is owners as far
as a sailorman's concerned.--Blast them."
"I was in a hooker once," said Raft, "and the Old Man came across a lot
of cheap sugar, served it out to save the m'lasses. It was lead, most of
it, and the chaps that swallowed it their teeth came out."
"What happened to them then?"
"They croaked. I joined at Bombay, after the business, or I'd have
croaked too."
"What ship was that?" asked Harbutt.
"I've forgot her name, it was a good bit back--but it's the truth."
"Of course it's the truth," replied the other, "who's doubtin' you, any
dog's trick played on a sailorman's the truth, you can lay to that.
I've had four years of sea and I oughta know."
"What's this you were?" asked Raft.
"Oh, I was a lot o' things," replied Harbutt. "Wished I'd never left
them to join this b--y business, but it's the same ashore, owners all
the time stuffin' themselves and gettin' rich, workers starvin'."
Raft belonged to the old time labour world dating from Pelagon, he
grumbled, but had no grudge against owners in general, it was only in
drink that Pelagon rose in him. Harbutt was an atom of the new voice
that is heard everywhere now, even in fo'c'sles. He had failed in
everything on land and a'board ship he was a slacker. You cannot be a
voice and an A.B. at the same time.
"What was your last job ashore?" went on Raft with the persistence of a
child, always wanting to know.
"Cleanin' out pig sties," said Harbutt viciously. "Drove to it. I tell
you when a chap's down he's down, the chaps that has money tramples on
the chaps that hasn't. I've been through it and I know. It's the rich
man does it."
"Well," said Raft, "I don't even remember seeing one."
"Haven't you ever been in no cities?"
"I've been in cities right enough, but most by the water-side."
"Well, you've seen chaps in plug hats and chaps drivin' in carriages,
that's the sort that keeps us down, that's the sort we've got to make
an end of."
Raft did not quite see. He had a respect for Harbutt mixed with a
contempt for him as a sailor. Harbutt knew a lot--but he could not see
how the chaps in plug hats kept other people down; the few he had seen
had always seemed to him away and beyond his world, soft folk, and
always busy about their own affairs--and how were they to be made an end
of?
"Do you mean killing them?" he asked.
"Oh, there's other ways than killin'," replied Harbutt. "It's not them,
it's their money does the trick."
He finished his patch and turned in. Raft finished his pipe and turned
in also and the fo'c'sle was given over to the noises of the sea and the
straining timbers of the ship.
Now that the figures of the two sailors had vanished its personality
took fuller life, grim, dark, close, like the interior of a grimy hand
clutching the lives of all those sleepers. The beams shewed like the
curved fingers, and the heel of the bowsprit like the point of the
in-turned thumb, a faint soul-killing rock of kerosene filled it,
intensifying, after the fashion of ambergris, all the other perfumes,
without losing in power. Bilge, tobacco and humanity, you cannot know
what these things are till they are married with the reek of kerosene,
with the grunts and snores of weary men, with lamplight dimmed with
smoke haze; with the heave and fall of the sea; the groaning of timbers
and the boom of the waves. This is the fo'c'sle whose great, great,
great grandmother was the lower deck of the trireme where slaves chained
to benches laboured till they died, just as they labour to-day.
CHAPTER II
NORTH-WEST
The _Albatross_, bound from Cape Town to Melbourne, had been blown out
of her course and south of the Crozet Islands; she was now steering
north-west, making towards Kerguelen, across an ice-blue sea, vast, like
a country of broken crystal strewn with snow. The sky, against which the
top-gallant stay-sails shewed gull-white in the sun, had the cold blue
of the sea and was hung round at the horizon by clouds like the white
clouds that hang round the Pacific Trades.
Raft was at the wheel and Captain Pound the master was pacing the deck
with Mason the first officer, up and down, pausing now and then for a
glance away to windward, now with an eye aloft at the steadfast canvas,
talking all the time of subjects half a world away.
It was a sociable ship as far as the afterguard was concerned. Pound
being a rough and capable man of the old school with no false dignity
and an open manner of speech. He had been talking of his little house at
Twickenham, of Mrs. Pound and the children, of servants and neighbours
that were unsociable and now he was talking of dreams. He had been
dreaming the night before of Pembroke docks, the port he had started
from as a boy. Pembroke docks was a bad dream for Pound, and he said so.
It always heralded some disaster when it appeared before him in
dreamland.
"I've always dreamt before that I was starting from there," said he,
"but last night I was getting the old _Albatross_ in, and the tow rope
went, and the tug knocked herself to bits, and then the old hooker swung
round and there was Mrs. P. on the quayside in her night attire shouting
to me to put the helm down--under hare sticks in the docks, mind you!"
"Dreams are crazy things," said Mason. "I don't believe there's anything
in them."
"Well, maybe not," said Pound. He glanced at the binnacle card and then
went below.
Nothing is more impressive to the unaccustomed mind than the spars and
canvas of a ship under full sail seen from the deck, nothing more
suggestive of power and the daring of man than the sight of those
leviathan spars and vast sail spaces rising dizzily from main and
foresail in pyramids to where the truck works like a pencil point
writing on the sky. Nothing more arresting than the power of the
steersman. A turn of the wheel in the hands of Raft would set all that
canvas shuddering or thundering, spilling the wind as the water is
spilled from a reservoir, a moment's indecision or slackness might lose
the ship a mile on her course. But Raft steered as he breathed,
automatically, almost unconsciously, almost without effort. He, who
ashore was hopelessly adrift and without guidance, at the helm was all
wisdom, direction and intuition.
The wake of the _Albatross_ lay as if drawn with a ruler.
His trick was nearly up, and when he was relieved he went forward;
pausing at the fo'c'sle head to light a pipe he fell in talk with some
of the hands, leaning with his back against the bulwarks and blown upon
by the spill of the wind from the head sails.
An old shell-back by name of Ponting was holding the floor.
"We're comin' up to Kerguelen," he was saying. "Should think I did know
it. Put in there in a sealer out of New Bedford in '82. I wasn't more'n
a boy then. The Yanks used to use that place a lot in those days. The
blackest blastedest hole I ever struck. Christmas Island was where we
lay mostly, for two months, the chaps huntin' the wal'uses and killin'
more than they could carry. The blastedest hole I ever struck."
"I was there in a Dane once," began another of the crew. "It was time of
year the sea cows was matin' and you could hear the roarin' of them ten
mile off."
"Dane," said Ponting, "what made you ship a'board a Dane--I've heard
tell of Danes. Knew a chap signed on in one of them Leith boots out of
Copenhagen runnin' north, one of them old North Sea cattle trucks turned
into a passenger tramp, passengers and ponies with a hundred ton of hay
stowed forward and the passengers lyin' on their backs on it smokin'
their pipes, and the bridge crawled over with passengers, girls and
children, and the chap at the wheel havin' to push 'em out of the way,
kept hittin' reefs all the run from Leith to God knows where, and the
Old Man playin' the fiddle most of the time."
"That chap said the Danes was a d----d lot too sociable for him."
Raft listened without entirely comprehending. He had always been a
fore-mast hand. He knew practically nothing of steam and he would just
as soon have fancied himself a railway porter as a hand on a passenger
ship. He was one of the old school of merchant seamen and the idea of a
cargo of girls and children and general passengers, not to speak of
ponies, was beyond him.
The girls he had mostly known were of the wharf-side. He finished his
pipe and went down below--and turned in.
He was rousted out by the voice of the Bo'sw'n calling for all hands on
deck and slipping into his oilskins he came up, receiving a smack of sea
in his face as he emerged from the fo'c'sle hatch. The wind had shifted
and a black squall coming up from astern had hit the ship. More was
coming and through the sheeting rain and spindrift the voice of the
Bo'sw'n was roaring to let go the fore top-gallant halyards.
Next moment Raft was in the rigging followed by others. The sail had to
be stowed. The wind tried to tear him loose and the sheeting rain to
drown him, but he went on clinging to the top-gallant mast-stays and
looking down he could see the faces of the others following him, faces
sheeted over with rain and working blindly upwards.
Ponting was the man immediately below him, and taking breath for a
moment and against the wind, Ponting was now yelling out that they had
their work cut out for them.
They had.
The top-gallant sail had taken charge of itself, and Raft and Ponting as
they lay out on the yard seemed battling with a thing alive,
intelligent, and desperately wicked.
The sail snored and trembled and sang, standing out in great hoods and
folds, hard as steel; now it would yield, owing to a slackening of the
wind, and then, like a brute that had only been waiting to take them by
surprise, it would burst out again, releasing itself, whilst the yard
buckled and sprang, almost casting them from it.
Then began a battle fought without a sound or cry except the bubbling
and snoring of the great sail struggling for its wicked liberty, it
shrank and they flung themselves on it, it bellied and flung them back,
clinging to the lift they saved themselves, attacking it again with the
dumb fury of dogs or wolves on a fighting prey. Twenty times it tried to
destroy them and twenty times they all but had it under.
The fight died out of the monster for a moment and Raft had nearly an
armful of it in when it stiffened, fighting free of him, owing to
Ponting and the other fellow not having made good. They clung for a
moment without moving, resting, and Raft glancing down saw far away
below the narrow deck driving wedge-like through the foam-capped seas.
Then the struggle began again. The sail, like its would-be captors,
seemed also to have taken breath, it held firm, relaxed, banged out
again in thunder, developed new hoods and folds as a struggling monster
might develop new heads and kinks, and then, all of a sudden when it
seemed that no effort was of avail the end came.
The wind paused for a moment, as if gathering up all its strength
against the dogged persistency which is man, and in that moment the
three on the yard had the sail under their chests beating and crushing
the life out of it. Then the gaskets were passed round it and they clung
for a moment to rest and breathe.
It was nothing, or they thought nothing of it, this battle for life with
a monster, just the stowing of a top-gallant sail in dirty weather, and
most likely when they got down the Bo'sw'n would call them farmers for
being such a time over it. Meanwhile they clung idly for a moment,
partly to rest and partly to look at something worth seeing.
The squall was blowing out, there was nothing behind it and away on the
port quarter the almost setting sun had broken through the smother and
was lighting the sea.
There, set in a thousand square acres of snowcapped tourmaline, white as
a gull and beautiful as grace itself, was running a vessel under bare
poles. The two yellow funnels, the cut of the hull, told Ponting what
she was. He had seen her twice before and no sailor who had once set
eyes on her could forget her.
"See that blighter," he yelled across to Raft. "Know her?"
"Should think I did, she's the _Gaston de Paree_--a yacht--seen her in
T'lon."
Then they came down, crawling like weary men, and on deck no one abused
them for their slackness or the time they'd been over their job. The
_Albatross_ was running easy and the Bo'sw'n with others was taken up
with a momentary curiosity over the great white yacht.
No one knew her but Ponting, who had for several years acted as deck
hand on some of the Mediterranean boats.
"I know her," said he ranging up beside the others. "She's the _Gaston
de Paree_, a yot--seen her in T'lon harbour and seen her again at Suez,
she's a thousand tonner, y'can't mistake them funnels nor the width of
them, she's a twenty knotter and the chap that owns her is a king or
somethin'; last time I saw her she was off to the China seas, they say
she's all cluttered up with dredges and dipsy gear, and she mostly
spends her time takin' soundin's and scrabblin' up shell fish and
such--that's his way of amusin' himself."
"Then he must be crazy," said the Bo'sw'n, "but b'God he's got a beauty
under him--what's he doin' down here away?"
"Ax me another," said Ponting. Raft stood with the others, watching the
_Gaston de Paris_ from whose funnels now the smoke was coming festooned
on the wind, then he went below to shed his oilskins and smoke.
She had ceased to interest him.
CHAPTER III
THE GASTON DE PARIS
Old Ponting was right in all his particulars, except one. The owner of
the _Gaston de Paris_ was not a king, only a prince.
Prince Selm, a gentleman like his Highness of Monaco with a passion for
the deep sea and its exploration. The Holy Roman Empire had given his
great grandfather the title of prince, and estates in Thuringia gave him
money enough to do what he pleased, an unfortunate marriage gave him a
distaste for High Civilization, and his scientific bent and passion for
the sea--inherited with a strain of old Norse blood--did the rest.
He had chosen well. Cards, women and wine, pleasure and the glittering
things of life, all these betray one, but the sea, though she may kill,
never leaves a man broken, never destroys his soul.
But Eugene Henry William of Selm for all this sea passion might have
remained a landsman, for the simple reason that he was one of those
thorough souls for whom Life and an Object are synonymous terms. In
other words he would never have made a yachtsman, a creature shifting
from Keil to Cowes and Cowes to Naples according to season, a cup
gatherer and club-house haunter.
But Exploration gave him the incentive and the Musée Océanographique of
Monaco his inspiration, limitless wealth supplied the means.
The _Gaston de Paris_ built by Viguard of Toulon was an ocean going
steam yacht of twelve hundred and fifty tons with engines by Conturier
of Nantes and everything of the latest from Conturier's twin-action
centrifugal bilge pumps to the last thing in sea valves. She was
reckoned by those who knew her the finest sea-going yacht in the world
and she was certainly the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of Lafiette, Viguard's chief
designer. Lafiette was more than a designer, he was a creator, the sea
was in his blood giving him that touch of genius or madness, that
something eccentric which made him at times cast rules and formulae
aside.
The decks of the _Gaston de Paris_ ran flush, with little encumbrance
save a deck-house forward given over to electrical and deep sea
instruments.
Forward of the engine room and right to the bulkheads of the fo'c'sle
ran a lower deck reached by a hatch aft of the instrument room. Here
were stowed the dredges and buoys and all the gear belonging to them,
trawl nets and deep sea traps, cable and spare rope and sounding-wire,
harpoons and grancs and a hundred odds and ends, all in order and spick
and span as the gear of a warship.
Aft of the engine-room the yacht was a little palace. Prince Selm would
labour like any of his crew over a net coming in or in an emergency, but
he ate off silver and slept between sheets of exceedingly fine linen.
Though a sailor, almost one might say a fisherman, he was always
Monsieur le Prince and though his hobby lay in the depths of the sea his
intellect did not lie there too. Politics, Literature and Art travelled
with him as mind companions, whilst in the flesh he often managed to
bring off with him on his "outlandish expeditions" more or less pleasant
people from the great world where Civilisation sits in cities, feeding
Art and Philosophy, Science and Literature with the hearts and souls of
men.
The main saloon of the _Gaston de Paris_ fought in all its details
against the idea of shipboard life, the gilt and scrolls of the yacht
decorator, the mirrors, and all the rest of his abominations were not to
be found here, panels by Chardin painted for Madame de Pompadour
occupied the walls, the main lamp, a flying dragon by Benvenuto Cellini,
clutching in its claws a globe of fire, had, for satellites, four torch
bearers of bronze by Claus, a library, writing and smoking room,
combined, opened from the main saloon, and there was a boudoir decorated
in purple and pearl with flower pictures by Lactropius unfaded despite
their date of 1685.
Nothing could be stranger to the mind than the contrast between the
fo'c'sle of the _Albatross_ and the after cabins of the _Gaston_,
nothing, except, maybe, the contrast between a garret in Montmartre or
Stepney and a drawing-room in the Avenue du Trocadéro or Mayfair.
Dinner was served on board the _Gaston de Paris_ at seven, and to-night
the Prince and his four guests, seated beneath the flying dragon of
Cellini and enjoying their soup, held converse together light-heartedly
and with a spirit that had been somewhat lacking of late. Every sea
voyage has its periods of depression due to monotony; they had not
sighted a ship for over ten days, and this evening the glimpse of the
_Albatross_ revealed through the break in the weather had in some
curious way shattered the sense of isolation and broken the monotony.
The four guests of the Prince were: Madame la Comtesse de Warens, an old
lady with a passion for travel, a free thinker, whose mother was a
friend of Voltaire in her youth and whose father had been a member of
the Jacobin club; she was eighty-four years of age, declared herself
indestructible by time, and her one last ambition to be a burial at sea.
She was also a Socialistic-Anarchist, possessed an income of some forty
thousand pounds a year derived from speculations of her late husband
conducted during the war with Germany in 1870, yet was never known to
give a sou to charity; her hands were all but the hands of a skeleton
and covered with jewels, she smoked cigarettes incessantly. She was one
of those old women whose energy seems to increase with age, tireless as
a gnat she was always the last in bed and the first on deck, though
lying in her bunk half the night reading French novels of which she had
a trunkful and smoking her eternal cigarettes.
Beside her sat her niece, Cléo de Bromsart, English on the mother's side
and educated in England, a girl of twenty, unmarried, dark-haired,
fragile and beautiful as a dream. She was one of the old nobility,
without dilution, yet strangely enough with money, for the Bromsarts,
without marrying into trade, had adapted themselves to the new times so
cleverly that Eugène de Bromsart the last of his race had retired from
life leaving his only daughter and the last of her race wealthy, even by
the standard of wealth set in Paris. She was a sportswoman and, despite
her lack of frailty, had led an outdoor life and possessed a nerve of
steel.
Madame de Warens had brought the girl up after she left school, had
laboured over her and found her labour in vain. Cléo had no leanings
towards the People and the opinions of her aunt seemed to her a sort of
disreputable madness bred on hypocrisy. Cléo looked on the lower classes
just as she looked on animals, beings with rights of their own but
belonging to an entirely different order of creation, and one thing
certainly could be said for her--she was honest in her outlook on life.
Beside her sat Doctor Epinard, the ship's doctor, a serious young man
who spoke little, and the fifth at table was Lagross, the sea painter,
who had come for the sake of his health and to absorb the colours of the
ocean. The vision of the _Albatross_ with towering canvas breasting the
blue-green seas in an atmosphere of sunset and storm was with him still
as he sat listening to the chatter of the others and occasionally
joining in. He intended to paint that picture.
It had come to him as a surprise. They had been playing cards when a
quarter-master called them on deck saying that the weather had moderated
and that there was a ship in sight, and there, away across the tumbling
seas, the _Albatross_ had struck his vision, remote, storm surrounded,
and sunlit, almost a vision of the past in these days of mechanism.
"Now tell me, Prince," Madame de Warens was saying, "how long do you
propose staying at this Kerguelen Land of yours?"
"Not more than a week," replied the Prince. "I want to take some
soundings off the Smoky Islands and I shall put in for a day on the
mainland where you can go ashore if you like, but I shan't stay here
long. It is like putting one's head into a wolf's mouth."
"How is that?"
"Weather. You saw that sudden squall we passed through this evening, or
rather you heard it, no doubt, well that's the sort of thing Kerguelen
brews."
"Suppose," said the astute old lady, "it brewed one of those things,
only much worse, and we were blown ashore?"
"Impossible."
"Why?"
"Our engines can fight anything."
"Are there any natives in this place?"
"Only penguins and rabbits."
"Tell me," said Lagross, "that three-master we saw just now, would she
be making for Kerguelen?"
"Oh, no, she must be out of her course and beating up north. She's not a
whaler, and ships like that would keep north of the Crozets. Probably
she was driven down by that big storm we had a week ago. We wouldn't be
where we are only that I took those soundings south of Marion Island."
"And, after Kerguelen, what land shall we see next?" asked the old lady.
"New Amsterdam, madame," replied the Prince, "and after that the Sunda
Islands and beautiful Java with its sun and palm trees."
Mademoiselle de Bromsart shivered slightly. She had been silent up to
this, and she spoke now with eyes fixed far away as if viewing the
picture of Java with its palms and sapphire skies.
"Could we not go there now?" asked she.
"In what way?" asked the Prince.
"Turn the ship round and leave this place behind," she replied.
"But why?"
"I don't know," said she, "perhaps it is what you say about Kerguelen,
or perhaps it was the sight of that big ship all alone out there, but I
feel--" she stopped short.
"Yes--"
"That ship frightened me."
