CHAPTER XXIIIRAFT
It took him three days to bring her back safe to life. It poured with rain during those three days but he managed to light little fires in one of the caves with seal blubber and routing out the things in her cave he found everything she had so carefully salved, the cups and plates, the tin of coffee, half empty now—everything, even to the tobacco the men had taken from the cache, he found Bompard’s tinder-box and the Swedish match box belonging to La Touche. He had given the woman life and she had given him tobacco and sometimes, sitting in the adjoining cave and smoking between nursing times, he would bring his big fist down on his thigh, just that.
Here was a woman starving to death and dying of thirst with food enough for a ship’s company at her elbow. And the tobacco! Where was the explanation? She was able to speak a little now. She had spoken at first in French, which he could not understand, then she spoke in English as good as his; another mystery. A woman all gone to pieces that spoke two tongues and was different somehow from any woman he had ever known.
Then the things she had said: “Who are you?I am not dreaming this? Are you really, really, truly—Oh,don’tleave me.” Crazy talk like that. And it was always “Oh, don’t leave me.” Then he would lay his pipe down carefully on the sand of the cave and pass through the sheeting rain to have a look at her. Sometimes she would have dozed off and he could get back to his pipe, sometimes she was awake and then he would have to sit down beside her and hold her hand and stroke it or play with her fingers just as one plays with the fingers of a child. At these moments he was transformed, he was no longer a man, he was a mother, and the hand that could break down the resistance of a bellying sail was the hand of a child. He no longer thought of her as the “poor woman,” an infant is sexless, so did she seem, or so would she have seemed had he thought of the matter. He didn’t. As a matter of fact thought was not his strong suit in the game of life. He was a man from the world of Things. That was why, perhaps, he made such a good sick nurse. He did not fuss, nor talk, his touch was firm, firm as his determination to “get food into her” and his hand, big as a ham, was delicate because it was the hand of a perfect steersman. It was used to handling women in the form of three thousand ton ships, coaxing them, humouring them—up to a point.
He fed her now from one of the tin cups. Every two hours of the day, unless she was asleep, half a cupful of food went into her whether she liked it ornot; “hot stuff,” for though the firewood was done he found that the blubber alone was the best fuel in the world.
On the second day she was able to raise herself up, and once when he came in he found that she had been moving about the cave and that she had rearranged the blanket that did for a pillow.
Then on the morning when the blessed sun shone she was able to come out and sit on a patch of sand with one of the blankets for a rug.
She looked old and worn, but no longer terrible, and as she sat with her thin hands folded in her lap watching the great sea bulls and the cows, as if contemplating them for the first time, the man who had helped her out and placed her there was at a loss—she was a sight to inspire pity in a savage. He took his seat beside her on a piece of rock and rolling some tobacco in his hand stuffed his pipe.
“You’re all right now,” said he.
She nodded her head and smiled.
“Yes,” she said, “this is good.”
“Lucky I came along,” he said, “wouldn’t have seen you only an old tin hit my eye.”
He put the pipe in his pocket, got up, went to the cave where he did the cooking and came back with a cup half full of coffee and half a biscuit.
“Dip it in,” said he.
She did as she was bid. It was the first time he had given her coffee and the stimulant broughta flush to her cheeks and cheered her heart so that she began to talk.
“There are more biscuits in a place down the beach,” she said, “and down there,” she nodded to the left, “there are a lot of things hidden under a heap of stones. It’s beyond the river on the left.”
Then the empty cup began to shake in her hand and he took it from her.
“You’re not over strong yet,” said he, “but you’ll be better in a bit with this sun. Y’aren’t afraid of the sea cows, are you?”
She shook her head.
“Thought you wouldn’t be,” said he, “there’s no harm in them. Well, I’ll be moving about. I’ll go and have a look down the beach and see what’s to be found.”
He hung for a moment with the cup in his hand shading his eyes and looking seaward, then he turned towards the cave to put the cup back.
