CHAPTER IVDISASTER
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 everythingthat 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 theGaston de Paristo 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 atmosphereof 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 theGaston 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”
“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 engineshad 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 theGaston de Parisseemed 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 theGaston de Pariswas 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 theGaston de Parisheeled 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 VVOICES IN THE NIGHT
The boat tackle of theGaston de Pariswas 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 theGaston de Parisfoundered 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-masterbroke 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 menblunt 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 VIDAWN
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 hermind 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 theGaston 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 typicalmaître 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 anddiamonds, 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 theGaston 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 addressingsome 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 handsthe 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 thebows 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. Shenoticed 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, thatwas 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 theGastonblew 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 theothers. 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 faintscent 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 VIITHE 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-placewhere 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 mountainsthe 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.
CHAPTER VIIITHE 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 oilskincoat 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 theGaston 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 theGastononly 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 firmagain 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.