"Frightened you," cried Madame de Warens, "why, Cléo, what is the matter
with you to-night? You who are never frightened. I'm not easily
frightened, but I admit I almost said my prayers in that storm, and you,
you were doing embroidery."
"Oh, I am not frightened of storms or things in the ordinary way," said
the girl half laughing. "Physical things have no power over me, an ugly
face can frighten me more than the threat of a blow. It is a question of
psychology. That ship produced on my mind a feeling as though I had seen
desolation itself, and something worse."
"Something worse!" cried Madame de Warens, "what can be worse than
desolation?"
"I don't know," said Cléo, "It also made me feel that I wanted to be far
away from it and from here. Then, Monsieur le Prince, with his story of
desolate Kerguelen, completed the feeling. It is strong upon me now."
"You do not wish to go to Kerguelen then?" said the Prince smiling as he
helped himself to the entrée that was being passed round.
"Oh, monsieur, it is not a question of my wishes at all," replied the
girl.
"But, excuse me," replied the owner of the _Gaston de Paris_, "it is
entirely a question of your wishes. We are not a cargo boat, Captain
Lepine is on the bridge, he has only to go into his chart house, set his
course for New Amsterdam, and a turn of the wheel will put our stern to
the south." He touched an electric bell push, attached to the table, as
he spoke.
"And your soundings?" asked she.
"They can wait for some other time or some other man, sea depths are
pretty constant."
A quarter-master appeared at the saloon door, came forward and saluted.
"Ask Captain Lepine to come aft," said the Prince. "I wish to speak to
him."
"Wait," said Mademoiselle Bromsart. Then to her host. "No. I will not
have the course altered for me. I am quite clear upon that point. What I
said was foolish and it would pain me more than I can tell to have it
acted upon. I really mean what I say."
He looked at her for a moment and seemed to glimpse something of the
iron will that lay at the heart of her beauty and fragility.
"That will do," said he to the quarter-master. "You need not give my
message."
Madame de Warens laughed. "That is what it is to be young," said she,
"if an old woman like me had spoken of changing our course I doubt if
your quarter-master would have been called, Monsieur. But I have no fads
and fancies, thank heaven, I leave all that to the young women of
to-day."
"Pardon me, madame," said Doctor Epinard speaking for almost the first
time, "but in impressions produced by objects upon the mind there is no
room for the term fancy. I speak of course of the normal mind free of
disease. Furthermore, we talk of objects as things of secondary
importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that
the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that
form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus
upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking
in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form
our thoughts and the reasons, utterly divorced from what we call human
reason, that connect together the objects that form our environment."
"Is this a theory of your own, Epinard?" asked the Prince.
"It is, monsieur, and it may be bad or good but I adhere to it."
"You mean to say that man is composed entirely of environment, past and
present?"
"Yes, monsieur, you have caught my meaning exactly. Past and present.
Man is nothing more than a concretion formed from emanations of all the
objects whose emanations have impinged upon living tissue since, at the
beginning of the world, living tissue was formed. He is the sunset he
saw a million years ago, the water he swam in when he was a fish, the
knight in armour he fought with when he was an ancestor, or rather he is
a concretion of the light, touch and sound vibrations from these and a
million other things. I have written the matter fully out in a thesis,
which I hope to publish some day."
"Well, you may put my name down for a dozen copies," said the Prince,
"for certainly the theory is less mad than some of the theories I have
come across explaining the origin of mind."
"But what has all that to do with the ship?" asked Madame de Warens.
"Simply, madame, that the ship which one looked at as a structure of
canvas and wood, once seen by Mademoiselle de Bromsart, has become part
of her mind, just as it has become part of yours and mine, a logical and
definite part of our minds; now, mark me, there was also the sunset and
the storm clouds, those objects also became part of the mind of
Mademoiselle de Bromsart, and the reasons interlying between all these
objects produced in her a definite and painful impression. They were, in
fact, all thinking something which she interpreted."
"It seemed to me," said the girl, "that I saw Loneliness itself, and for
the first time, and I felt just now that it was following me. It was to
escape from that absurd phantom that I suggested to Monsieur le Prince
that we should alter our course."
"Well," said Madame de Warens, "your will has conquered the Phantom. Let
us talk of something more cheerful."
"Listen!" said Mademoiselle de Bromsart. "It seems to me that the
engines are going slower."
"You have a quick ear, mademoiselle," said the Prince, "they undoubtedly
are. The Captain has reduced speed. Kerguelen is before us, or rather
on our starboard bow, and daybreak will, no doubt, give us a view of it.
We do not want to be too close to it in the dark hours, that is why
speed has been reduced."
Coffee was served at table and presently, amidst the fumes of cigarette
smoke, the conversation turned to politics, the works of Anatole France,
and other absorbing subjects. One might have fancied oneself in Paris
but for the vibrations of the propeller, the heave of the sea, and the
hundred little noises that mark the passage of a ship under way.
Later Mademoiselle de Bromsart found herself in the smoking-room alone
with her host, Madame de Warens having retired to her state-room and the
others gone on deck.
The girl was doing some embroidery work which she had fetched from her
cabin and the Prince was glancing at the pages of the Revue des Deux
Mondes. Presently he laid the book down.
"I was in earnest," said he.
"How?" she asked, glancing up from her work.
"When I proposed altering the course. Nothing would please me more than
to spoil a plan of my own to please you."
"It is good of you to say that," she replied, "all the same I am glad I
did not spoil your plan, not so much for your sake as my own."
"How?"
"I would rather die than run away from danger."
"So you feared danger?"
"No, I did not fear it, but I felt it. I felt a premonition of danger. I
did not say so at dinner. I did not want to alarm the others."
He looked at her curiously for a moment, contrasting her fragility and
beauty with the something unbendable that was her spirit, her soul--call
it what you will.
"Well," said he, "your slightest wish is my law. I have been going to
speak to you for the last few days. I will say what I want to say now.
It is only four words. Will you marry me?"
She looked up at him, meeting his eyes full and straight.
"No," said she, "it is impossible."
"Why?"
"I have a very great regard for you--but--"
"You do not love me?"
She said nothing, going on with her work calmly as though the
conversation was about some ordinary topic.
"I don't see why you should," he went on, "but look around you--how many
people marry for love now-a-days--and those who do, are they any the
happier? I have seen a very great deal of the world and I know for a
fact that happiness in marriage has little to do with what the poets
call love and everything to do with companionship. If a man and woman
are good companions then they are happy together, if not they are
miserable, no matter how much they may love one another at the start."
"Have you seen much of the world?" she raised her eyes again as she
asked the question. "Have you seen anything really of the world? I do
not mean to be rude, but this world of ours, this world of society that
holds us all, is there anything real about it, since nearly everything
in it is a sham? Look at the lives we lead, look at Paris and London and
Berlin. Why the very language of society is framed to say things we do
not mean."
"It is civilization. How else would you have it?"
"I don't know," she replied, "but I do know it is not life. It is
dishonesty. You say that the only happy married people are those that
are good companions, that love does not count in the long run, and you
are right, perhaps, as far as what you call the World is concerned. I
only repeat that the thing you call the World is not the real world, for
love is real, and love is not merely a question of good companionship.
It is an immortal bond between two spirits and death cannot break it."
"You speak as though you were very certain of a thing which, of all
things, is most hidden from us."
"I speak by instinct."
"Well," said the Prince, "perhaps you are right. We have left behind us
the simplicity of the old world, we have become artificial, our life is
a sham--but what would you have and how are we to alter it? We are all
like passengers in a train travelling to heaven knows where; the seats
are well cushioned and the dining-car leaves nothing to be desired, but
I admit the atmosphere is stuffy and the long journey has developed all
sorts of unpleasant traits among the passengers--well, what would you
do? We cannot get out."
"I suppose not," said she.
He rose up and stood for a moment turning over some magazines lying on
the table. He had received his answer and he knew instinctively that it
was useless to pursue the business further.
Then after a few more words he went on deck. The wind had fallen to a
steady blow but the sky was still overcast and the atmosphere was heavy
and clammy and not consistent. It was as though the low lying clouds
dipped here and there to touch the sea. Every now and then the _Gaston
de Paris_ would run into a wreath of fog and pass through it into the
clear darkness of the night beyond.
In the darkness aft of the bridge nothing could be seen but the pale
hint of the bridge canvas and a trace of spars and funnels now wiped out
with mist, now visible again against the night.
The Prince leaned on the weather rail and looked over at the tumble and
sud of the water lit here and there with the gleam of a port light.
Cléo de Bromsart had fascinated him, grown upon him, compelled him in
some mysterious way to ask her to marry him. He had sworn after his
disastrous first experience never to marry again. He had attempted to
break his oath. Was he in love with her? He could scarcely answer that
question himself. But this he knew, that her refusal of him and the
words she had said were filling his mind with quite new ideas.
Was she right after all in her statement that he who fancied himself a
man of the world knew nothing of the world except its shams? Was she
right in her statement that love was a bond between two spirits, a bond
unbreakable by death? That old idea was not new to him, he had played
with it as a toy of the mind constructed for the mind to play with by
the poets.
The new thing was to find this idea in the mind of a young girl and to
hear it expressed with such conviction.
After a while he came forward and went up the steps to the bridge.
Captain Lepine was in the chart room, the first officer was on the
bridge and Bouvalot, an old navy quarter-master, had the wheel.
"We have slowed down," said the Prince.
"Yes, monsieur," replied the first officer, "we are getting close to
land. We ought to sight Kerguelen at dawn."
"What do you think of the weather?"
"I don't think the weather will bother us much, monsieur, that blow had
nothing behind it, and were it not for these fog patches I would ask
nothing better; but then it's Kerguelen--what can one expect!"
"True," said the other, "it's a vile place, by all accounts, as far as
weather is concerned."
He tapped at the door of the chart room and entered.
The chart room of the _Gaston de Paris_ was a pleasant change from the
dark and damp of the bridge. A couch upholstered in red velvet ran along
one side of it and on the couch with one leg up and a pipe in his mouth
the captain was resting himself, a big man of the Southern French navy
type, with a beard of burnt-up black that reached nearly to his eyes.
The Prince, telling him not to move, sat down and lit a cigar. Then they
fell into talk.
Lepine was a sailor and nothing else. Had his character been cut out of
cardboard the line of division between the sailor and the rest of the
world could not have been more sharply marked. That was perhaps why the
two men, though divided by a vast social gulf, were friends, almost
chums.
They talked for half an hour or so on all sorts of subjects connected
with the ship.
"By the way, Lepine," said the Prince suddenly, "It has been the toss up
of a sou that we are not now steering a course for New Amsterdam."
"And how is that, monsieur?"
"Well, Mademoiselle de Bromsart proposed to me at dinner that we should
alter our course, the idea came to her that some misfortune might happen
to us off Kerguelen and, as you know, I am always anxious to please my
guests--well, I called a quarter-master down. I was going to have sent
for you."
"To alter our course?"
"Yes, but Mademoiselle de Bromsart altered her mind. She refused to let
me send for you."
"But what gave the young lady that idea?" asked the Captain.
"That big ship we sighted before dinner."
"The three-master?"
"Yes, there was something about it she did not like."
"Monsieur, what an idea--and what was wrong with it?"
"Oh, it was just a fancy. The sea breeds fancies and superstitions, you
know that, Lepine, for I believe you are superstitious yourself."
"Perhaps, monsieur; all sailors are, and I have had experiences. There
are bad and good ships, just as there are bad and good men, of that I am
sure. Perhaps that three-master was a bad ship." Lepine laughed as
though at his own words. "All the same," he went on, "I don't like
warnings, especially off Kerguelen."
They left the chart house and came out on the bridge.
The wind was still steady but the clouds had consolidated and the night
was pitch black. On the bridge the _Gaston de Paris_ seemed driving into
a solid wall of ebony.
The Prince after a glance into the binnacle was preparing to go down the
bridge steps when a cry from the Look-out made him wheel round.
Suddenly, and as if evolved by magic from the blackness, the vague
spectre of a vast ship shewed up ahead on the port bow making to cross
their course. Thundering along under full canvas without lights and
seemingly blind, she seemed only a pistol shot away.
Then the owner of the _Gaston de Paris_ did what no owner ought ever to
do: seeing Destruction and judging that by a bold stroke it might be
out-leaped, he sprang to the engine room telegraph and flung the lever
to full speed ahead.
CHAPTER IV
DISASTER
Left alone, Mademoiselle de Bromsart finished the all but completed
piece of embroidery in her lap. It did not take her five minutes. Then
she held up the work and reviewed it with lips slightly pursed, then she
rolled it up, rose, and went off to the state-room of Madame de Warens
to bid her good-night.
Madame was sitting up in her bunk reading Maurice Barres' "Greco." The
air of the place was stifling with the fume of cigarettes, and the girl
nearly choked as she closed the door and stood facing the old lady in
the bunk.
"Why don't you smoke, then you wouldn't mind it," cried the latter,
putting her book down and taking off her glasses. "No, I won't have a
port opened, d'you want me to be blown out of my bunk? Sit down."
"No, I won't stay," replied the other, "I just came to say
good-night--and tell you something--He asked me to marry him."
"Who--Selm?"
"Yes."
"And what did you say?"
"I said 'No.'"
"Oh, you did?--and what's the matter with him--I mean what's the matter
with you?"
"How?"
"How! The best match in Europe and you say 'no' to him--a man who could
marry where he pleases and whom he pleased and you say 'no.'
Good-looking, without vices, richer than many a crowned head, second
only to the reigning families--and you say 'no.'"
The old lady was working herself up. This admirer of Anarchasis Clootz
and dilletanti of Anarchism had lately possessed one supreme desire, the
desire to have for niece the Princess Selm.
"I thought you didn't believe in all that," said the girl.
"All what?"
"Titles, wealth and so forth."
"I believe in seeing you happy and well-placed. I was not thinking of
myself--well, there, it's done. There is no use in talking any more, for
I know your disposition. You are hard, mademoiselle, that is your
failing--without real heart. It is the modern disease. Well, that is all
I have to say. I wish you good-night."
She put on her spectacles again.
"Good-night," said the other.
She went out, closed the door, and entered her state-room.
It was the same as Madame de Warens' only larger, a place to fill the
mind of the old-time seafarers with the wildest surprise, for here was
everything that a mortal could demand in the way of comfort and nothing
of the stuffy upholstery that the word "state-rooms" suggests to the
mind of the ordinary traveller.
The crimson velvet, so dear to the heart of the ship furnisher, was
supplanted by ribbed silk, Persian rugs covered the floor, the metal
fittings were of bronze, and worked, where possible, into sea designs:
dolphins, sea-horses, and fucus. There was a writing-table that could be
closed up into the wall so cunningly that no trace was left of where it
had been, a tiny library of slim volumes uniformly bound in amber
leather, a miracle of binding, the work of Grossart of Tours, a map-rack
containing large scale maps of the world, and a tell-tale compass
shewing the course of the _Gaston de Paris_ to whomever cared to read
it. A long mirror let into the bulkhead aft increased the apparent size
of the place. A bath-room and dressing-room lay forward.
Having closed the door she stood for a moment glancing at her reflection
in the mirror. The picture seemed to fascinate her as though it were the
reflection of some stranger. Then, turning from the mirror, she sat down
for a moment on the couch by the door.
She felt disturbed. The words of Madame de Warens had angered her,
producing the effect of a false accusation to which one is too proud to
reply, but the momentary anger had passed, giving place to a craving for
freedom and fresh air. The atmosphere of the state-room felt stifling,
she would go on deck. Then she remembered that she was in a thin evening
dress and that she would have to change.
The two women shared a maid, and she was in the act of stretching out
her hand to the electric bell by the couch to summon the maid, when the
craving to get on deck without delay became so strong that she rose,
went into the dressing-room and, without assistance, changed her gown
for a tweed coat and skirt and her thin evening shoes for a pair of
serviceable boots. Then she slipped on her oilskin and sou'wester and
coming back into the state-room caught a momentary glimpse of herself in
the mirror, a strange contrast to the elegant and black-gowned figure
that had glanced at its reflection only ten minutes before.
She was coming up the saloon companion-way when the engines, easily
heard from here, suddenly began a thunderous pow-wow; the ship lurched
forward, and from the blackness of the open hatch above came a voice
like the sudden clamour of sea-gulls. Then she was flung backwards and
stretched, half-stunned, on the mat at the companion-way foot.
For a moment she did not know in the least what had happened. She
fancied she had slipped and fallen, then, as she scrambled on to her
hands and knees, someone passed her, nearly treading on her, and rushed
up the companion-way to the deck. It was the chief steward. Rising and
holding on to the rail she followed him.
The deck was aslant, and in the windy blackness of the night nothing was
to be seen for a moment; but the darkness was terrific with voices,
voices from forward of the bridge and voices from alongside as though a
hundred drunken sailors were yelling and blaspheming from a quay.
For the tenth of a second the idea of being alongside a quay came to her
with nightmare effect, heightened by a ruffling and booming from the sky
above, a rippling and flapping and thundering like the sound of vast and
tangled wings.
Then a blaze of light shot out, making day.
The arc lamp of the fore-mast, always ready to be used for night work,
had been run up and switched on.
To starboard and stern of the _Gaston de Paris_, a great ship, within
pistol shot of the deck, and with her canvas spilling the wind and
thrashing and thundering, was dipping her bows in the sea. Men were
fighting for the boats, and the stern was so high that more than half of
the rudder shewed like a great door swinging on its hinges. On the
counter in pale letters the word
"_Albatross_"
shewed, and to the mind of the gazer all the horror seemed focussed in
that calm statement, those commonplace letters written upon destruction.
Clinging to the hatch combing she saw, now, as a person sees in a dream,
sailors rushing and struggling aft along the slanting main deck. The
engines had ceased working but the dynamos were running on steam from
the main boilers, and through the noises that filled the night the
sewing machine sound of them threshed like a pulse. What had happened,
what was happening, she did not know. The great ship to port seemed
sinking but the _Gaston de Paris_ seemed safe, but for the horrible
slant of the decks; she called out to the sailors, now clustered here
and there by the boat davits, but her voice blew away on the wind, she
saw Prince Selm, he was struggling aft along the slippery sloping deck,
clutching at the bulwarks as he came, he seemed like a man engaged in
some fantastic game--an unreal figure, now he was on the deck on all
fours, now up again, clutching men by the shoulders, shaking them,
shouting. She could hear his voice. The starboard boats were unworkable
owing to the list to port. She did not know that, she only knew, and now
for the first time, that the _Gaston de Paris_ was in fearful danger.
And instantly the thought came to her of the old woman below in her bunk
and, on the thought, the mad instinct to rush below and save her.
Holding on to the woodwork of the hatch she was crawling towards the
opening when blackness hit her like a blow between the eyes. The arc
lamp had gone out, the dynamos had ceased running.
On the stroke of the darkness the _Gaston de Paris_ heeled slightly
deeper, flinging her to her knees, and as she hung, clutching the
woodwork, she heard her name.
It was the Prince's voice. She answered, and at once on her answer a
hand seized her cruelly as a vice. It caught her by the shoulder. She
felt herself dragged along, buffeted, lifted, cast down--then nothing
more.
CHAPTER V
VOICES IN THE NIGHT
The boat tackle of the _Gaston de Paris_ was the latest patent
arrangement for lowering boats in a hurry; every boat was provisioned,
and the water casks left nothing to be desired, there were frequent
inspections and boat drills. Yet when the _Gaston de Paris_ foundered
only three souls were saved.