“What is your name?” she said, suddenly, bringing him to a halt.
“Raft,” said he.
“Raft,” she repeated the name several times in a low voice as if committing it to memory or turning it over in her mind.
“How long might you have been here?” he asked, standing in a doubtful manner, as though debating in his mind the wisdom of allowing her to strain her strength answering questions.
“I don’t know,” said she, “a long while. I was wrecked with two men from a yacht. TheGaston de Paris. Wecame here in a boat. They are both dead.”
At the nameGaston de ParisRaft nodded his head. Already a suspicion that she might be one of the yacht’s crowd had come into his mind, so the news came scarcely as a surprise.
“It was us you hit,” said he, “I’m one of the chaps from the old hooker.”
“TheAlbatross?”
“That’s her.”
She said nothing for a moment, looking away over at the islands. She could see the name, still, written as if on the night. Then she remembered the boat sail she had seen when adrift with Bompard and La Touche.
“There were four of us got off,” said he, “we struck them islands over there and put in but there was nothing but rocks in that part. Next day we put out, but got blown down the coast; we got smashed landing; all but a chap named Ponting and me went under, but one chap’s body was hove up and we stripped him. I’ve got his boots and his knife in that bundle over there in the cave, and Ponting’s. We saved a bag of bread.”
He took his seat again on the rock and, placing the cup beside him, took the pipe from his pocket, but he did not light it. He held it, rubbing the bowl reflectively. He seemed to have come to an end of his story.
“Did the other man die?” she asked.
“He went getting gulls’ eggs one day,” saidRaft, “and slipped over the cliff. They’re big, the cliffs, down there. I found him all broke up on the rocks. He didn’t live more than a minute when I got to him and I had to leave him; the tide was coming up.”
“Poor man,” said she.
He rose up and, taking the cup, stood for a moment again looking seaward.
“Well, I’ll be off down the beach,” said he, “you won’t be frightened to be here by yourself?”
“No,” she replied, “but don’t go very far.”
“I’ll keep in sight,” said Raft.
He put the cup in the cave and off he went whilst she sat watching him; everything, life itself, seemed centred in him. A terrible feeling came over her at moments that he might vanish, that, looking away for a moment and turning again she might find him gone and nothing but the beach and the gulls.
Beyond the river he turned and saw her watching him and waved his hand as if to reassure her. She waved in reply and then sat watching till he reached the figure-head and stood to examine it.
He seemed very small from here. She saw him standing and looking inland, he had seen the cache, no doubt, and he would want to go to it; if he did that he would disappear from sight. But he did not go to it, he kept on always in view, exploring the rocks and the sands and stopping now and then as if to look back.
It seemed to her that he could read her mind andfeel her terror of being left alone. Then her mind went back over the last few days.
She had been very near death. She had drunk the last of the water in the tin and had been too feeble to go for more. What had brought her to that pass? It seemed to her that the rocks, the sea and the sky had slowly sucked her vitality away from her till at last she could not eat, could not walk, could not think. All that time her mind had never thought of loneliness, the thing that was killing her had veiled itself by numbing her brain and weakening her body. But near death her mind had cleared and the great grief of desolation stood before her. Then God-sent, a form had pushed the grief aside and a hand had taken her lonely hand and a finger had moistened her lips. But it was the knowledge that the hand was a real hand that gave her the first lead back to life.
Then the last three days. The feeling of extreme helplessness and sickness and the knowledge that she was watched over and cared for and thought for—there was no word to express what all that meant. It turned the great rough figure to a spirit, great and tender and benign.
He was coming along back now carrying something he had picked up amongst the rocks. It was a crab.
A great satisfactory two pound crab bound up in kelp ribbon so craftily that it could neither bite nor escape. He put it on the sand for her to look at before taking it off to boil.
The sun was hot and as he stood whilst she admired his prize: “Don’t you feel the sun to your head?” asked he.
“No,” she replied, “I like it. I had a hat—a sou’wester but it’s in a cave away down the beach. There’s a dead man there.”