The starboard boats, owing to the list, could not be lowered at all;
every boat had its canvas cover on, which did not expedite matters. The
patent tackle developed defects in practise, and, to crown all, the men
panicked owing to the sudden darkness that fell on them like a clap on
the extinction of the electric light. The port quarter-boat into which
the girl had been flung had two men in her and was lowered away by
Prince Selm, the doctor and the first officer; panic had herded the rest
of the hands towards the pinnace and forward boats, and the pinnace,
over-crowded, was stoved by the sea as soon as she was water-bourne. The
other boats never left their davits, they went with the ship when the
decks opened and the boilers saluted the night with a column of coloured
steam and a clap of thunder that resounded for miles.
The whole tragedy from impact to explosion lasted only seven minutes.
The two men in the boat with the girl had shoved off like demons and
taken to the oars as soon as the falls were released. If they had not,
being so short-handed for the size of the boat, they would have been
stoved; as it was they were nearly wrecked by a balk of timber from the
explosion. It missed them by a short two fathoms, drenching them with
spray, and then the night shut down pierced by voices, voices of men
swimming and crying for help.
The rowers did not know each other. The bow oar shouted to the stern.
"Is that you Larsen?"
"No, Bompard, and you?"
"La Touche--Row--God! Listen, there's a chap ahead."
The cries ahead ceased, and the boat bumped on something that duddered
away under it and sank.
"He's gone, whoever he is," cried Bompard. "No use hunting for him.
Listen, there's more." Voices shrill and voices bubbling came through
the blackness from here and from there. The men tried to locate them and
rowed now in this direction, now in that--always wrong. Once a voice
sudden and shrill and close to the boat cried "A moi," and at the same
instant Bompard's oar struck something, but they found nothing, the
voice had ceased.
They could see, now, the waves like spectres evolving themselves from
the night, a vision touching the very limit of dimness, and now as they
entered a mist patch--nothing. The voices to port and starboard were
ceasing, one by one--being blotted out. Then silence fell, broken only
by the sound of the oars. La Touche shouted and shouted again, but there
came no response. Then came Bompard's voice. "Is that hooker gone, too?"
"Curse her, yes. I was the lookout. Sailing without lights."
"This woman seems dead."
"It's the girl. I heard her squeal out as they hove her in. Let her lie.
Well, this is a start."
"A black job, but we're out of it, so far."
"Ay, as far as we've got--as far as we've got. Well, there's no use
rowing, there's no sea to hurt her, let her toss."
The oars came in and the fellows slithered from their seats on to the
bottom boards. Ballasted so the boat rode easy. They lay like shivering
dogs, grumbling and cursing and then, as they lay, the talk went on.
"Mon Dieu! What a thing--but we've grub and water all right."
"Ay, the boats are all right for that."
There was a long silence and then La Touche began in a high complaining
voice:
"I was lookout, but it was not my fault, that I swear. I saw nothing
till a big three-master broke out of the smother making to cross our
bows, no lights shewing, snoring along asleep. Then I shouted. The
bridge had seen her too and put the engines full speed ahead. They'd
mistaken the distance, thought to clear her. I got aft. Hadn't reached
the port alley way when the smash came. It was all the fault of those
fools on the bridge."
"Who knows," came Bompard's voice. "Things happen and what is to be must
be. Well, they're all gone a hundred fathoms deep and here we are
drifting about with a dead woman. I'd sooner have any other cargo if I
was given my choice."
"Sure she's dead?"
"Ay, she's dead sure enough by the way she's lying, not a breath in
her."
Neither man suggested that she should be cast over. She ballasted the
boat, and for Bompard she was something to lean against.
The French mercantile marine is divided into two great classes, the
northerners and southerners. The man from the north is a Ponantaise, the
man from the south a Moco.
Bompard was a Moco, La Touche a Ponantaise. They talked and talked,
repeating themselves, cursing the "hooker," the Bridge and the
steersman. Once La Touche, grown hysterical, seemed choking against
tears.
Then after a while, conversation died out. They had nothing more to talk
about. The boat rode easy. There was nothing to do, and these men blunt
to life and sea-hardened so that to them all things came in the hour's
work, nodded off, La Touche curled up in the bow, Bompard with his
grizzled head on the breast of Mademoiselle de Bromsart.
CHAPTER VI
DAWN
The girl was not dead as Bompard imagined, she had been stunned and had
passed from that condition into the pseudo-sleep that follows profound
excitement.
She was awakened by a flick of spray on her face, a touch from the great
sea that had claimed her for its own.
Lying as she was she could see nothing but the ribbed sides of the boat,
the grey sky above, and a gull with domed wings and down-curved head,
poised, as though suspended on the end of a string. It screamed at her,
shifted its position, and then passed, as though blown away on the wind.
She sat up. Bompard had drawn away from her and was lying curled up on
his side. La Touche on his back, forward, shewed nothing but his knees;
across the gunnel lay the sea, desolate in the dawn, turbulent, yet
hard and mournful as a view of slated roofs after rain.
She had never seen the sea so close before, she had never smelt its
heart and the savour of its soul; bitter, fresh, new and ever renewed by
the blowing wind.
The whole tragedy of the night was alive in her mind as a picture, but
it seemed the picture of what another person had seen. Her past life,
her own personality, seemed vague and unconnected with her as the past
life and personality of another person. This was reality. Reality new,
terrific, pungent as that which the soul may experience on awakening
after death.
She knew, as though the desolate sea had told her, that the great yacht
was gone and everyone on board of her; yet the fact, perhaps from its
very enormity, failed to realize itself fully in her mind. Then, in a
flash and horribly clearly, came the picture of her immediate
environment on board the _Gaston de Paris_, quite little things and
things more important: the silver-plated taps of the bath in the
bath-room, adjoining her cabin, the silk curtains of her bunk, the
hundred and one trifles that made for comfort and ease. She saw the
cabin servants and the face of the chief steward, a fat pale-faced man,
a typical _maître d'hôtel_; the dinner of the night before, when the
people seemed to her phantoms and the food, table equipage, knives,
forks and spoons, realities.
All these things stood forth against the blankness and desolation of the
sea, the sea she could touch by dipping her hand over the gunnel, the
sea that had stripped her of everything but life and body, the dress and
boots she wore and the yellow oilskin coat that covered her. Her hand
resting on the gunnel shewed her that she still wore her rings,
exquisite rings of emerald, ruby and diamonds, fresh washed with spray.
They held her eyes as her mind, swaying just as the boat swayed to the
swell, tried to re-construct yesterday and to feel.
Horror, pity for the fate of the others, the sense of the great disaster
that had happened to the _Gaston de Paris_, of these only the latter
possessed any vitality in her mind. The feeling of unreality destroyed
her grip upon all else.
Her mind was subdued to her own condition. The hard angles of the
woodwork against which she leaned and the spray upon her face, the boat
and the men in it, the sharp cut wave tops--these were real, with an
appalling reality.
It was as though she had never come across a real thing before, and
across her mind came a vague, vague recognition of that great truth that
real things bruise one, eat at one, try to make one their own, once they
manage to break down the barrier of custom that separates the false from
the true; that quite common things have a power greater than the power
of mind, that only amidst the falsity of civilised life and the stage
are the properties subordinate to the persons and emotions of the
actors.
At this moment Bompard, suddenly moving in his sleep, roused himself and
sat up. His rough, weather beaten face was expressionless for a moment,
then his eyes fell on the girl and recognition seemed to come to him.
"Mon Dieu," cried the old fellow as if addressing some unseen person.
"'Tis all true then--" Then, as though remembering something--"but how
is mademoiselle alive?"
"I don't know," said the girl, unconscious as to what he was referring
to. "I know you, I have seen you often on deck--who is the other man?
Oh, is it possible that we are the only people left?"
Bompard, without replying, swung his head round, then he rose and came
over the thwarts. He caught La Touche by the leg.
"Gaston--rouse up--the lady is alive. It's me. Bompard."
La Touche sat up, his hair towsled, his face creased, he seemed furious
about something and pushing Bompard away stared round and round at sea
and sky as if in search of someone.
"Bon Dieu," cried La Touche. "The cursed boat." He spat as though
something bitter were in his mouth and wiped his lips with the back of
his hand. He did not seem to care a button whether the lady were alive
or not. He had been dreaming that he was in a tavern, just raising a
glass to his mouth, and Bompard had awakened him to this.
The girl could not repeat the question to which there seemed no answer,
she crawled into the stern sheets and sitting there, half bent, watched
the two men. An observer perched in the sky above might have noticed the
curious fact that on board the forsaken boat quarter deck and fo'c'sle
still held sway, that the lady was the lady and the hands the hands,
that Bompard was talking in an undertone, saying to La Touche: "Come,
get alive, get alive," and that La Touche, after his first outburst, was
holding himself in. They were old yachtsmen, no disaster could shake
that fact.
La Touche, rising and taking his seat on a thwart and looking everywhere
but in the direction of the girl, as though ashamed of something, began
cutting up some tobacco in a mechanical way, whilst Bompard, on his
knees, was exploring the contents of the forward locker. La Touche was a
fair-haired man, younger than Bompard, a melancholy looking individual
who always seemed gazing at the worst of things. He spoke now as the
girl drew his attention to something far away in the east, something
sketched vaguely in the sky as though a picture lay there beyond the
haze.
"Ay, that's Kerguelen," said La Touche.
Bompard, on his knees, and with a maconochie tin in his left hand,
raised his head and looked.
"Ay, that's Kerguelen," said Bompard.
"And look," said the girl, pointing towards Kerguelen. "Is not that the
sail of a boat, away ever so far--or is it a gull? Now it's gone. Look,
there it is again."
Bompard looked.
"I see nothing," said he, "gull, most like--there wouldn't be any boat
from us, they're all gone, unless it was a boat from that hooker we
struck."
"Boat," said La Touche with a dismal laugh. "She got no boat away, she
went down by the bows with the fellows like flies on her, this is the
only boat of the lot that got away."
The girl with her hand shading her eyes was still looking.
"It's gone, whatever it may have been," said she, "can we reach the
land?"
"Why, yes, mademoiselle," said Bompard, "the wind is setting towards
there and we have a sail, I am going to step the mast now when I've
taken stock--well, we won't starve. The tube is provisioned for a full
crew for a fortnight, water too, we won't starve, that's a fact. La
Touche, get a move on and help me with the sail."
"I'm coming," grumbled La Touche.
It seemed to the girl that the minds and the tongues and the movements
of the two men were part of some slow-acting, wooden, automatic
mechanism. Whether they reached the land or not seemed a matter almost
of indifference to them. Accustomed to people who talked much and had
much to talk about she could not understand. All this was part of the
new world in which she found herself, part of the boat itself, of the
mast, now stepped against the grey sky, the waves, the gulls, and that
tremendous outline of mountains now more visible to the east--Kerguelen.
A world of things without thought, or all but thoughtless, things that,
yet, dominated mind more profoundly than the power of mind itself.
Bompard was munching a biscuit he had taken from one of the bread bags
as he worked. She noticed the bag, its texture, and the words
"Traversal--Toulon" stamped on it. The maconochie tin which he had
placed on a seat and a tin of beef with a Libby label held her eyes as
though they were things new and extraordinary. They were. They were
food. She had never seen food before, food as it really is, the barrier
between life and death, food naked and stripped of all pretence.
Bompard coming aft with the sheet shipped the tiller, and, taking his
seat by the girl, put the boat before the wind. La Touche, who had taken
his seat on the after thwart, was engaged in opening the tin of beef.
The girl scarcely noticed him. She was experiencing a new sensation, the
sensation of sailing with the wind and the run of the swell. The boat,
from a dead thing tossing on the waves, had suddenly become a thing
alive, buoyant, eager and full of purpose, silent, too, for the slapping
and buffeting of the water against the planking had ceased. Running thus
with the wind and swell there was no opposition, everything was with
her.
"Well, it's beef," said La Touche who had managed to open the Libby tin,
"it might be worse."
He dug out a piece with his knife and presented it to the girl with a
biscuit, then he helped Bompard and himself, then he scrambled forward,
leaving his beef and biscuit on the thwart, and reappeared with a
pannikin of water; it was handed to the lady first.
The food seemed to loose their tongues. It was as though the caste
difference had been broken by the act of eating together.
"I'd never thought to set tooth in a biscuit again when that smash came
last night," said Bompard addressing no one in particular.
"I wasn't thinking of biscuits," said La Touche, "I was bowled over in
the alley-way. You see, I was running, so it took me harder. What set me
running I don't know, my legs took care of themselves--I was just
leaning like this, see, on the look out and between two blinks there was
the hooker crossing our course or making that way. She'll clear us,
maybe, said I to myself, then the engines went full speed and I knew we
were done. Then I cleared aft, running, with no thought in my mind but
to get out of the way, dark, too, but I didn't barge against nothing,
till the smash came, and I went truck over keel in the alley-way."
"I was coming up the cabin stairs," said Cléo, "and something seemed to
knock me down. Then when I got on deck the light was put on and I saw a
great ship on the right hand side; she seemed sinking, but I read her
name, she was quite close. Then the light went out and someone caught me
and threw me--I don't know where, but it must have been into this boat."
"That was it," said Bompard, talking and eating at the same time, "us
two was in the boat."
"I thought it was Larsen," cut in La Touche. "Larsen helped me to get
the canvas off her, that was when the electric was on--what became of
Larsen?"
"Lord knows," said Bompard. "I scrambled into her just as the light was
shut off, then the chaps on deck chucked the lady in. Next thing we were
fending her off from the ship. I was shouting to the chaps on deck to
jump and we'd pick them up, we'd got the oars out then. I tell you I was
fuddled up for I'd got it in my head that the hooker was to port of us
though I'd seen her with my own eyes to starboard. I was thinking we'd
be taken down with the suck of her and I was bent on getting ahead of
her."
"I didn't hear you shouting to the fellows on deck," said La Touche,
"but I heard you shouting to me to row. Then when we'd got her away a
bit the _Gaston_ blew up."
"Blew up," said the girl.
"The boilers," said Bompard, "they lifted the decks off her. She must
have gone like a stone."
"So you think no one at all escaped but us?"
Neither of the men replied for a moment, then La Touche said: "There
wasn't another boat could have got away."
The sun was well risen now, the clouds were high and breaking and the
far away land shewed up, vast in the distance, with a white line of
snow-covered peaks against the sky, desolate as when Kerguelen first
sighted them.
Cléo with her eyes fixed across the leagues of tumbling tourmaline
tinted sea almost forgot the others. That was the place where the wind
was bearing them to, a place where there was nothing. Neither hotels nor
houses nor huts, nor men nor women, a place where no landing-stage would
receive them, no voice welcome them. Her throat worked for a second
convulsively as she battled with the quite new things that the far off
mountains were telling her.
It was now and not till now that she recognised fully what Fate had done
to her. It was now and not till now that she saw Time before her as a
thing from which all the known features had been deleted.
"Mademoiselle's bath is quite ready."
"Mademoiselle, the first gong has sounded."
Oh, the day--the day with its hundred phases and divisions, the
breakfast hour, the luncheon hour, the hour that brought afternoon tea,
the dresses that went with each phase, the emotions and interests, and
changing forms of being, the day which made a person change to its light
and the person of ten o'clock in the morning quite different from the
person of noon--this thing which we talk of as the day appeared before
her now as what it really is, life itself, as civilized men know life, a
thing outside ourselves yet of ourselves and without which the circling
of the sun is as the circling of a pointer on a blank dial--. This thing
was gone.
La Touche had got more forward and was smoking and, though the wind was
with them, a faint scent of tobacco smoke came on the spill of the wind
from the sail. Bompard was chewing, spitting occasionally to starboard
and wiping his mouth with the back of his bronzed tattooed hand.
The vague scent of the tobacco threaded up all sorts of things in the
girl's mind: Madame de Warens, the streets of Paris, the deck of the
yacht. She remembered the piece of embroidery work she had been engaged
on last night, and then a scrap of conversation she had overheard
between the doctor and the artist towards the end of dinner, they were
talking of the passéistes and futurists, of the work of Pablo Picasso,
of Sunyer, of Boccioni and Durio, arguing with extraordinary passion
about the work of these people.
"There's weather or something over there," said La Touche who had
slipped down and was seated on the bottom boards with his back to a
thwart; he nodded his head towards Kerguelen.
Around one of the highest peaks a lead-coloured cloud had wrapped itself
turban-wise, and even as they looked the cloud turban increased in
volume and height, mournful and monstrous as some djin-born vision of
the Arabian story-tellers.
"That's snow," said Bompard, "and by the twist of it it's in a
whirlwind."
"Bon Dieu, what a place," said La Touche.
"You may say that," said Bompard, "but that's nothing, it's when we come
to make a landing we'll find what we are against."
"Oh, we've got so far we'll finish it," said La Touche.
Then began a dismal argument, full of words and repetitions but with few
ideas, and from the trend of it the curious fact appeared that La
Touche, the ship's grouser and dismal James, was taking the optimistical
side, whilst Bompard, generally cheerful, was the pessimist.
La Touche's optimism was, perhaps, the outcome of fear. What they had
gone through was nothing to the prospect of having to make a landing on
that tremendous coast, simply because what they had gone through had
come on them suddenly. This thing had to be faced in cold blood. The
coward in La Touche refused to face it fully, refused to face the fact
that with this swell and with all the chances of uncharted and unknown
reefs and rocks the risk was appalling. He grew angry.
"Don't be a coward over it," said he. That set Bompard off, and for a
moment the girl thought they would have come to blows. Then it passed
and they were as friendly as before, just as though nothing had
happened.
Their talk and the whole business had been conducted as though the girl
were not there. In the few hours since daybreak, quarter deck and
fo'c'sle had vanished. They had become welded into one community, all
equal, and the lady was no longer the lady. There was no hint of
disrespect, no hint of respect. They were all equal, equal sharers in
the chances of the sea.
More, the sex standard seemed to have vanished with the social. Nothing
remained but the human, for that is the rule with the open boat at sea.
When they lowered the sail for screening purposes, when they raised it
again, it was all the same, for the human level is above all little
things.
Towards noon and with the coast now closer and well-defined, La Touche
sighted something ahead. It was a rock, high and pointed like a black
spire protruding from the sea and standing there like an outpost of the
land.
"Had we better give it a wide berth?" asked La Touche. "Maybe there's
more near it."
"The sea is running smooth enough by it," said Bompard. "I don't see
breakers, and we don't draw anything to speak of." He held on.
The sun was shewing through breaks in the high clouds and its light fell
on the water and the rock, pied with roosting guillemots. As the boat
drew near the guillemots gave tongue. The sound came against the wind
fierce and complaining, antagonistic like the voice of loneliness crying
out against them and telling them to be gone--be gone--be gone!
Cléo, as they passed, saw the green water sliding up and falling from
the polished black rock surface. The sight seemed to bring the hostile
coast leagues nearer and the bagpipe crying of the guillemots as it died
away behind them seemed a barrier passed, never to be re-crossed.
CHAPTER VII
THE COAST
And now, away at sea and leagues from the coast they were approaching,
vast islands disclosed themselves suddenly through the sea haze,
standing like giants waist deep in the ocean, whilst the coast itself
with its cliffs and rocks of black basalt and dolerite shewed clear,
extraordinarily clear, with every detail defined in the sunlight, from
the rifts in the basalt to the gulls blowing about in legions and the
great sea-geese hovering and fishing.
The coast was ferocious, and the whole country from the sea foam to the
foothills looked tumbled and new, with the newness of infinite
antiquity. The last thunders of creation seemed scarcely to have died
away, the last throe scarcely to have ceased, leaving million-ton rock
cast on rock and the new, shear-cut cliffs spitting back their first
taste of the bitter sea.
"There is nowhere to land," said the girl. She was shuddering as a dog
shudders when overstrung.
"Ay, it's a brute beast of a place," said Bompard, "well, we must nose
along on the lookout. There's no coast but hasn't some landing-place
where a boat can push in. Y'see it's not like a ship. A boat can go
where a ship can't."
He shifted the helm a bit, keeping the coast parallel to them on the
starboard side.