“A dead man?” said Raft.
“Yes. I killed him.”
“Killed him?”
“It was partly accident. He was one of the sailors. He was a bad man. The other sailor got lost and never came back and I was left alone with this man. He nearly frightened me to death.”
“Swab,” said Raft.
“Then one night he crawled into my cave in the dark and I struck out with the knife and it killed him—he’s lying there now. I didn’t mean to kill him, but he frightened me.”
“Swab,” said Raft, two tones deeper. Then he laughed as if to himself. “Well, that’s a go,” said he. He took a pull at his beard as he contemplated this slayer of men seated on her blankets at his feet. She glanced up and saw that he was laughing and a wan smile came around her eyes, it seemed to him like a glimmer of sunshine from inside of her. Then bending down he pulled up the blanket that had slipped from her left shoulder and settled it in its place.
“I’ll tell you all about it some time,” said she, “when I feel stronger.”
“Ay, ay,” said Raft. Then he went off with the crab to boil it.
As he attended to this business in the cave, half-sitting, half-kneeling before the little fire, he chuckled to himself now and then, and now and then he would bring his great hand down on his thigh with a slap.
The idea of her killing a man seemed to him the height of humour. He didn’t put much store on men’s lives in general, and none at all on the life of an unknown swab who deserved his gruel. Then he was of the type that admires a fighting thing much more than a peaceful and placid thing, and he felt the pleasure of a man who has rescued a seemingly weak and inoffensive creature only to find that it has pluck and teeth of its own.
She had gone up a lot in his estimation. Besides, her feebleness and forlorn condition had wounded him in a great soft part of his nature where the hurt felt queer. This new knowledge somehow eased the hurt. He could think of her now apart from her condition and think more kindly of her, for the strange fact remains that the very weakness and forlornness that had wakened his boundless compassion had antagonized him. When he had found the crab the idea had come to him that here was some different sort of food to “put into her;” he was thinking that same thought now but with more enthusiasm. Yes, she had gone up a lot in his estimation.
CHAPTER XXIVA DREAM
This same Raft whom the fo’c’sle could subdue to the surroundings, making him as faithful a part of the picture as the kerosene lamp, on the beach stood immense both in size and significance.
It was as though the fo’c’sle had the power to dwindle him, the beach, to expand him.
The girl had never seen him in the fo’c’sle so she could not appreciate the difference that environment made in him, and perhaps she saw him ever so slightly magnified, but it seemed to her that he was big enough to form part of the landscape, that he was one with the seven mile beach and the Lizard Point and the great islands and the sea elephants.
Not only had she been crushed down by loneliness; size had helped. Raft seemed to reduce the size of things, so that the seven mile strand and the vast islands and sea spaces no longer burdened her, and in some magical way whilst he reduced the proportions of his surroundings they increased his potency and significance. He was in his true setting, part of a vast picture without a frame.
It was not alone his physical dimensions. Bompardhad been a big man, but Bompard could not fill that beach. No, it was something else—what we call, for want of a better expression, “the man himself.”
Then there was another thing about him, he found food of all sorts where Bompard and La Touche had found nothing; he brought in crabs and cray-fish and penguins eggs, he brought down rabbits with stones. That was his great art. A stone in the hand of Raft was a terrible missile and his aim was deadly.
At the end of a week the girl was able to accompany him along the beach to the cache where he unearthed some stores and came upon the harpoon which he carried back with them.
Then one day he suddenly appeared before her carrying her lost sou’wester. He had gone off down the beach in the direction of the Lizard Point and he came back carrying the hat in his hand. He must have been into the cave where the remains of La Touche lay, but he said nothing about that.
It was nearly a fortnight since she had told him of how she had lost it and he must have treasured the fact up in his mind all that time.
The weather had cleared again, after a tremendous blow from the south, and as they sat that evening in the sunset blaze before the caves, Raft, who had been staring steadfastly out to sea as if watching something, began to talk.