"Might those islands be better to go to?" asked she, "they couldn't be
worse than that."
La Touche suddenly grew excited. "Bon Dieu," cried he, "what a thing to
be saying! Those islands, nothing but rocks--nothing but rocks. Here
there is land, at all events, good land one can put one's foot on; out
there there's nothing but rocks. Rather than go out there I would swim
ashore--I would--"
"Oh, close up," said Bompard, "don't talk about swimming--maybe you'll
have to."
"One can always drown," said La Touche.
It was Bompard who next broke the silence.
"I've been over cliffs worse than those, for gulls eggs," said he, "take
one coast with another, coasts are pretty much the same, you get bad
bits and easy bits, that is all."
La Touche said nothing.
As they drew on the great islands out at sea ranged themselves more
definitely and the tremendous coast to starboard shewed more clearly its
deep cut canons, its sea arches and absolute desolation.
The sea had fallen, though the wind still held steady, and this surface
calmness, under-run by a gentle swell, served only to emphasize the
vastness of the view. The island seemed immensely remote and immense in
size, the far snow-covered mountains the mountains of a land where
giants had lived and from which they had departed countless ages ago.
Oyster catches passed the boat with their melancholy cry, but the
fishing gannets and the swimming puffins seemed scarcely to heed the
intruders. Puffins swimming a biscuit toss away as though they had never
learned the fear of man.
They had drawn nearer shore so that the boom of the swell in the caves
and on the rocks came to them with the crying of the shore birds;
passing a headland like a vast lizard they opened a beach curved like
the new moon and seven miles from horn to horn.
"There's our landing-place," cried Bompard, "big enough to pick and
choose from."
"Lord!" shouted La Touche. "Look over there--moving rocks!"
He pointed half a mile away to seaward.
Bompard looked.
"Those crest rocks, they're whales," said he.
A pair of whales shewed, standing up, coupling in the chill blue grey
water, a miraculous sight, as though they had entered a world where the
original things of life still moved and had their being untroubled by
man and untouched by Time.
Bompard shifted the helm, and the boat, heading for the shore and no
longer running before the wind, moved less easily, shipping an
occasional dash of spray.
The change of movement, the dash of spray, the altered course were to
the girl like the turning of a corner. Running with the wind and with a
parallel shore the boat was the world and the coast and island a
panorama. With the twist of the helm Reality made the coast a
destination. Up to this moment the uncertainty of whether they could
land had held her mind, up to this moment all sorts of vague
possibilities, the chance of meeting a ship, the chance of being blown
out to sea, the chance of this or that had come between her and the
realisation of the fact that this prison was hers.
The monstrosity of the idea stood fully revealed only now on that beach
where there was nothing but sand, nothing but rocks, nothing but gulls.
Close in now Bompard let go the sheet and they unstepped the mast, the
boat rocking in the trough of the swell. Then they got the oars out.
As they bent to their work and over the creak of the leather in the
rowlocks the rumble and fume of the seven mile beach came mixed with the
yelping and mewing of the gulls. The boat made slow progress, then a few
yards from the surf line it hung for a moment till the rowers suddenly
gave way and moving like a relieved arrow she came on the crest of a
wave, then the oars came in with a crash and the two men tumbling out
dragged her nose high and dry. They helped the girl out and as they
pulled the boat higher she stood, the wind flicking her oilskin coat
about her and the spindrift blowing in her face.
PART II
CHAPTER VIII
THE AWAKENING
The great beach of Kerguelen shews above tide mark long stretches where
no sand is, only rock. Basalt planed and smoothed by the seas of
countless ages, level as a ball-room floor and broken by rifts and pot
holes, between tide marks these pot holes serve as traps for all sorts
of sea creatures. Once the waves must have beaten right up to the low
and broken basalt cliffs full of caves floored with sand, but volcanic
action raising the beach has pushed the tide mark out leaving a shore
varying in width from half a mile to a few hundred yards.
This is the breeding place of the sea elephant. Half way between the
lizard point and the point further to the east a river comes down
disembarging through three months; on the banks of this river is the
seal nursery where in summer the young sea elephants tumble and play and
take their swimming lessons, whilst the mothers lie on rocks and the
fathers fish and hunt and fight in battles, the roaring of which
resounds for miles. Here the penguins drill and hold councils and law
courts and marry and get divorced and hold political meetings, here the
rabbits play and the terns foregather, and here the winds that blow
from everywhere but the east, hunt and yell and pile in winter a twenty
foot sea that breaks in seven miles of thunder under seven miles of
spray thick as the smoke of battle.
Duck and teal haunt the place and gulls of nearly every known kind snow
it and flick it with movement. Yet above the thunder of the waves and
the cries of the birds and the shouting of the winds when they blow,
there hangs a silence--the silence of the remote and prehistoric. The
living world of men seems cut off from here by far away doors and
forever.
After supper they had explored the cave mouths in the cliff opposite to
where the boat had beached. There were three caves just here. One was
impracticable owing to water dripping from the roof, but the other two,
floored with hard sand, were good enough for shelter. The men had stowed
the provisions and themselves in the western mast giving the girl the
other and the boat sail for a pillow.
It was old Bompard who thought of the latter. La Touche seemed to have
no thought for any one or anything but himself. He grumbled all the time
during supper, grumbled at the fact that there was no stuff to make a
fire with, that they had nothing warm to drink, that some time soon
their tobacco must run out. It seemed to Cléo as she lay with her head
on the hard sailcloth and her body on the hard sand, covered with the
oilskin coat which she had taken off to use as a blanket, that through
the league long rumble of the surf she could hear him grumbling still.
She did not care. Hard though the floor was she did not mind, she was
chloroformed. Chloroformed by the air of Kerguelen. The air that fills
the lungs with life, keeps a man going all day with an energy and
buoyancy unknown elsewhere and then fells him with sleep.
She awoke when the whale birds had ceased crying, just after dawn, awoke
fresh and new and full of life. She felt none of that troubled surprise
which comes when the mind has to adjust itself to the new situation on
awakening for the first time after a great disaster. It was as though
her mind had already adjusted itself and discounted everything.
She rose up and leaving the oilskin coat and sou'wester on the floor of
the cave came out on to the beach.
The fine weather still held and the day was strong, now lighting the
beach, the sea, and the distant islands through a sky of high, grey
eastward drifting clouds. The boat lay where it had been pulled up, the
tide now coming in and legions of birds were flitting and blowing about
and stalking on the sands as far as eye could reach.
She came to the cave where the men were. Bompard and La Touche lying on
their backs might have been dead but for the sound of their snoring.
Bompard was lying with his wrist across his eyes, La Touche with both
hands beside him, clenched. The tins of beef and the bread bags shewed
vaguely in the gloom behind them.
She stood for a moment watching them and then, turning, she came down to
the boat lying high and dry on the sand. She was trying to realize, that
on the morning of the day before yesterday at this hour she had been
lying in her bunk on board the _Gaston de Paris_, to realize this and
also the fact that her present position seemed scarcely strange.
She ought, so she told herself, to be astonished at what had happened
and to be bewailing her fate, yet, looking back now over yesterday and
the day before, everything seemed part of a level and logical sequence,
almost like the events of a stormy day on board ship. The tragedy of the
destruction of the _Gaston_ only partly experienced could not be fully
felt.
Standing by the boat she tried to realize it and failed, tried to grasp
what she knew to be the horror and pity of it, and failed. She was
neither hard nor insensible, she simply could not grasp it.
And her position here with two rough men, very little food and little
chance of escape, how she would have pitied herself a few days ago could
she have foreseen! Yet here, with the firm sands under her feet and the
wind blowing in her face, reality, instead of hurting her as it had done
in the boat on awakening yesterday morning, soothed her and reassured
her. Everything seemed firm again and the fear that the ugly coast had
raised in her mind had vanished.
She came along the beach looking at the gulls, turned over huge
star-fish and picked up kelp ribbons to examine them. Half a mile or so
from the cave she was about to turn back when her eye caught a strange
appearance on the sea, hundreds and hundreds of moving points drawing in
to the shore, white and black points like a shoal of fish only half
submerged. It was a fleet of swimming birds.
She sat down on the sand to watch as they took the shore with a rush
through the foam. Then, safely beached, the fleet became an army of
penguins. She had seen pictures of penguins so she knew what they were
and she had read Anatole France's "Penquin Island"--these, then, were
the real things and she watched them fascinated as one who sees
storyland taking visible and concrete form.
The penguins formed line, broke into companies, drilled a bit and then
began to move up the beach.
The figure of the girl did not seem to disturb them in the least.
One company passed to the left, one to the right, whilst that
immediately fronting her halted a few feet away and saluted her, bowing
like little old-fashioned men in black swallow-tail coats and immaculate
shirt fronts, little old-fashioned men with sharp quizzical eyes,
polished, humorous, polite and entirely friendly.
The company on the right wheeled to examine her as did the company on
the left, so that she found herself almost in a hollow square. Wherever
she turned there were birds bowing to her or things in the semblance of
birds, absolutely fearless, so close that she could have touched them
had she carried a walking-stick.
She rose up to allow them to pass and they went on like mechanical
things wound up and released, forming line again and seeming to forget
her.
She remembered the guillemots and their rudeness and the way they had
stormed and jeered at the boat--did all that mean more than the
politeness and friendliness of the penguins? If she were lying dead
would not the guillemots pass her without enmity and the penguins
without friendliness, as indifferent to her fate as the wave of the sea
on the blowing wind?
They would--as indifferent as the great islands standing out there in
the distance, mauve and slate grey against the morning. As she came back
along the beach her mind was battling with a problem that had suddenly
risen. She had neither brush nor comb nor glass. Her hair was beautiful
and she loved it. Her face was beautiful but she did not love it, it was
herself, she could not view it from an independent standpoint, but she
could view her hair almost as impartially as a dress and she loved it
with the strange passion that women have for things of texture.
The hair of Cléo de Bromsart had been waited upon like a divinity by
many a priestess in the form of a maid. It had been dressed and
shampooed and treated by artists and adepts, the hours of brushing alone
if put together would have made a terrific total. The result was
perfection, and even now, after all she had gone through, it shewed
scarcely disarrangement, lustrous and beautiful, dressed with artful
simplicity in the Greek style and outlining the perfect curves of her
head.
The wind was blowing now in gusto from the sea, but she scarcely noticed
it as she walked, facing the problem that shipwreck had put before her,
a problem the first of a long queue ranging from soap to a change of
garments.
She was fighting it and at the same time battling with the strengthening
wind when suddenly something sprang on her with the yell of a tiger and
flung her on the sand, pinning her there.
CHAPTER IX
THE WOOLEY
It was the wind. The Wooley, which is the fist of Kerguelen suddenly
clenched and hitting out from the shoulder of the great islands now
suddenly stormed about with foam and veiled in spray.
Half stunned, she twisted round, still lying but fronting it now with
her arm protecting her face. The beach had loudened up in thunder from
end to end but the yelling Wooley as it met the cliffs and howled inland
almost drowned the thunder of the waves. Then it died down as suddenly
as it had come, and the boom of the surf rose high, as the girl,
gathering herself together, got up and struggled on.
She was no longer thinking of her hair. It was the first lesson of the
school of Kerguelen. "Here you shall think of nothing but the moment, of
the ground beneath your feet, of the bite you put in your mouth, of the
rock that stands before you."
When she reached the cave with her petticoats thrusting about her she
was met by the two men and as she came up to them La Touche was cursing
the wind. The Wooley had all but blown him down too. He had got up
sooner than Bompard and had received the full face of it "in the pit of
the stomach." He seemed to look on it as a personal matter affecting him
alone.
Even as he spoke a sudden calm fell, lasted for a moment, and was
followed by a howl from inland.
At a stroke the wind had changed right round and was blowing now from
the mountains. Here in the shelter of the cliffs they scarcely felt it
but the shift had raised an appalling cross sea. Right away to the
islands there was nothing but tumbling foam, waves standing up and
fighting waves in a battle that spread for leagues.
"It's well for us we didn't fall in with this yesterday," said Bompard
"a ship couldn't stand it."
"And what ship will ever poke her nose in here to take us off do you
think?" asked La Touche. "This is what you get every day of the week, if
all accounts are true--this, and worse. I tell you we've come to the
wrong place. There's no getting over it. We've come to the wrong place."
"Well, right or wrong, here we are," said Bompard "Mon Dieu! to hear you
talk you'd think we'd come here on purpose--come, get a move on and
let's have some grub."
He turned into the cave and they fetched out the can of beef they had
opened yesterday, some biscuits, and a water breaker, and sitting at the
cave mouth they ate just as the men of the Stone Age ate, with the palms
of their hands for plates and their fingers for forks. They spoke
scarcely at all. The ill-humor of La Touche seemed like a contagious
disease, even Bompard, the imperturbable, seemed glum.
It was the girl who broke the strain.
Suddenly she began to speak as if giving voice to carefully thought out
ideas. Yet what she said was absolutely spontaneous, the result of a
quick, educated mind suddenly grasping the essentials of their position,
suggestion breeding suggestion.
"There's no use in grumbling," said she. "That wind knocked me down as I
was coming along the beach. I didn't grumble, and there is no use in
thinking. I was thinking as I walked along that I had no brush and comb
to do my hair with, you two have short hair and you can't imagine what
it is to a person with long hair when they find themselves without a
brush and comb. I was grumbling to myself about it when the wind knocked
me down. I want just to tell you what is in my mind: we will die or go
mad if we do not forget everything as much as we can and not think of
to-morrow or yesterday or ships coming to take us off. We have to fight
all sorts of things that don't care in the least for us and we have to
work. Everything here is at work in its own way. Well, we must do as
everything else does or die."
"It's easy to say work," said La Touche munching a biscuit, "but what is
one to work at?"
"We want food for one thing, our provisions won't last forever."
"There's rabbits enough," said Bompard. "Remember those rabbits we saw
running out on the beach last evening?"
"I can snare rabbits all right," said La Touche, "but where's the wire
to make snares with--see--we're caught everywhere."
"Wait," said Bompard.
He got up and went down to the boat, hunted in one of the lockers and
returned with a spool of wire.
He flung it at La Touche.
"There's your wire," said he.
Cléo's eyes brightened. The spool of wire seemed to her a fruit suddenly
born from her words; she had accomplished something, it was perhaps the
first real accomplishment in her life.
"Where did you get it from?" asked La Touche.
"The forward locker," replied Bompard.
"Are there any other things in the locker?" asked the girl.
"Oh, Mon Dieu, yes," replied the old fellow. "There's a lot of truck,
but it's no use to us."
"Let's go and see," said Cléo. She rose up and came down the beach
followed by the others. The wind from the mountains died away but the
sea torment remained and, though the tide was beginning to ebb, the
spray of the waves almost reached the boat.
It had been listed to one side by the Wooley but was undamaged and the
forward locker was still open as it had been left by the careless
Bompard.
It was one of the boats used for fishing and deep sea work, hence the
contents of the locker.
The steel head of a two pronged fish spear, a fisherman's knife in its
sheath with belt, a paternoster, invaluable for the fathoms of fishing
line attached, a small American axe with the head vaselined, a canvas
housewife with sail-needles, a few darning needles and some pack thread,
and a number of odds and ends including some extra heavy lead sinkers.
Bompard looked on apathetically and La Touche stood with his hands in
his pockets as the girl fished the things out one by one, placing them,
some on the sands and some on the thwarts of the boat.
The things seemed to have no interest for the men. Accustomed all their
lives to being looked after as far as shelter and food were concerned
they seemed absolutely helpless in front of new conditions. Men are like
that, especially men of the people, and when you read of Crusoes and
their wonderful doings on desert islands you read Romance.
The quick, trained mind of the girl seemed to see clearly where they
could scarcely see at all, she had imagination and she was a woman--that
is to say a being more gifted than man, with prevision in affairs purely
material.
Bompard did not see any use in the axe and said so. The girl, with her
hand resting on the gunnel of the boat, stood like a housekeeper trying
to explain to a mere male creature the use of some household implement.
"We will want a fire and an axe will chop wood," said she.
"Ay, and where are you to get the wood?" asked La Touche. "There's not a
tree on this blasted place, nor the sign of one."
"Well, we'll have to look--there may be trees inland--there's sure to be
bushes of some sort--anyhow we will take these things up to the cave,
they will be safer there."
The baling tin of the boat caught her eye, she included it amongst her
prizes.
This baling tin, like a psychological instrument, exhibited the mind of
Bompard as though that said mind had been scooped out and placed in it.
To him it was a baling tin; here there were no boats to be baled
out--where was the use of it?
To the woman it was a possible pot to boil things in if they could get a
fire and things to boil.
She explained and Bompard saw the light. La Touche saw it, too, but
promptly pointed out that they had no fire and nothing to boil. He
seemed to find an odious satisfaction in the fact, a satisfaction which
Bompard faintly reflected, and for a moment the girl seemed to glimpse
in the two men a lethargy of mind almost unthinkable. A lethargy and
laziness, mulish, and kicking at anything that disturbed it, that
actually fought against betterment because betterment meant exercise of
intellect and action.
She felt angry with them, just as a grown person feels angry with lazy
children, and putting the belt with the knife round her waist and
picking up some of her treasures she ordered the others to follow with
the rest.
When they had been placed in the cave with the provisions, Bompard,
after his great labours, cut himself some tobacco and La Touche lit his
pipe. Then they sat down at their cave opening to smoke and rest
themselves whilst the girl, who could not keep still, went back to the
boat to explore the other lockers and see if by chance anything else of
a useful nature might be found. The two men seated smoking at the cave
mouth watched her as she went. She felt their eyes upon her and guessed
that they were discussing her, but she did not mind.
The ceaseless activity of old Madame de Warens seemed to have descended
on her through the air of Kerguelen. The will that Prince Selm had
divined in her had been aroused; the surroundings seemed to call her to
action from every side; the past and the future seemed phantoms before
the tremendous and insistent present. Fate could perhaps have broken her
spirit only in one way, by casting her upon the sordid. If she had been
socially shipwrecked and thrown onto a Paris slum she might have gone
under. Here where everything was clean, where the air was life, where
nothing was sordid, she swam; here she was miraculously filled with a
new energy and an extraordinary new interest as though she were peeping
at things for the very first time.
The forward locker was now empty, she hunted in the others and
discovered two more Maconochie tins that Bompard had overlooked, some
cotton waste, a roll of thick copper wire and a bradawl.
She collected the lot and brought them up to the cave before which her
companions were seated.
She handed them to La Touche, who, without getting up, leaned back and
pushed them as far into the cave as he could reach, then he resumed his
pipe whilst Cléo standing and shading her eyes looked away up and down
the beach as though measuring its possibilities.
"I found a lot of things down there this morning before the tide was
high," said she. "There were star-fish, big ones like what I have seen
on the beach at Bordighera; the Italian people eat them. I'm sure there
must be lots of food to be found here on the beach. Then there is a big
break in the cliffs lower down that seems to lead inland. I think the
best thing we can do is to start now and hunt about and see what we can
find. You two can go inland, and I will go along the beach. It's
absolutely necessary to find any sort of food, and wood to make a fire."
The smokers were disposed to argue.
Yes, it was quite true, one must look round, but there was grub enough
for a month and there was plenty of time before them. Then La Touche
began to argue about star-fish. He had never heard of people eating
star-fish. If they were to be condemned to eat stuff like that it would
be better to quit. One might have fancied from his tone that it was
Cléo's fault that such a suggestion should be made.
Cléo listened patiently and Bompard sat evidently approving. It was
almost as though the two were in league against her, just as children
get in league against an adult who insists on unpleasant duties or
uncongenial food.
But a will was at work stronger than theirs and presently, tapping out
their pipes, they rose up. La Touche, at her direction, placed the new
found Maconochie tins, the cotton waste, the bradawl and wire with the
rest of the stores, far back in the cave, and then, following her, they
lumbered along down the beach in the direction of the cliff break like
two schoolboys after a governess.
The cliff break was a narrow gully piercing the basalt and bending upon
itself; here they parted, the men striking up the gulley and the girl
continuing her way along the beach.
"And be sure to look out for some wood," she cried after them, "any sort
of wood."
"Ay, ay," said Bompard, "we'll be on the look out right enough."
Then they vanished and she pursued her way alone, picking up things as
she went, turning over shells and thinking of her companions.
The wind had fanned up again to a strong breeze but the sound of the
surf had fallen with the receding tide and the stretch of wet sand
below high tide mark was strewn with huge kelp ribbons, masses of
seaweed, shells, all empty, cuttle fish bones and the star-fish
despised of La Touche.
Then she came upon something that gave her a grue, it seemed at first
like a white rock, it was a skull. The skull of some enormous creature
half-bedded in the sand just above the tide mark, possibly cast up in
some storm. She thought it might be the skull of a whale and as she
stood looking at it, suddenly, the desolation around came in upon her
with the fact that she was absolutely alone.
Suppose the men lost their way--suppose that they never came back? The
thought clutched her heart like a hand. To be here, alone, absolutely
alone, forever!
For a moment panic seized her and the wild impulse came upon her to turn
and run back to the cave. Then she mastered herself, fighting down the
surging in her throat, and continuing her way steadily and with renewed
strength. She had not cast the thought away, she had mastered it and as
she went she contemplated it as a victor contemplates the dead body of
an assailant.
Then she saw the penguins, she had not noticed them before, they were
drawn up in long lines at the base of the cliff and the sight of them
destroyed the desolation just as the skull had crystallized it around
her.
A great pow-wow was going on amongst the penguins. Three birds,
separate from the others, were standing, two facing one another bowing
and discussing something, the third standing by, putting in a word now
and then and now and then coming right between the disputants.
She watched them for awhile and then went on. She had no time to waste.
The thought of coming back empty handed after all her talk to the men
pursued her. She was looking for food and had found none--nothing but
the star-fish.
The gulls evidently found plenty of food. But for a human being there
seemed nothing, and as she went on and on the thought of what would
happen when those tins in the cave were empty came at her just as the
terror of finding herself alone had come, and this thought was not to be
combated by an effort of will simply because it was born of Reason.
Her clear and practical mind saw starvation, over-leaped the slender
food barrier that held hunger only a month away from them and wandered
in a wilderness where nothing was.
She had reached the rock surface now that stretched away level and
smooth, broken by cracks and pot holes and strewn here and there with
weed. The cliffs had fallen away, giving a view of the broken country
and the mountains with their snow-covered tops, immense, wrapped in
distance under the dull grey day, remote, yet clearly defined in that
air, crystal clear as the air of Iceland.
It was like looking at Silence herself, silence set off and explained
by the beach noises, the sound of the surf, the calling of the terns,
the mewing of the great white gulls.
She saw Kerguelen as it is, as it was, as it ever will be. Standing
there alone she saw it for the first time in all its utter nakedness. If
no food were to be found on the busy beach, what food could be found in
that carved, silent, cruel land where not a single tree shewed in all
the miles of desolation?
A stealthy scraping sound behind her made her wheel round.
Up from a rock pond which she had passed without examining had risen a
crab, its body was not bigger than the two fists of a man put together,
yet it moved standing high up like a spider on slender stilts that if
stretched out would have measured four feet or more. She watched it with
dilated eyes as it scrambled and hurried along, vanishing at last like a
spectre in some cleft of the rock. There was something of a skeleton
about it as well as something of a spider, it was like a caricature of
food drawn by Famine. It made the whole beach hideous for a moment and
it made the food hunter almost afraid to go on. She crushed the fear and
went on, reaching a place where the rocks ceased and a broad level of
sand stretched to where the rocks began again and further on the river
ran down.
Where the sand met the further rocks a huge conical stone stood with a
gull roosting on its top, and just as a person fixes on some object as
the limit of his walk she determined to go as far as this stone and then
turn back.
As she drew close to it the gull flapped its wings and flew away and she
saw that the thing was not a stone but the figure-head of a ship, the
form of a woman with ample breasts, broken and scarred by years of
weather and stained with the droppings of gulls. The arms were gone, but
the great face remained almost in its entirety staring away across the
sands and the sea.
It had once worn a crown, but the crown was broken away all but a little
bit on the left side of the head and it had an appearance of life that
almost daunted the girl as she stood looking, watching it, and listening
to the singing sound of the beach echoes and the mewing and crying of
the gulls.
Then as she moved closer her foot struck on something half buried in the
sand, it was a balk of timber, ships timber was all about, sanded over,
and in places half uncovered. Here was firewood enough for twenty years.
In the figure-head alone there was enough to supply their wants for a
long time to come.
She sat down to rest on a projecting piece of this timber near the
figure. Close up to it like this it lost its touch of life and became
simply a block of wood, and from this point she could see the beach over
which she had travelled stretching away and away to the Lizard Point
with the foam breaking around it and flown about by the never-resting
gulls.
She had come nearly three miles and she had found something worth
finding by just keeping on.
She remembered the spectre crab. It had nearly turned her back
empty-handed, but she had kept on and she registered that fact deeply in
her mind, dwelling on it with a pleasure she had never felt before.
Then she fell to thinking of the ship that all this belonged to and the
storm that must have driven it here. The weeds of the high tide mark did
not come within ten feet of the wreckage, so the waves must have come a
hundred feet or more beyond where she was sitting. Perhaps it was at
night with all this coast roaring in the darkness and the wind yelling
above the shouting of the waves. And all that must have happened years
ago, to judge by the work of the weather on the once gaily painted woman
and the depth the timbers had sunk in the sand.
She rose up, and before starting back she glanced inland towards the
mountains across the broken country.
Then she shaded her eyes.
Beyond the fringe of the beach and amongst the high broken rocks stood a
cross.
CHAPTER X
THE CROSS
The thing itself startled her less than the fact that she had not seen
it before. It was as though it had been put up whilst she sat to rest.
It was so striking, so palpably evident that anyone coming along towards
the figure-head as she had done must have been attracted by it. To
verify this she walked a few yards away and even as she did so the cross
vanished, shut out from sight by the rock to the left of it. Only from
the point of view of the figure-head could it be seen.
It was as though the beach had tried to frighten her again.
She came towards it, noticing as she came the shortness of the arms. It
was less a cross than a sign-post, a sign-post raised on a mound of
small rocks; it was tarred to preserve it from the weather. From the
left limb close to the post a metal box was hanging by a wire, and on
the post itself, a few feet from the base, there was a plate of
galvanised iron nailed to the wood. On the plate were stamped some
words.
She stepped upon the mound and read: "Kestrel Expedition. Cache I. Don't
disturb 19--"
The date was three years back.
The cache, whatever it might be, was under the mound. Also, this thing
had evidently nothing to do with the wreck, for the embossed metal plate
must have been prepared in some civilized country for the purpose to
which it had been put.
She reached up and tried to detach the box and pulling on it brought
down the slat of wood that formed the arms of the cross, the nails that
had held it having rusted away.
Then, having detached the box, she examined it. It was an ordinary
sailor's tobacco box, she pressed the spring, opened it, and found a
piece of paper folded in four and inscribed as follows, the writing done
with a purple indelible pencil:
Opened the cach.
Took nuthing out.
Stuck in som extry goods
Put the ship about.
To any one that finds it in this blasted hole
Sam Slacum,
Master Mariner. Thresler 19--
Then as an after thought:
"Keep up your spirits."
The date was a year after the date on the post. The cache had not been
visited evidently since then. For three years it had lain here, and for
three years, evidently, only one ship had put in. This dismal thought
took all the pleasure away from the find, she sat down on the rocks
forming the mound and holding the paper in her fingers gave way for a
moment to a depression that came against her like a black, surging sea.
Then she remembered that the cross had been only visible from one point,
that vessels might have been here and not have seen it, that men might
even have landed and found it without leaving the fact behind them,
after the manner of the writer of this paper.
And then, suddenly, and as if from the sky came the thought of
Providence, the feeling that she had been led along the beach to find
the wood and to find this. The remembrance of how she had been saved
from the _Gaston de Paris_ rose up in her mind also--saved almost by a
miracle.
To a person torn from civilization and flung into the arms of Nature the
most terrible thing is the sense of the amorphous, the feeling that
there is no structure in this world where houses are not and laws are
not and streets are not, no power to intervene between oneself and
injury, no thread to cling to. The idea of a Providence to such a person
is like brandy.
The girl remembered the words she had spoken that morning to her
companions when she said that one must not think here but work. There
was no use in thinking of the past or the future, of ships coming or
not, they had been taken care of so far and the feeling came to her that
this would be so to the end.
She rose up, put the paper back in the box and the box in her pocket,
then she turned to the cache.
She walked round the mound to a spot where the covering rocks had fallen
away a bit and going down on her knees began pulling them apart and
carrying them off one by one, dumping them a few yards away. Her rings
hindered her and taking them off she put them in the tobacco box and the
box in her pocket. Under the rocks lay a covering of sand, she fetched
the arm of the cross and scraping away at the sand came upon something
hard, it was the end of a barrel. Then she stood up, flushed with her
work and satisfied.
The stores were there, whatever they might be, and with the help of the
two men they would easily be uncovered. The question whether they would
be of any use after all the years they had lain there recurred to her,
but she put it aside. They would soon see.
Then she started back for the caves taking the slat of wood with her as
a trophy. As she went the recollection of the find followed her
agreeably, she did not know which to congratulate herself most upon, the
wood of the wreck or the cache. Then came the dismal thought of winter,
begotten of the idea of fires. It was the middle of August. Winter lay
ahead. If no ship came to take them off what would their life be like
during the winter months? Imagine this place at Christmas, covered
perhaps with snow! The gloom of this idea pursued her for a mile or more
till all of a sudden she stopped and laughed aloud at her own
stupidity. It was not autumn, it was spring. They were south of the line
and summer lay before them, not winter. That gloomy ghost, fear of the
Future, which spoils so many men's lives in Civilization, had tricked
her and made her miserable and as she cast it from her and pursued her
way she said to herself again: "I will not think, here the person who
thinks and broods is lost."
When she reached the caves the men had not yet returned; leaving the
slat of wood leaning against the cliff she came down to the boat and
stood for a moment looking at the sea. The tide was far out now and
coming in again, the sea had fallen to a gentle glassy swell and the
treacherous wind had died away to a faint breeze. Out there where the
waves were coming in and at the limit of the sands rocks were uncovered,
shaggy, black rocks that seemed covered with fur. She came down to them
and found that the fur was a coating of mussels. Here was another find.
She began to pick them and then, running back to the cave for the baling
tin, filled it to the brim, and placed it in the boat. Having done this
she sat down with her back to the boat to rest and wait for the men.
They ought to have returned by this. The thought that some disaster had
happened to them came to her and tried to creep into her mind, but she
drove it out promptly, stamped on it and began to think of how they
would cook the mussles. They would make a fire with the slat she had
brought back, it was tarred and would burn finely, with that and some
of the bottom boards of the boat, unless Bompard could be persuaded to
go and cut some wood from the wreckage three miles away. Then she
thought how fortunate it was that men smoked. La Touche had a Swedish
match box nearly full of matches and Bompard had a tinder box, one of
the sort that makes a spark by the striking of a wheel against a flint.
Then she yawned.
She had been in the open air since early dawn and it was now noon. She
was not tired, but she was filled with a craving for something, yet she
could not tell what this something was that she wanted and without which
she felt somehow lost. Then she knew--it was a roof.
A person accustomed to live under a roof and suddenly condemned to live
in the open suffers nothing for the first few hours. Then there
gradually comes upon him a weariness and distress almost unimaginable to
those who have not experienced it. He craves not only for a roof but for
walls around him to protect him from the great open spaces that seem
sucking away his individuality. A man living absolutely in the open
without tent or cave or house wherein to concentrate himself would
surely and without doubt either become mad or descend to the level of
the beasts.
She came up the beach to the cave where she had slept, went into it, and
sat down, her mind finding instant relief from the craving that had
filled it. Her hands went up to her hair and began to arrange it as best
they could. Had she been alone on the beach she would have taken the
pins out and left it loose for the winds to comb and blow about, but the
thought of the men prevented her. She did not like the idea of their
seeing her going about with her hair down; after her experiences in the
boat it seemed absurd to quibble over a thing like this and she tried to
argue with herself without avail. It seemed to her that if she went
about in _negligé_ like that she would lower herself. How? There was
nothing unwomanly in flowing hair, there was nothing indelicate. No, but
women of her class never appeared before men in that fashion, she would
lower herself socially.
A fool would have laughed at her, holding that amidst castaways there
was no such thing as social position, and, though fools are not
inevitably wrong in their opinions, he would have been wrong.
Though Bompard and La Touche had dropped the "mademoiselle" in
addressing her, they treated her since landing with a certain respect
which would have been wanting had she been a woman of their own class.
The class difference held and was a greater protection to her than
anything else. In their eyes she was not a woman, but a lady, a fact
that chilled familiarity, or worse, and, with the aid of her superior
intelligence, gave her authority.
She felt this instinctively and determined that at no time and in no
manner would she allow her position to degrade.
Then, having done what she could to her hair she took the rings from the
tobacco box and put them on. She would have much preferred not to have
worn them, they irritated her, but they were part of her insignia and
she put them on.
As she was putting the tobacco box back in her pocket something looked
in at her. It was a rabbit, a grey fat rabbit that had lopped right to
the cave mouth; it sat up for a moment on its hind legs, looked in, and
then lopped off without any hurry, as though a girl seated in a cave
were an accustomed object and a human being something not to be afraid
of.
This fearlessness of the rabbit would have started her on a long and
dismal train of thought had she not checked herself in time and like the
man in the haunted house who kept the fear of ghosts away by thinking of
plum puddings, she started to work, re-folding the sail that had served
her for a pillow the night before; then she took the oilskin coat out
and shook it, and folding it, placed it by the left wall of the cave
with the sou'wester on top of it. She was tidying her house.
Then she went into the men's cave and did a bit of tidying there,
stacking the tins more neatly and putting the odds and ends together.
The sight of the cotton waste gave her an idea and going down to the
boat she emptied the mussels from the baling tin on to the sand, filled
the tin with sea water and bathed her face and hands, drying them on
the cotton. She had finished this operation and had got the mussels back
in the tin when a shout caused her to turn.
It was the men, they were coming along the beach from the break in the
cliffs. Bompard leading, La Touche lagging behind.
Bompard was carrying something under his arm, it was a Kerguelen
cabbage. La Touche carried nothing.
CHAPTER XI
THE CACHE
When she lay down that night on the hard sand, with the sailcloth
beneath her head, she could not sleep. The wretchedness of having to lie
down fully dressed, of being unable to change her clothes, fell on her
like a blight.
She lay fighting the problem. It was impossible to go on like this. One
might live with little food, but to live always without undressing and
changing one's things was impossible. This problem was insoluble, or
seemed so. Then she found a half solution. She would discard her
stockings and under garments, make a bundle of them and put them under
the sailcloth, she would not wear them again, she would suffer from
cold, no matter, anything was better than that feeling of being fully
dressed always. The weather, besides, was fairly warm. She would learn
to do without shoes as well as without stockings. She would have to go
about without shoes or stockings. She thought of the men. Strangely
enough the thought of going about without shoes or stockings seemed less
repulsive to her than the thought of going about with her hair loose.
As she lay revolving this business in her mind the whale birds flitting
about in the darkness outside suddenly ceased their crying and through
the silence came a vague mysterious sound that deepened into a humming
like the drone of a gigantic top; the humming became a roar, the roar of
rain. Rain falling in solid sheets, coming across the land like a moving
Niagara, now taking the beach and now the sea. Never had she heard such
rain as this, falling in the black and utter darkness. The shelve of the
beach saved the cave from being flooded and the beetling of the cliff
kept it dry and within a couple of feet of the entrance but it could not
keep out the rain smell, the raw smell of Kerguelen carried from inland,
the smell of bog patches and new washed dolerite and bitter vegetation,
keen, like the smell of the Stone Age. Then after a bit the first great
onslaught slackened.
The girl raised herself on her elbow, then she rose and cast off the
oilskin coat that had served for a blanket. She undressed in the
darkness, made a bundle of her stockings and her Jaeger underclothes and
placed them beneath the sailcloth, then removing the comb from her hair
and letting it fall she came out into the blackness and stood in the
torrential rain.
It beat on her head and shoulders and breast, it cascaded down her
limbs, soothing as the hand of mesmerism, refreshing, delightful beyond
words, then she came back into the cave and, finding the cotton waste,
dried herself as well as she could, dried her hair and twisted it into
a knot, put on her blouse, coat and skirt and covered herself with the
oilskin.
She had solved the question of a bath and change of clothes, at least
for the moment. The discomfort of the rough tweed of the skirt against
her unprotected limbs, of the hard bed, of the sailcloth pillow with
its vague smell of canvas and jute, all these were nothing to that other
discomfort. These were physical, that was psychical.
She fell asleep and slept till long after dawn. When she came out the
rain had ceased and through air fresh as though from the hand of
Creation vast clouds were rolling away towards the islands over a
blue-green sea.
They had made a fire on the night before and had cooked some of the
mussels in the baling tin, the rest had been put by to cook for
breakfast; hot food of any sort is a revelation if you have been
condemned to live on cold stuff for any time, but this morning there was
to be nothing hot. The firewood, one of the bottom boards of the boat
chopped up, had been left out in the rain. The sight of it, all soaked,
made the girl forget her bare feet and her hair roughly tied up in a
knot. The housekeeper that lives in every woman rose up in revolt, all
the more so as the guilty ones tried to defend themselves.
"As for me," said La Touche, "I was listening to the rain, it drove
everything else out of my head."
"That is so," said Bompard, "I thought every moment we would be flooded
out. It was no time for a man to be thinking of firewood."
"Well, you will have no fire and nothing hot," said Cléo, "and those
mussels will be wasted--they won't keep, but there's no use in saying
any more about it--only you must learn to think of things. It's not
pleasant, I know, to have to look ahead but one has to do it. You see I
am not wearing my boots and stockings, boots wear out and stockings wear
out quicker, so I just looked ahead last night and said to myself--'your
stockings will soon be worn into holes, so you must begin now to learn
to do without them.' It's not pleasant, but it has to be done. If that
ship we ran into had looked ahead we would not have been wrecked."
"That is true," said Bompard, anxious to get off the main subject. "If
those chaps had eyes in their heads they wouldn't be feeding the
fishes."
"It wasn't all their fault," put in La Touche. "If those chaps on the
bridge hadn't put the engines on we wouldn't have rammed her as we did."
"Well," said Cléo, "there is no use in going back over things. We have
to get breakfast and then go and open the cache."
She had told them of the cache overnight and, to her wonder, the thing
had interested them, so this morning when they had finished their
biscuits and beef she found not the slightest difficulty in making them
start.
She put on her boots for the journey and then they reeled along the
beach in the usual order, Cléo first, the two others following; the
great skull made them halt and discuss it for a moment but the
figure-head when they reached it held them entirely in its spell.
She could scarcely tear them away, they discussed it from every point of
view, argued over it, pondered over it and were only brought to their
senses by a hint that it would have to be chopped up for firewood.
Then, when they reached the cache, there was another long pause for
discussion, the two sitting down to smoke whilst they talked it over.
It was not till she set to work pulling more stones away that they began
to get busy; then when once started they laboured like negroes. The
glimpse of the barrel end seemed to inflame them, but indeed they did
not want even that, for the business they had set their hands to had all
the fascination of treasure hunting mixed with the thrills of
house-breaking. Here was "stuff," plunder of some sort, who could tell
what?
An hour and a half of labour brought them sweating to the end of the
business and the presiding gulls saw exposed to the light of day two big
barrels, two long cases and an amount of canned meat and vegetables
enough to stock a small shop, also a harpoon of the old type and two
shovels placed by the long cases. Then after a rest of half an hour the
barrels were sampled. One contained flour, the other blankets and mens'
clothes, sweaters and coats and trousers. One of the long cases
contained kitchen utensils and tin cups and plates, also knives and
forks and spoons.
The other contained "comforts," tea and coffee and sugar in sealed tins,
some rolls of tobacco, drugs and a few surgical instruments. All the
equipment, in fact, necessary for an expedition of a dozen men for six
months. Not a drop of liquor.
Perhaps that was why the girl was more overjoyed by the details of the
find than the mariners.
Bompard openly expressed his mind.
"Not a bottle of wine or a drop of rum, swabs."
"Well, you've got some tobacco," said Cléo, "and there's tea and coffee
and cups and saucers, and a teapot--no coffeepot--well one can make
coffee in anything--" She was running over the stores in her mind,
standing, reviewing them with no thought of anything else and her soul
filled with a joy and satisfaction absolutely new.
Blankets! Tea! Coffee! and clothes--even mens' clothes if it came to the
worst. One might have fancied her to have fixed definitely in her mind
that she was to spend a very long time on the shores of Kerguelen and to
have accepted the terrible prospect with equanimity. It was not so. She
was living in the moment, so entirely in the moment that these things
were tremendous and vivid and compared with them Art, Music, Religion,
Ambition, and the gauds of Civilization were as nothing.
This power to live in the moment is the form of strength that brings
men through battles and women through adversity. It fells cities and
builds them. On Kerguelen it is salvation. For, here to think of the
future, unless in terms of material necessities, to dream, to brood,
means death or madness.
But Bompard and La Touche, resting themselves after their labours, were
not living in the moment nor in the past nor in the present, they were
living in that strange sad land called the Might-Have-Been. They might
have been in the way to a jolly booze by now if that fool who
provisioned the cache had not forgotten the drink. They were thankful
for nothing. They had food, they had clothes, they had tobacco. They
were glad enough of the blankets, but even the thought of the blankets
could not relieve their depression.
They were not drunkards, but the cache had given them hopes of drinks.
These hopes shattered they sat like discontented children who had been
promised sweets and disappointed.
But this did not last long, the Hopeless is its own antidote and after
half a pipe of tobacco their cheerfulness, such as it was, returned and
they fell to discussing with the girl the best way of treating the
stores.
Bompard, considering the difficulty of transporting the stuff to the
caves, proposed that they should move their abode right up to the cache.
Cléo pointed out that there were no caves here, so, unless they moved
the caves as well as their belongings, they would have nowhere to sleep
in.
"I think the best thing we can do," said she, "is to take what we want
and then cover up the rest till we want some more."
"Put the stuff under the rocks again?" asked Bompard.
"Yes."
"Mon Dieu!" said La Touche.
It was not what he said but the way he said it that angered the girl.
La Touche was a problem in her mind. She could understand Bompard but
she could not quite understand La Touche. It seemed to her that he was
one of those people who without much intelligence, yet, or perhaps
because of that fact, make fine centres of rebellion. She could fancy
him leading a mob to tear down something that vexed him, and everything
seemed to vex him, at times.
But though she was not clear about La Touche she was quite clear about
herself and she was determined to be his master. She felt instinctively
that he was the leader of Bompard and that Bompard alone would have been
a much better individual, in many respects.
"There is no use in saying 'Mon Dieu,'" said she, "the thing has to be
done. The gulls and the rabbits will ruin everything if we leave things
about. Come, Bompard."
Bompard rose up at the order and began to assist in sorting out the
things they were to take back with them. Then La Touche, not to be out
of the business and perhaps ashamed of himself, or of his position as an
idler, joined in.
Had she given the order direct to him he might have revolted; she had
conquered him for the moment none the less.
First they began to sort out the things to be kept for immediate use. A
saucepan, three tin cups, three tin plates, knives and forks, the teapot
and kettle, a canister of tea, sugar and salt. The canned stuff,
including thirty cans of vegetables, Cléo left untouched. She determined
to keep it in reserve and depend upon the cabbage plants, one of which
Bompard had brought back yesterday.
Then came the question of the flour, that too must be kept in reserve
and the opening they had made in the top of the barrel closed up
properly. This operation took time and was conducted with a good deal of
grumbling which fell on deaf ears. The thing was done and that was the
main thing. Four blankets were taken from the other barrel and that too
was closed. Then with the shovels the whole lot was sanded over and the
rocks replaced, the girl helping in the work as well as directing.
When everything was finished they made three bundles, using the blankets
as holdalls, and started back.
It was now noon and the breeze that had been blowing ever since dawn had
died away, but great clouds were banking up over the islands, vast,
solemn, leaden-coloured clouds rolling up from the far sea and piling
one on the other like alps on alps.
They had nearly reached the caves when a roll of thunder like the ruffle
of muffled drums came over the water, but they got under shelter before
the rain began to fall, just a few heavy drops, at first, and then in a
moment a cataract.
The islands vanished, the sea vanished to within a few hundred yards of
the beach, the voices of the gulls and the breaking of the waves became
merged and vague in the hiss of the sheeting rain.
"The chaps that left the truck in that cask forgot to shove in some
oilskins," said La Touche as he undid his load.
Cléo had come into the men's cave to help to unpack. Half-way back she
had taken her boots off. Owing to the absence of stockings her right
heel had become chafed and she had taken them off determining not to
wear them any more. She was kneeling now, bare-footed, taking the things
from Bompard's bundle and La Touche's remark made her look up. It was
the tone rather than the words that irritated her. The recollection of
an oilskin coat which she had used when fishing in Norway the year
before rose in her mind. It had been put away for a long time and when
taken out had been found all stuck up and quite ruined.
"You can't be much of a sailor," said she, "not to know that oilskin
doesn't stand packing. The men who buried these things did. If they had
known that you were so particular about rain they might have put in an
umbrella."
Dead silence followed this thrust of the tongue which she instantly
regretted, not because of hurting La Touche's feelings, but because she
instantly felt that it had helped to widen the division between her and
her mates. The extraordinary fact was that she, having assumed the
responsibility of office, was, seemingly, held responsible by the others
for all unpleasant happenings; she felt that the rain of Kerguelen was
now, in a way, being laid at her door.
Then, again, she had singled out La Touche as a direct opponent. She
felt that he and she were already matching each other and there was
likely to be a struggle between them for dominance.
Women have been gifted above men with an instinctive knowledge of
character. She divined in La Touche a character weak yet capable of
violence, incapable of leading yet jealous of being led, and especially
of being led by a woman. That was the danger point.
However, there was no use in trying to say anything smooth and she went
on with her work, helping to stow the things and, when that was
finished, taking off two of the blankets to her own cave.
A fire was impossible owing to the rain so they dined off biscuits and
canned stuff, cold.
Bompard and La Touche on this little expedition had discovered a water
source only a quarter of a mile inland, a deep pond cut in the rocks
and fed by the rains. Bompard referred to it as he ate.
"But as long as the boat holds together," said he, "we don't want to
bother about water; she'll catch and hold all we want. I've heard tell
it rains here months on end."
"When it's not blowing," said La Touche. Cléo said nothing. It came to
her almost as a new impression that conversation as we know it was
almost impossible with her companions. They had no outlook over anything
but the material and they seemed to see nothing but the black side of
things. She felt also that any attempt to rally them and cheer them
would be dumbly resented and would only help to widen even more the
division between her and them.
When the meal was finished she put the plates out in the rain to wash
them. Then a bright idea came to her and getting the roll of wire she
asked La Touche to shew her how to make rabbit snares.
La Touche took the roll of wire and held it in his hands for a moment.
"This is all very well," said he, "but where is your wire cutters?"
They had nothing to cut the wire with, and he seemed to look on the fact
as a triumph of his own cleverness over Cléo's, till Bompard intervened
and shewed how, by knotting the wire and pulling hard, a break might be
made. This accomplished, and three lengths of wire having been
procured, the surly one proceeded to make a snare and to demonstrate how
it might be set.
At the end of the business the girl regretted that she had ever started
it. She had put herself under the tuition of La Touche and allowed the
intimacy of master and pupil, allowed even in this slight way that he
was her superior.
A yelling wind from the mountains arose that afternoon and drove the
rain away across the islands. It held for half an hour and then of a
sudden ceased and a howling wind from the islands rose and drove the
rain back again towards the mountains.
The sea suddenly seemed to go mad, with cross currents meeting. Waves
seemed fighting waves and the gulls seemed filled with the general
torment, clanging and blowing about hither and thither like leaves in
autumn.
Cléo went to her cave and wrapping herself in one of the blankets, with
the other folded double to lie upon, took her place upon the floor with
her head on the sailcloth.
It was her first really bad moment. Her first moment of real depression.
The rain and the fact that their position as regarded food was secure,
so that there was nothing to fight against at the moment, conspired to
overthrow her.
Hitherto she had fought bravely and the struggle had kept her up; the
sudden easing of the situation had brought new forces against her. Time
suddenly appeared before her eyes asking: "How are you to kill me? You
can't, you have no weapons. Would you like a book? Would you like
embroidery work to do, companions to talk with, music to listen to?
Fate, under the name of civilization, gave you all these and more, they
have been taken from you and now you see me as I am, the great terror."
She fought this Bogey by thinking of La Touche. She had raised La Touche
against herself. She knew that something in herself had risen against La
Touche.
She felt that his respect for a woman of the higher classes was, as
regarded herself, wearing thin, owing to propinquity. That he resented
being "bossed" by a woman, that her superior quickness of mind and
energy vexed him and that one day he would try to master her. He was of
the type that is too mean to rule, yet hates to be ruled. There was also
the jealousy of the male at the superiority of the female. She was
physically weaker than he, a fact that means little in civilized life
where power is in the hands of Order, but which means everything in
primitive life. And they were steadily drifting to the primitive.
These thoughts, troublesome enough, were still excellent in their way.
They gave her occupation for her mind.
Then she fell asleep, awaking towards evening to find Bompard at the
cave mouth telling her that supper was ready.
CHAPTER XII
THE QUARREL
Next morning broke fine. She was awakened by voices quarrelling and came
out to find a breezy and absolutely cloudless day, with the sea running
smooth and the sunlight on the far islands.
The two men, who had fallen out over some trifle, were wrangling like
fish-women, Bompard having the worst of it, as his ineffectual southern
oaths were no match for the language of the other.
The girl stood looking at La Touche, but he seemed not to mind in the
least.
Then she turned away and walked down to the boat.
She heard Bompard say: "There, you have sent her off, talking like
that," and what La Touche replied she could not hear, but she guessed it
was something not complimentary to Bompard or herself.
The boat was half full of rain-water. She rinsed her hands in it, then,
standing with the warm sun upon her, she almost forgot the men, looking
at the purple islands and the gulls like new minted gold and the great
arch of the bay lined out with a thread of creamy foam.
After a while, turning round, she saw that Bompard was lighting a fire
with the remains of the wood and, coming up, she helped in the business.
He had arranged the little fire between pieces of rock so as to make a
stand for the kettle, and La Touche was opening the hermetically sealed
canister of tea with his knife; neither man was speaking and the meal
passed off almost in silence.
She felt that any moment the quarrel might break out again and her
instinct was to get away from them.
She had left the fisherman's knife and belt in her cave; she went to the
cave and strapped the belt around her waist. The boat hook was lying on
the sand; she picked it up and, carrying it, walked away down the beach
in the direction of the cache.
The boat hook was a weapon of sorts and it was better out of the men's
way; the knife was different. It had come to her that in this place it
was better to be armed and she determined always to wear it.
But no sounds of quarrelling followed her, only the quarrelling of the
gulls, and half a mile away, looking back, she saw that the men had
separated. La Touche was standing by the boat and Bompard was walking
towards the Lizard point. She sat down to rest for a moment and she
watched the figure of Bompard. It grew smaller and smaller till it
reached the point, then it vanished over the rocks.
She saw La Touche walk away towards the caves; he disappeared, and the
beach, now destitute of life, lay sung to by the sea and flown over by
the gulls. Nothing speaking of man lay there but the boat that looked
like a toy cast there by a child. It held her eyes, focussed her
thoughts, and became the centre of a sudden longing, a desire soul
searching as the desire for water--the desire for civilization, for the
things and people that she knew.
Her companions had become horrible to her. To go on living with them
seemed appalling. The rocks, the sea, the gulls, even the rain, all
these fitted with her mind--they seemed in some way familiar, but with
the men she had nothing in common.
It is worse to be wrecked on a social state than on a desert shore. She
was wrecked on both.
She recognised surely that at the rate things were going she would soon,
so far from being above her companions, be below them on account of her
weakness. She recognised that superiority of mind would count little
after a while with these minds, incapable of distinguishing grades, or
values, beyond money value and the distinction of master from man, and
that sex so far from being a protection would be a danger.
Her brave mind allowed itself to be borne along for a while on these
currents of thought, then it reacted against them, repeating again the
old formula that to think, here, on other things than the moment and
the material was to die or go distraught.
She got up and shifted her position, sitting with her back towards the
boat.
She could see the penguins, now, drilling beneath the cliff and beyond
the penguins the figure-head of the ship and beyond that the fuming beach
with its snow storm of gulls. She was soon to see something that many
would travel a thousand miles to witness, but unconscious of what was
coming she sat watching the penguins, then with the boat hook point she
began scratching figures on the sand, but with difficulty, on account of
the length of the staff.
Sitting like this her eyes were suddenly attracted seaward to a point in
the water beyond the line of the figure-head. Things were moving out
there, moving rapidly and drawing in-shore and now, riding an incoming
wave, like a half submerged canoe, she saw a dark elongated form. It
came shooting through the foam just like a beaching canoe and as it
dragged itself up the sand a sound like the far off roar of a lion came
echoing along the cliffs.
She knew at once what it was, a sea elephant. Prince Selm had described
them and how they came ashore at Kerguelen to breed, journeying there
through thousands of miles of ocean and arriving in hundreds and
thousands at different points of the coast.
This was the first of the great herd and, as she watched, more were
coming, breasting the waves and breaking from the foam and coming up the
beach like vast, rapidly-moving slugs.
The sight held her fascinated. Every newcomer saluted the land with a
roar. They were the males; the females of the herd, still far out at sea
beyond the islands, would not land to give birth to their young for
another fortnight.
She watched till perhaps two hundred had beached, then the invasion
ceased; there was no more roaring, and over the army of invaders,
lumping along hither and thither on the flat rocks, the sea-gulls flew
and screamed in anger or in welcome, who could say?
Prince Selm had spoken of how the sea elephants fought together on
landing. He was wrong. The great, far-distant brutes instead of fighting
seemed resting and sunning themselves and the girl, rising up, came
along in their direction. She had forgotten Bompard and La Touche.
She reached the river which was spating from the recent rains, but great
flat-topped rocks made it always possible to cross; she crossed it.
The sea elephants were close to her now and seemed not in the least
disturbed by her presence, they lay here and there, vast brutes, twenty
feet in height, weighing tons, raising themselves occasionally on their
flippers and then sinking back to rest with a sigh of contentment.
She measured them with her eye, noted the short trunks that seemed so
useless, the tusks, the old scar marks got in battle and the splendour
of their strength and mass and muscle. Like the land elephants there was
something about them terrible yet benign.
She drew closer. As regarded animals of any good sort she had the
fearlessness of a child, the instinct that would have been terrified by
a reptile or anything truly ferocious however masked by fur or feather.
These things she felt to be absolutely harmless, as regarded herself,
and they were a million years closer to her than the penguins.
The penguins had amused her, but for all their quaintness and politeness
they seemed as far apart from her as mechanical toys. Her heart had not
gone out to them with that love of living things which lies in the heart
of children, of women and most men.
She drew closer still. The great brutes were now watching her
steadfastly, but seemingly without fear. She had left the boat hook
behind a mile away, dropping it because of its weight, and with the
exception of the knife in her belt she was unarmed. Perhaps they knew
this. Vague in their brains must have lain memories of great hurts when
they were the hunted and men the hunters; but this vision evidently
stored up no antagonistic feelings. Possibly they knew her sex and
possibly the instinct which never failed them told them that she was
friendly.
Less than ten yards away from the nearest bull she sat down on a piece
of rock, and no sooner had she taken her seat than they seemed
immensely closer and her own position one of absolute helplessness. With
a sudden rush, moving with that swiftness with which she had seen them
moving on first landing, the bull could have reached her, but the bull
did not move, his lordship from the sea, filled with the absolute and
complete contentment of the male at rest, moved only his trunk, he
seemed sniffing her and the momentary fear that had seized her passed
utterly away.
She could sniff him too. Just as cows fill the air with the fragrance of
milk the herd filled the place with the scent of fish and fur and a tang
of deep sea like the smell of beach, only sharper and fresher.
Then, just as people talk to horses and dogs, leaning forward a bit she
began to talk to him.
The effect of the sweet soothing voice was magical, and for a moment not
in the least soothing. The near bulls moved, evidently deeply disturbed
in their minds. The majority, including the biggest and nearest bull,
turned half away as if to get off, then turned again as if to renew
their astonishment.
The girl laughed, the timidity of this vast force seemed to her less
timidity than masculine awkwardness, as though a number of heavy old
gentlemen, taking their ease in their club, were suddenly put to
confusion and flight by a female charmer appearing before them.
CHAPTER XIII
WHERE IS BOMPARD?
When they had re-settled themselves she rose to go, nodded to them and
turned away towards the river. Then she looked back. The big bull was
following her and the rest of the herd were moving slightly in the same
direction. The bull paused when she turned, then, when she went on, he
continued following her, lazily and as if drawn by some gentle magnetic
attraction.
Across the river she turned and waved her hand to them. Then she went
on.
In some extraordinary way the creatures had made the place less lonely
and the wonder of them pursued her as she walked, keeping to the sand
patches where the rocks were and then striking along the great levels of
pure sand.
Her feet did not hurt her and she was beginning to recognise that touch
with the world which comes to those who walk without boots, something
that humanity has all but forgotten, all but ceased to remember.
As she drew near the caves she looked for the men, but the beach was
deserted. Then, looking into the men's cave, she saw La Touche lying on
his back asleep, his pipe beside him and his arm flung across his eyes.
Where was Bompard?
He ought to have been back by this, and as she turned and looked up and
down the beach a vague uneasiness came upon her.
It was as if for the first time she had recognized the value of Bompard
in their small society. Bompard with his age and heaviness and patent
honesty, despite his stupidity, was a presence not to be despised.
If La Touche had been another man she might have awakened him to make
enquiries. As it was, she preferred to let him lie.
Bompard she had last seen crossing the rocks of the Lizard point. It was
there that she must look for him.
She went to the cave where she had left her boots and put them on for
the climb. When she reached the point she found the work easier than she
had suspected. The rocks were not strewn at random, they were in reality
breaks off and tables of the basalt; the whole point was like a great
lizard that, creeping stealthily towards the sea, had been stricken into
rock.
She climbed, and in five minutes was on the highest point with a new
view of the coast before her. It was like looking at Ferocity. Here the
rocks were broken and tumbled about, indeed, rocks, huge and spired like
churches, cliffs black and polished with the washing of the waves,
monoliths standing out in the blue-green water and all ringing and
singing to the chime of the sea. Inland, cañons of night and shoulders
of dolerite and plains where nothing grew leading to great level
bastions, fortifications that seemed built by rule and plumb line, with
the markings of the basalt visible through the clear air. Basalt has
that terrible peculiarity. It seems the work of a hand, it makes castles
and fortifications whose ruled markings bear the inevitable suggestions
of masonry.
And across all that not a sign of life save the wings of the tireless
birds, teal and duck, cormorants, and beyond the seaward rocks the great
sea geese fishing and the guillemots flighting and the white tern
darting like dragon-flies.
Where was Bompard?
Had he, by any chance, come back and taken some other road off the
beach? There was only one way: the break in the cliffs, beyond the
caves. She thought it highly improbable that he would have come back
only to leave the beach by another way, the descent from where she stood
and towards the bed country was quite easy, alluringly easy. No, he
would have gone on.
She sat down to rest and watch.
At any moment he might appear in the distance. From where she sat the
sea lay straight before her and the far off islands, to the left the
rock strewn coast, to the right the great curving beach.
Behind her the country stormed away, stern, grey-grim and treeless, to
the foothills whose misty mauve lay stretched before the mountains.
Every now and then she would turn towards the left searching the country
and cliffs with her eyes, but no form appeared.
She remembered now that he had talked about sea birds' eggs and how to
get them. Might he have gone hunting for eggs over those cliffs and
fallen?
She remembered also when the two men had come back from their expedition
inland they had brought an alarming story of a bog like a quick sand. La
Touche had blundered into it and he would have gone down only for his
companion. They had also said something about pot holes like shafts in
the basalt. She turned her mind away from these thoughts and passing her
fingers through her hair removed the comb which held it in a rough knot,
shaking it free to the sun and wind. She combed it with her fingers and
rearranged it and then looked again--nothing.
It came to her suddenly that though she were to sit there forever the
vigil would be useless, that Bompard had gone--never to return.
She reasoned with this feeling, and reason only increased her fears. It
was now noon, Bompard was not the man to go on a long expedition by
himself; he was too inactive and easy-going. No, something had happened
to him and he might at that moment be lying dead at the foot of some
cliff or he might have broken a leg and be lying at the foot of some
rock unable to move.
She rose up and came swiftly down to the beach. Reaching the caves she
found La Touche opening a tin. It was dinner-time.
"What has become of Bompard?" she asked. "Have you seen him since he
went off this morning over those rocks?"
"Bompard," replied the other, "Mon Dieu! How do I know? No, I have not
seen him, he is big enough to take care of himself."
"That may be," she replied, "but accidents happen no matter how big a
man may be. He has not returned--"
"So it would seem," said La Touche, who had now got the tin open and was
turning the contents on to a plate. "But he will return when he
remembers that it is dinner-time."
Her lips were dry with anger, there was a contained insolence in the
manner and voice of the other that roused her as much as his
callousness. His mind seemed as cold as his pale blue eyes. All her
mixed feelings towards him focussed suddenly into a point--she loathed
him; but she held herself in.
"If he has not returned when we have finished dinner," said she, "we
will have to look for him." She took a plate and some of the beef he had
turned from the tin and with a couple of biscuits drew off and taking
her place outside in the sun began her wretched meal. A rabbit that had
run out on the sands sat up and looked at her as she ate, then it ran
off and as she followed it with her eyes she contrasted the little
friendly form with the form of La Touche, the dark innocent eyes with
those eyes of washed-out blue, without depth, or, perhaps, veiling
depth.
When she had finished eating she put the plate by her side and sat
waiting for La Touche to make a movement.
Bompard that morning had left his tinder box behind him in the cave, she
heard the strike of flint on steel. La Touche was lighting his pipe. She
waited ten minutes or more, then she came to the cave mouth.
"Are you not coming to look for Bompard?" asked she.
"I'll go when I choose," said he, "I don't want orders."
"I gave you no orders," she replied, "I asked you, are you not coming to
look for Bompard who may be in difficulties, or lying perhaps with a
broken limb--and you sit there smoking your pipe. But I give you orders
now; get up and come and help to look for him. Get up at once."
He sprang to his feet and came right out. It seemed to her that she had
never seen him before. This was the real La Touche.
"One word more from you," he shouted, "and I'll show you who's master.
You! Talk to me, would you! A--woman more trouble than you're worth. Off
with you, get down the beach--clear!"
He took a step forward with his right fist ready to strike,
open-handed. Then he drew back. She had whipped the knife from its
sheath.
The boat hook, which she had brought back with her, was propped against
the cliff behind her and out of his reach, he had no weapon.
She did not add a word to the threat of the knife. He stood like a fool,
unable to sustain her gaze, venomous, yet held, as a snake is held by a
man's grip.
"Now," she said, "get on. Go search for your companion and if you dare
to speak to me again like that I will make you repent it. You thought I
was weak being a woman and alone. You were going to strike. Coward!--Get
on, go and search for your companion."
He turned suddenly and walked off towards the Lizard rocks. "I'll go
where I choose," said he.
It was a lame and impotent end of his rebellion, but she held no
delusions. This was only the beginning--if Bompard did not return.
She put the knife in its sheath and then she put the boat hook away,
hiding it behind the sailcloth in her cave, then she went into the
men's cave. La Touche's clasp knife lay there on the sand, it was not
much of a weapon but she took it. She examined the dinner knives again.
They were almost useless as weapons. Then she came out. La Touche had
disappeared beyond the rocks and she came to the boat. There was nothing
here in the way of a weapon that he might use, unless the oars. They
were heavy, but he was strong. She determined to leave nothing to
chance and, carrying the oars down the beach to the break in the cliffs,
she hid them amongst some scrub bushes. Then she remembered the axe,
sought for it and hid it.
Then she came back and sat down to reconsider matters.
The position was as bad as could be.
As bad as La Touche. Once let this man get the upper hand and she was
lost. She would be his slave and worse. She had measured him finely.
Instinct, never at fault, told her that to pull down anything above him
would be meat and drink to La Touche's true nature and that his hatred
of her superiority was deepened by the fact that she was a woman.
Were she weak he would beat her and make her cook for him, trample on
her, make her his woman to fetch and carry, and, if Bompard did not come
back, she was here alone with him and would have to fight this thing
out.
Well, she could not fight it by brooding over it, and she was not
helping to look for Bompard.
She drew the knife from its sheath and held the eight inches of razor
sharp steel balanced in her hand for a moment as though admiring it.
Then she replaced it in the sheath and started towards the Lizard
Point.
CHAPTER XIV
THE DEATH TRAPS
From the highest shoulder of the point she could see La Touche
clambering over the seaward rocks.
He seemed more in search of shells and seaweed than of Bompard. Then,
climbing down, she reached the lower ground and struck off inland. If
she did not succeed in finding Bompard she would at least succeed in
avoiding La Touche.
Right from the Lizard Point the plain stretched to higher ground which
marked the beginning of the sea cliffs, great rocks strewed the way and
the ground was torn by the beds of small water courses, depressions that
would suddenly become little rivers in the deluging rains; stunted
bushes huddled as if for shelter at the rock bases and the voice of the
sea came here, broken and mixing with the whisper of the bushes to the
wind.
This place had once been a glacier bed, rounded boulders standing in
pools of water told that.
A gull flying in from the sea and carrying a fish in its beak drew her
attention; it was being pursued by a larger gull. They were both of the
Burgomaster type, but the fish carrier was noticeable on account of the
intense blackness of its tail plumage.
As they passed the fish dropped, fell on a patch of yellow ground just
in front of the girl, sank, and vanished.
She stopped dead and drew back with a chill at her heart. Then she
picked up a stone and cast it on the patch of ground. It vanished even
more swiftly than the fish.
It was one of the bogs the men had spoken of. They had described the
treacherous ground as white, this was yellowish and not very noticeable,
it was also death and another dozen steps would have led her into it.
She advanced cautiously, reached the border line and kneeling down
pushed her hand into the yellow mud. It was like pushing it into a cold
slimy mouth. She could scarcely draw it out again, when she did the mud
was clinging to her hand like a yellow glove.
She came back to one of the rock ponds and washed her hand, it was like
trying to get rid of treacle and, as she washed, she tried to fancy what
would have happened but for the gull, tried to picture herself being
slowly pulled down into that cold darkness and entombed there forever.
Then, skirting the place of danger, she went on, cautiously, examining
carefully the ground before her. She had not gone ten yards when it
seemed to her that a patch right in front of her was ever so slightly
darker and moister looking than the ground she was treading.
She picked up a stone and cast it on the patch. It vanished. Then she
knew the feeling of the man who finds himself ambuscaded.
This place was a death trap, or, rather, a series of death traps, there
might be pits lying in wait for her quite unnoticeable. She turned and
began to retrace her steps, so shaken that she would not trust even the
ground that she had already covered but kept testing it by casting
stones before her.
From a little distance an observer might have fancied her engaged in
some new sort of game.
Near the safety of the Lizard rocks her eyes, closely scanning the
ground before her, caught sight of something. It was a half-burned
match. No one else but Bompard could have dropped that match. He had
started without his tinder-box, had evidently found that match in his
pocket, lit his pipe and walked on. There was only one direction in
which he would have walked unless he had struck inland, which was
improbable. He would have made as she had made to cross to the higher
ground.
Even if he had walked inland he would not have escaped, for, casting her
eyes in that direction she could see yellow patches spreading between
the rocks.
She knew now what had become of Bompard, and with lips dry as pumice
stone she began to climb till she reached the point where she had sat
that morning. If the mud had taken Bompard, had he cried out? If so, La
Touche would have heard his cries, for the caves were not so far from
the Lizard rocks.
La Touche was nowhere to be seen, but she had no fear about him, or only
the fear that he would come back. Bompard was gone. Bompard was dead,
she knew it as though she had seen him engulfed, and she was here alone,
in this place, with La Touche.
She put her hand to her side automatically to make sure that the knife
was there. Then she sat with her eyes fixed on the distant islands,
haze-purple in the light of the westering sun.
The thought of the boat on the beach came to her with the idea that she
might launch it and escape, make for the islands and put all that sea
between herself and the man she hated. But she could not launch the boat
single-handed and, if she could, it would have been impossible to work
it single-handed with those big oars.
She could see the boat from where she sat and the line of the beach
leading away past the seal-nursery and the sea elephant strand to the
rocks that formed the north-eastern horn of the bay. In stormy weather
those rocks would be invisible in the smoke of the breakers, to-day they
were clearly defined. She could see the great seals as they moved slowly
hither and thither and the ship's figure-head as it stood to this side
of them and, like a pin point of white the great white skull on the
sands, a desolate scene, but almost benign when compared to the savagery
of rocks and cliffs visible on her other side and that sinister plain,
where the death traps were set and waiting with the patience of
malignity for what might come to feed them.
She had fought the human failing that makes men brood and trouble about
the future, a failing that is mostly born of houses and artificial life;
already the struggle against it was less. She was coming more and more
under that which has dominion over all things that live in the open and
have to fight for life--the moment. If she had examined her own mind she
would have found that the death of Bompard, of which she felt certain,
affected her far less than it would have done some days ago, that her
desire to escape to the islands was caused by the hatred of La Touche
more than by fear of the future with him.
She would have found that her capacity for hatred had increased and also
her dangerous qualities, and she would have found all this because God
had so ordered life that it is adaptable, making the defensive and
offensive qualities of the being capable of increase or decrease in
answer to environment or need.
She came back to the beach. It wanted, still, a couple of hours of
sun-down. There was no sign yet of La Touche, but, just as she knew in
her heart that Bompard was dead she knew that La Touche was all right.
He had been keeping to the rocks by the sea, leaving that aside; she
knew that he would come back. He was of the sort that remains unscathed
when the better man is taken.
She had one dread; that La Touche might get the knife from her, throw it
away, and be master by his superior strength.
She had his clasp knife in her pocket, but it was a thing of little
account in a struggle. Well, she must be on her guard. Then came the
thought: "But how can I be on my guard when I am asleep?"
Nothing would be easier, if he were really in earnest, than for him to
creep upon her whilst she slept, and disarm her.
She tried to dismiss this idea. La Touche was not crafty enough for that
and, besides, would he go to the lengths of a physical struggle? He had
been on the point of hitting her, it was true, but that was in a moment
of excitement. Was she not painting him in too desperate colours?
Argue as she would on the question, reason, instinctive reason, always
came back with the same answer: "Be on your guard, that knife is the
only barrier between you and heaven knows what. Without it you would be
at the mercy of a superior force. La Touche is no melodramatic villain;
he is, what is perhaps worse for you, a creature of low instincts,
stronger than you. Beware of being at his mercy."
With her mind filled by these thoughts she set to work getting supper
ready. La Touche had taken the tinder box with him, so a fire was out of
the question and she contented herself by laying out the beef that had
served for dinner, and some biscuits.
Then she saw that she had only laid two plates. Working
half-unconsciously she had ruled Bompard out. She looked at the things
lying there on the sand, then she turned away from them. La Touche had
crossed the rocks and was coming along the beach. He was trailing a long
ribband of seaweed he had picked up and as he drew closer she saw that
he had left his ill-humor behind him.
"There was no sight of Bompard," said he, "he has not come back, then?"
"Bompard will not come back," replied the girl, "we will never see him
again."
Then she told of the death traps beyond the rocks and of the match.
La Touche listened, standing, and still holding the ribband of seaweed
in his fingers.
She could see that he believed what she said and yet his words gave the
lie to what was in his face.
"Oh, Bompard will come back all right," said he. "He's not such a fool
as to get into any of those bogs; he's sulking, that's all."
He shaded his eyes, looking back towards the rocks as though on the
chance of seeing the missing one; then he sat down before his plate and
helped himself to food and the girl, loathing him and the food as well,
sat down and made a pretence of eating.
She noticed that he was cheerful, for a wonder. He ate with good
appetite and shewed in his movements and manner and voice when he spoke
a restrained vivacity new to him.
His blondness, the washed-out blue of his eyes, his features, his voice,
she considered all these anew as she sat opposite to him. It seemed to
her that anything truly manly about him had come from the sea; that
essentially he was a product of Mont Martre or the Banlieu of old Paris.
She loathed him now as only a woman can loathe a man and, woman-like,
her loathing focussed itself upon his blondness and the colour of his
eyes.
Then, when she had done with the pretence of eating she rose up and,
leaving him to remove the things, walked down to the water's edge and
along towards the break in the cliffs.
The tide was nearly out and the sea scarcely broke on the rocks; she had
never seen it calmer nor the islands closer. They seemed to have drawn
in shore during the last half hour and as she looked she saw a great
flock of gulls coming landward, and, as she turned to watch them, she
noticed the far-off mountain tops visible through the cliff break. They
were fuming. One might have fancied that fires had been lit all along
their tops and round the highest peak a turban of cloud was winding
itself, coil on coil.
Then as she stood watching, and from away over, there came a rumble,
deep and cavernous, as if a gargantuan dray were being driven over
subterranean roads. It died out in echoes amongst the foothills and
the silence returned broken only by the wash of the sea on the beach.
She turned towards the sea. It had altered suddenly in colour and from
away beyond the islands the wind was coming. She could see it, raking
the sea like a comb. Then it struck the beach and yelled away up the
break in the cliffs like a hunter in a hurry to get to the wild work
going on amidst the hills.
She turned back towards the caves.
La Touche had left the tin plates lying on the sand and the wind, which
seemed to possess a hundred fingers, was chasing them about. He was
trying to recapture them and as he brought them back he laughed. It was
the first time she had seen him laugh. Then as he stowed them away he
shewed a disposition towards intimacy and talkativeness.
"That's what the winds are in this place," said he, "no wonder ships
steer clear of it."
"I'm not thinking of the wind," said she, "I'm thinking of Bompard."
"Oh, Bompard will come back all right," said he, "the grub's here and
that will bring him. Bompard will come back all right."
"No," said she, "he will never come back and you know it."
She turned away from him. Dusk was now falling and as she entered her
cave the wind from the sea suddenly fell dead. Almost immediately it
began to blow again, but now from the land and as though this land wind
were spreading a pall over the sky darkness fell suddenly and with the
darkness she could hear the rain coming with the sound she had heard
once before like the murmuring of a great top spun by a giant.
Then the rain burst on the beach with a roar through which came the hiss
of the rain-swept sea.
The sound was almost welcome. As she lay in the darkness it seemed like
a protecting wall between herself and La Touche. La Touche's ill-temper
would have disturbed her less than his cheerfulness and amiability, born
so suddenly and from no apparent reasons. She had determined not to
sleep and she had lain down fully dressed; even to the oilskin coat and
with her boots on; to-morrow she would go off and hide amongst the
bushes beyond the cliff break and get some sleep, but to-night she would
not close her eyes; so she told herself.
She had taken the knife from its sheath and placed it beside her, her
hand rested on it. An hour passed, and now, as she lay listening to the
pouring of the rain her fingers felt the pattern of the hilt. The hilt
was striated cross-ways to give a better grip, and as her fingers
wandered up and down the strictions the cross bars of a ladder were
suggested to her. The steady pouring of the rain seemed to work on this
idea and make it more real. Then she was climbing a ladder set against
the cliffs. La Touche was holding it at the foot and Bompard was waiting
for her at the cliff top. He helped her up and then the dream changed
to something else, and to something else, till she woke suddenly to the
recognition that she had been asleep for a long time and that fear,
deadly fear, was clutching her by the throat.
She sat up, leaning on her elbow. The rain was still falling, though the
sound of it was much less, and the blackness was so intense that it
seemed moulded round her. She felt for the knife and found it. Then she
lay down again, listening.
The tide was coming in and she recognised, and not for the first time, a
curious singing, chanting echo that always accompanied the waves of the
incoming tide.
Fear is reasonless, it is also Protean, and this sea voice coming
through the night turned the fear of La Touche to the fear of Bompard.
What if he were to return, cold and wet, from that terrible grave-yard
beyond the rocks?
CHAPTER XV
THE STROKE
As she lay, listening, through the black darkness and the singing of the
sea came a faint sound as of something dragging itself along the sand at
the cave entrance. She clutched the knife and sat up. A waft of wind
brought with it a tang of stale tobacco and rain-wet clothes. It was La
Touche.
She drew up her feet and sat crouched against the sailcloth, the knife
half-held in her lap, her fingers nerveless, her mind paralysed with the
knowledge that now, immediately, she would _have_ to fight, that the
Beast was all but upon her. She knew.
She could hear him breathing now and the faint sound of his hands
feeling gently over the floor of the cave. He was searching for her, the
fume of him filled the place, he was almost in touch with her, yet still
she sat helpless as a little child, paralysed in the blackness, as a
bird before a crawling cat. Yet her right hand as though endowed with a
volition of its own was tightening its grasp upon the hilt of the knife.
She had no longer reasoning power. Reasoning power and energy seemed
now in the possession of the knife.
Then something touched her left boot and at the touch her hand struck
out into the darkness, blindly and furiously, driving the knife home to
the hilt in something that fell with a choking sound across her feet.
She forced her feet from the thing that had suddenly fallen on them,
rose, sprang across it and passed through the cave entrance with the
surety of a person moving in broad daylight.
Then the pouring rain on her face brought her to her full senses and
recognition of what had happened.
The knife was still in her hand and her hand was sticky and damp.
She said to herself: "That is his blood." The thought that perhaps she
had killed him did not occur to her. The fear of him was still so
intense, that it made him alive, alive somewhere in the surrounding
darkness, and waiting to seize her. Then she began to steal off towards
the sound of the sea. Twice as she went she stopped and turned, ready to
strike again, then when the water was washing round her feet she came up
the beach a few paces and crouched down.
The sea was at her back and the haunting dread of being followed
vanished.
It was now that she asked herself the question: "Have I killed him?"
Meaning:--"Have I freed myself of him,"--hoping this was so.
The terror behind her having vanished she was now brave. It seemed to
her that the sound of the sea had become sharper; then she realized that
the sound of the rain had ceased. Her mind seemed working in a dual
manner and she had not fully recognized the cessation of the rain till
the sound of the sea clinched the fact.
Through the clear night now came the melancholy crying of the whale
birds, and through the broken clouds a ray of the moon shewed a faint
light in which the cliffs began to stand out.
The incoming tide washed round her so that she had to move, it seemed
determined to drive her up to the caves. She could see now the whole
beach desolate of life and before her, vaguely sketched in the cliff
wall, the cave openings.
She came along the sea edge till she reached the break in the cliffs,
then, looking behind her again to make sure, she took refuge in the
bushes.
For the last few yards before reaching them she seemed wading through
tides of nothingness. In the shelter of the bushes she forgot
everything.
CHAPTER XVI
ALONE
She was awakened by the light of day. Kerguelen had cleared its face of
clouds and the new risen sun was on sea and mountains and land.
A whole family of rabbits were disporting themselves close to her in a
clear space between the bushes and as she sat up they darted off, a
glimpse of their cotton white tails shewing for a moment in the sun.
She was stiff from the damp, her clothes were wet despite the oilskin
coat which she had left open, and her throat was sore, every bone ached
as though she had been beaten. Her soul felt sick. It was as though the
crawling beast of the night before had crawled over it like a slug,
poisoning it. The knife lay beside her; she picked it up and looked at
it; there were red traces upon the hilt and the lines in the palm of her
right hand were red. She rubbed it clean with the damp leaves of the
bushes, then she stood up, shaking and weak, heedless of everything but
the friendly touch of the sun. Her fear was gone, but the effect of it
remained in a sense of bruising and injury.
Out on the beach there was nothing, nothing but the breaking sea and the
flying gulls and lines of long legged gulls stalking or standing on the
sands, the 'get-away--get-away' of the kittiwakes came across the water
and the barking of brent geese from beyond the rocks of the Lizard
Point. The boat lay there on its side, everything was the same.
She drew towards the caves. Nothing stirred there. Then she halted and,
changing her course, came right down to the water's edge. From here she
could see the three cave mouths dark cut in the cliff. She watched them
for a moment as though expecting something to appear, then she came up
towards them, walking more cautiously as she drew near, just as she had
walked on the plain where the death traps were.
The light shone into the cave where she had slept. She saw a naked foot
with toes dug into the sand and beyond the foot a form lying on its
side.
Then she drew back with a cry; something was moving there. A rabbit
dashed out of the cave and scuttered away along the cliff base. Then she
knew.
La Touche was dead, he would never crawl again. She had killed him. She
cast the knife on the sand and wiped the palm of her hand on her dress
half unconsciously, gazing at the foot.
The terror of him had burned away anything in her mind that might have
fed remorse. She had not killed him consciously. Searching her memory
she could vaguely recollect having struck out against something
appalling in the darkness. Now she knew and guessed all, and she could
have hated him only that death kills hatred.
She came to the mouth of the men's cave and sat down in the sun, the
soreness of her throat, the weariness of her very bones, the feel of her
horrible wet clothes, all these filled her with a craving for the sun
and its warmth and light, fierce as the craving for drink. She spread
out her hands to it, then, with shaking fingers she began to take off
her clothes. They clung to her like evil things. Had this been a day of
pouring rain she might just have lain down and died.
Without getting up, and leaning on her elbow, she spread out the skirt
and coat and other things on the sand beside her, then she stretched her
aching limbs to the warmth.
The wind had fallen to almost a dead calm, and as she lay she saw little
rabbits stealing out to play in the sunshine on the sands. She watched
them running in circles like things on wheels and moving by clockwork.
Then she closed her eyes, but still she saw them circling, circling,
circling.
Then she was in the toy department of the Magazin du Louvre and a
shop-woman was shewing her toy rabbits that ran in circles, five francs
each.
She awoke at noon; the sore throat was gone, her bones no longer ached
and the great beach lay under the heat of noon, humming like a
stretched string to the touch of the sea.
Her left arm and side and thigh were scorched by the sun, but that was
nothing; the sense of illness was gone, and her mind, quite clear and
renewed, had regained its balance.
She remembered everything. La Touche was lying there in the cave, dead.
The knife that had killed him she could see lying on the sand where she
had dropped it; she had killed him. All these monstrous facts seemed
old, settled and done with and of little more interest than the things
and events of a year ago.
What seemed new was the beach and its desolation--its emptiness. It was
as though a crowd of people had suddenly vanished from it; a crowd that
any moment might return. The place seemed waiting and watching.
She cast her eyes towards the rocks of the Lizard Point and then towards
the cave mouth; then hurriedly she began to put on her clothes, now dry
and warm, and having dressed she stood for a moment again looking about
her.
She could see the penguins in the distance going through their endless
evolutions, and the rhythmical sound of the sea came from near and far
mixed with the chanting and crying of the gulls. At any moment Bompard
might appear labouring over those rocks, at any moment La Touche might
step from the cave where he lay. That is what the beach told her, though
she knew that the forms of the two men would appear no more; that she
was here alone, utterly alone.
She took shelter from the sun in the men's cave. Bompard's tinder box
was lying on the sand and half a box of Swedish matches. The men's
blankets were tossed in a corner and the provisions and utensils were in
their proper place. On a plate by the bags of biscuits lay the remains
of the beef from last night's supper; she took it and ate it with a
biscuit, sitting on the floor of the cave and staring before her out at
the strip of beach where the boat lay on its side with the sea breaking
beyond.
On the day the men had gone off inland on their expedition she had
terrified herself with fancies of what it would be like were she to find
herself here alone. Her imagination had gone far from the reality.
The thing had happened; the men were gone, gone forever, yet she was not
alone. They filled the place by their absence far more than they had
filled it by their presence.
The louder cry of a gull outside seemed hailing Bompard, the rustle of a
rabbit on the sands seemed the coming of La Touche, the sound of the sea
spoke of them, the boat seemed only waiting for them to launch it. They,
whom a million years would not bring back.
She felt neither regret for the fate of La Touche nor sorrow for the
fate of Bompard, all that seemed unreal, just as the darkness and terror
of the night before seemed unreal. The real thing that touched her
through everything was Expectancy. Expectancy, ghostly and attenuated,
yet ubiquitous.
It brought her to the cave mouth before she had finished her meal. The
beach seemed to say to her: "Come out and look!" and she came out and
looked, and the line of foam and the wheeling or stalking gulls held her
for a moment as though saying--a moment, a moment more and you will see
something. They will come. Any moment now you may see Bompard crossing
the rocks. La Touche is not in that cave, he is here, everywhere.
She came back into the cave and sat down and finished her meal, the food
had renewed her strength and with renewed strength her indifference to
all that had happened began to pass.
She had killed La Touche. The reality of that fact was coming home to
her now; she did not reason in the least on the matter saying he
deserved to be killed, that had all been settled long ago in her mind,
but the fact that she had killed him was standing strongly out before
her, also the facts that he was dead and lying quite close to her and
that though she did not mind his dead body she was beginning to dread
something else.
Dead, he was beginning to frighten her just as he had frightened her
when living. Then she found that it was just the same with Bompard. He
was frightening her too.
Suppose one or the other were to peep in at her, and nod at her--she
pictured it and then crushed the picture in her mind and got up and came
out again and stood in the sun.
Then she came down to the boat and stood with her hand on the gunnel,
and, for a moment as she stood thus, the terror of utter loneliness came
to her in a hundred tongues and ways, and always with reference to the
men who had vanished.
It was impossible to stay here alone--alone--absolutely alone; like a
frightened child her mind appealed against this terror; it climbed the
vacant skies and passed over the desolate hills in search of comfort.
Was there a God? To whom could she run for comfort, for escape--?
As if in answer to her wild but unspoken question came a far-off roar
brought on the wind from the great seal beach.
CHAPTER XVII
FRIENDS IN DESOLATION
She turned her face that way and stood for a moment with the faint
breeze blowing her hair. Then she came running up the beach to the
caves. In the men's cave she stood glancing rapidly about her like a
person in a burning house seeking what he may save.
She picked up the tinder box and the box of matches and put them in her
pocket. Then she began to remove everything from the cave. Making a sack
of one of the blankets, she filled it with as much as she could drag
along and brought it to the break in the cliffs where she dumped the
contents.
It took her three journeys. Then, having collected everything in a big
pile, she sat down for a moment to rest. The things would be safe here
till she could fetch them to her new home, and the weather would not
hurt them, except, maybe, the biscuits.
The thought of the biscuits troubled her, and the picture of them lying
exposed in one of the torrential rains. Then she caught sight of a cleft
in the basalt. It was dry and big enough to contain the bags and she
placed them there having taken out some of their contents.
These and a couple of tins of meat she placed in one of the blankets,
making a sack of it. Then she remembered the knife she had left lying on
the sand before the cave where the dead man lay.
She fought against the idea of returning for it. Then her will made her
go.
As she picked up the knife she glanced once again into the cave and once
again caught a glimpse of the naked foot with the toe dug into the sand;
then, placing the knife in its sheath and running like a frightened
child she reached the break, caught up the sack, the extra blanket and
the axe, which she had hidden among the bushes, and started.
It was not a heavy load, fortunately. Had it been heavy she would have
dropped it, for, once moving, she had to run. The idea that she was
deserting people who did not want to be deserted pursued her; now and
again she stopped and turned for a moment--nothing; the Lizard rocks lay
just the same and the beach and the forsaken boat, just the same, and
the jeering gulls; yet, when she turned again to go on she had to run.
Near the great skull her right bootlace, getting loose, nearly tripped
her. She sat down and tied it and then went on, walking now, but
swiftly, till, nearing the river and in full sight of her new
companions, she found herself suddenly free.
The hounds of Fear had given up the chase. The great sea elephants had
driven them away. Here was no longer loneliness.
The great beasts sunning themselves on the flat rocks seemed more
numerous and, as she crossed the river, a monster coming in from the sea
in a thunder of foam saluted the land with a roar.
She recognized, or thought she recognized, the great bull that had
followed her, he was lying, to-day, half-tilted to one side, he looked
drunk with sun and laziness and as she came amongst them and sat down,
as she had sat that day, she found that though a hundred pairs of eyes
were watching her, scarcely a burly figure moved.
They had grown used to her, perhaps, or perhaps they recognized that she
did not fear them now in the least, or that she had come for refuge and
friendship.
Then she rose up and passing amongst them as a friend amongst friends
came towards the caves in the basalt cliffs. They were smaller than the
caves to the west but they were dry and free from water drip. She chose
one and put her bundle down with the axe beside it.
PART III
CHAPTER XVIII
GOD MADE FRIENDSHIP
The place was as populous as a town. That was the soul-satisfying fact
which she absorbed as she sat with the bundle and axe beside her. To be
lonely here one would have to be deaf and blind and without the sense of
smell. Now that their attention was no longer strained by watching her
the great brutes filled the place with all sorts of sounds, grunts and
grumbles, puffs and snorts like the escape of steam from a locomotive
and now and then the flop of a great body changing position. There was
another sound she got to know and recognize, after a while, the
grumbling and rumbling of their interiors. Infested with sea-lice they
were always scratching. Quite close to the cave mouth three great bulls
were lying and every now and then one of them would turn and twist round
and scratch himself with his flippers, the nearest bull had lost an eye
in some past battle and they were all scarred about the necks, and seen
close like this, in their natural state and as one of their company, the
marvel of them, was beyond speaking.
She took off the oilskin coat and laid it on the sand of the cave, took
the things from the blanket and spread the two blankets out and folded
them. As she moved about she saw that the bulls had turned slightly,
attracted by her movements, but they shewed not the slightest sign of
mind disturbance. Then, having placed the things in order, she came out
and walked down to the water's edge, making a detour now and then to
avoid treading on the flippers or the tail of a monster. On coming
amongst them a few minutes ago she had felt not the slightest fear, but
this walk in cold blood from the cliff to the sea edge made her hold her
breath. She felt as she had felt that first day when she sat down close
to them. Angry, and with a sudden movement, one of these creatures could
have destroyed her as a man destroys a fly; but she held on, and was
rewarded.
Not one of them shewed any wish to destroy her, or anger, or uneasiness.
They had accepted her into their company by not attacking or ejecting
her, she ran counter to none of their desires or needs and evidently her
form called up no recollections of the beast Man in their dim brains.
Then she was a female. Sex is more than a physical difference between
one being and another, one can fancy it as one of the outstanding signs
of the Wild to be read by instinct, as instinct reads the weather or
season signs, or the sea mile posts that lead the seals and sea
elephants thousands of leagues to strike some particular beach as an
arrow strikes the bull's eye of a target.
The female, unless with young, is not dangerous to the male. One may
fancy that amongst the few but burningly important warnings and
directions in the book of Instinct.
Here, at the sea edge and within a few feet of the breaking waves, she
sat down on a projecting rock and tried to measure with her eye the vast
herd. The whole beach from where she sat to where the flat rocks ceased
a mile and a half away on her right was spotted with them and she
noticed that here and there they were always putting out to sea and
coming ashore again.
Making for a spot on the right, a hundred yards from her she saw one
coming ashore, swift as an arrow, steering with straight steadfast eyes
and landing with the water cascading from his huge shoulders, whilst on
the left one was putting out to sea in a burst of foam.
Then, of a sudden, all the shore edge bulls got in commotion slithering
about, raising themselves on their flippers and blowing off steam.
A sea elephant was coming towards the beach, moving with a speed thrice
that of any of the others, his head was raised and she could see the
eyes that seemed blazing with wrath or challenge.
Then, as he came thundering on to the rocks, he lifted the echoes with a
roar that resounded for miles along the beach.
All the others had landed in silence.
She did not know that this was a newcomer, a belated bull, held days
behind the arrival of the others by some chance of the sea. Maybe he
had hung fishing off the South Shetlands or the Horn, or beached for
repairs after some sea fight off the Falklands; whatever had held him he
was late.
He came swiftly up the rocks, casting his head from side to side but
unchallenged. There were no females there yet to fight for and they
evidently recognized him as one of the herd and not a stranger. The herd
instinct, without which a nation would be a mob, ruled here and gave the
belated one his place, and after a while of squattering about and
sniffing and blowing he settled down with quieted eyes to rest. He had
reached one of the stopping stages of his life, with the surety with
which he would reach the last, on some desolate beach or reef of the
sea.
The girl watched him. Not only did these new-found companions chase away
loneliness and ghostly fears, but they brought her comfort. They seemed
so sure, sure of food and life and the right to live, so undisturbed; it
was as though she felt the presence of the ghostly shepherd who looks
after the flocks of sea and land and who counts even the sparrows. She
cast her eyes towards the islands and the sea-line; some day a ship would
come and all this would be a dream of the past. She knew it. Her mind
went back over all that she had been saved from--the wreck, the
deathtraps and worst of all--La Touche. It was strange to think that a
man should be worse than the others.
If that fisherman's knife had not been included in the gear of the boat!
It was now, as she sat thinking this and watching the huge harmless
things around her, that a hatred of La Touche came into her mind, a
hatred that seemed to have been waiting to enter until her mind was at
rest. He seemed to her evil itself. He seemed to her connected with all
the disasters that had happened and part of them. He had been the
lookout on the _Gaston de Paris_, his quarrel had sent Bompard to his
death, he had nearly unhinged her mind with terror. Had he possessed the
evil eye? Then, for the first time, she recalled her premonition of
disaster, yet, how she had refused to let the yacht be put off its
course. They might now have been at New Amsterdam only for that. Yet it
was not her fault. She had refused to alter the course, not for any
selfish reason, quite the reverse, she had refused because she did not
wish to spoil the plans of her host. It was Fate, not blind Fate,
because the premonition was full sighted, it was Fate obeying some
order. And it seemed to her that she could read in the order that she
was to be saved. Why? God only knew, but so she read the facts, and she
would be saved to the end and go back to the life she knew, or had known
and die, perhaps, at last an old, old woman.
It seemed to her that this coming on to the sea elephant beach was a
stage in her great journey that had brought her definitely nearer to the
end of her loneliness. And whether all this were true knowledge or
whether it was only the fancy of the ego its effect was to give her
peace.
Then, as she sat there the strangest lonely figure on earth, she
explored the pocket of her skirt and took the things from it. La
Touche's knife, her rings knotted up in her handkerchief, the tobacco
box of Captain Slocum, the tinder-box and box of matches. Then she
opened the tobacco box and re-read the purple writing with the tag "keep
up your spirits." She could not visualize the old slab-sided whaling
captain who had scrawled that, inspired no doubt by practical knowledge
of disaster and the horrors of Kerguelen, but the message came now as an
additional comfort, it seemed to her written by a hand other than that
of man. She put the paper back in the box and, then, everything back in
her pocket.
Then, like a stroke of humour, an incident occurred to lighten the whole
beach.
A big platoon of penguins had crossed the river and marched up to the
sacred precincts of the seal beach. Turning her head to see what the
disturbance was about she sighted the penguins just at the end of their
march and three bulls fronting them. The penguins wished to pass, either
from impudence or a real desire to cross the beach, but the bulls barred
the way, heading them off, turning and twisting, snorting as if to blow
the feathered ones away.
The penguins bowed and scraped and explained, but the bulls, blind to
politeness and deaf to argument only presented their heads, then they
raised their rumps and made a half charge. The girl watched the penguins
going at the double with heads slewed round as though fearful of their
tails. Then she laughed.
The sea elephants had not only made her able to laugh, they had given
her something to laugh over. Then came the thought: why had they refused
the penguins and accepted her?
She did not know that the penguins were rival fishermen, she fancied
that the sea elephants were somehow friendly to her, divining her
friendship for them, and maybe she was right, though not perhaps in the
way she fancied, for when God made friendship He made it out of queer
and sometimes negative materials.
That night as she lay in her cave with a rolled-up blanket for pillow
and the other blanket for covering, neither Ghosts nor Loneliness came
to trouble her.
Two great bulls a few yards from the cave's mouth kept her warm and
comfortable of mind.
She could hear their puffs and grunts and the occasional wobble-wobble
of their digestive organs as they slept, dreaming maybe in their sleep,
for sometimes they tossed and moved, and once one of them gave a "woof"
as though trying to roar under the blanket of sleep.
She thought of dogs lying asleep; dogs dreamed and hunted in their
dreams, why should not these?
Then suddenly the rain came down as though someone had pulled the
string of a shower bath, but she knew that would not drive them away,
guessing that rain to sea elephants was no more disturbing than sun to
peaches.
Then she was chasing penguins along the beach, riding on a sea elephant
towards that absolute oblivion which is the brand of sleep they serve at
Kerguelen.
CHAPTER XIX
THE BIRDS
It rained off and on for three days, but rain in Kerguelen is not the
same as rain in England, just as rain at Windmere is not the same as
rain at Birmingham. It does not depress, especially when you are busy.
In those three days she made three journeys to the break in the cliffs
to recover the things she had left there and she made her journeys, not
to put too fine a point on it, with nothing on but the oilskin coat, the
blanket she used for a sack got hopelessly soaked and her head was
exposed to the rain owing to the fact that the sou'wester was in the
cave where the dead man lay, but she got used to it, especially as
neuralgia and colds are unknown in Kerguelen.
The loss of her only towel, the lump of cotton waste, was far worse than
the loss of the sou'wester and would have been worse still only that she
had other things to think about, especially on these journeys. They were
terrible and required all her fortitude to make them, and they were
terrible for a new reason. The birds had got at La Touche. Great
predatory birds like cormorants thronged the beach opposite the cave,
she could see them going in and out of the cave and she could hear them
quarrelling in there in the darkness.
Then, on her last journey, as she was preparing to come back, happening
to glance that way she saw a gull like a Burgomaster coming out of the
cave mouth and pulling after it something long like a rope upon which
the other gulls flung themselves. She turned and ran.
She had saved everything but one full bag of biscuits; she determined to
leave them. If worst came to the worst there was bread stuff in the
cache.
That night the memory of what she had se
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