“That chap Ponting told me this side of the coast is no use for ships,” said he. “They keep beyondthem islands for fear of the reefs. I reckon the old sea cows know that or there wouldn’t be so many on this beach. He said there was a bay round to the westward where ships put in.”
“How far?” asked the girl.
“A goodish bit,” replied Raft. “I was making for that bay when I struck you. I was thinking,” he finished, “that when you were stronger on your pins we might make for there.”
“Leave here?”
“Ay,” said Raft, “there’s not much use sticking here.”
She said nothing for a moment, she felt disturbed.
Since her recovery she had fallen into a state of quietude. She who had been the leader of Bompard and La Touche, she who had fought and worked so determinedly for existence had now no ambition, no desire for anything but rest. The strength of this man who had given her back her life seemed a shield against everything, just as a wall is a shield against the wind; she was content to sit in its shelter and rest. The idea of new exertions and unknown places terrified her.
“But how are you to know the bay?” asked she, “there may be a good many bays along the coast.”
“No,” said Raft, “Ponting told me there wasn’t a decent anchorage but this. He said this bay wasn’t to be mistook, looks as if it was cut out with a spade and the cliffs run high and black, there’s a seal beach that way and it’s after seals the shipscome. Well, there’s time enough to think of it seeing you are not fit to move yet.”
“Oh, I’ll soon be all right,” said she. “I’m getting stronger every day.”
“What gets me,” said Raft, “is how you fell to pieces like that, with all that stuff at your elbow and a river close by.”
“It was being alone,” replied she, “I did not know it at the time, but I got so that I did not care to eat and then at last I believe I didn’t eat anything at all. I couldn’t have imagined that just being alone would make a person like that. You see I had food and water. If I had been compelled to hunt about for food I expect I would have been all right, as it was I had nothing to do and was just driven in on myself.”
Raft said nothing for a moment, he was turning this over in his mind. He could not understand it. The idea of a person with plenty of food and a good set of teeth dying of starvation just because she was lonely seemed to him outrageous, yet he knew she was speaking the truth. It was another strange thing about this strange woman. She was altogether strange, different from any human being he had ever met and growing more different every day now that she was “filling out,” and getting her voice back.
That voice, soft and musical and refined, had disturbed the sea elephants when she first talked to them as people talk to horses and dogs, it was something they had never heard before in the languageof tone, and so it was with this sea animal with a red beard. He could not tell whether he liked it or not, never asked himself the question, it was part of her general strangeness and to be considered along with her clinging, man killing and double-tongued qualities, also with the fact that she had starved almost to death because she was alone; also with her eyes and new face, for she was growing younger looking every day and better looking, and her eyes, naturally lovely, were growing natural again.
As he looked at her now sitting in the sunset this return of beauty struck him as it almost might have struck the sea elephants. It pleased him. Had he put his thoughts into words he would have said that she was filling out and getting more pleasant looking. At her very best he would never have tacked the word beauty on to her; a buxom, rotund, beady-eyed young female would have made the word beauty spring to his lips—Cléo de Bromsart, never. But she was getting more pleasant looking and her eyes were getting over their “stiffness”—which was something, and he felt pleased.
Presently, alone in his cave, he would bring his fist down on his thigh with a bang and chuckle over her contrarieties, reviewing her against that terrific picture he had seen in the cave when he had gone to fetch the sou’wester; the picture of a man who had been torn to pieces by Burgomasters and cormorants. It had been necessary to wash the sou’westerfor a long time in sea water before bringing it back.
She had done that chap in proper; the work of the gulls and the work of the girl were hardly dissociated in his mind—there was the Result. Just as though a baby had smashed a rock with its fist. Hence the chuckles, heightened by her clinging ways, her fragility, her musical voice, her starvation due to loneliness, her double tongue, her unaccountable tricks of manner.
And she, as she sat in the sunset not knowing his thoughts, had you asked her how she felt about him would have answered with steadfast eyes that she loved him. Meaning that she loved him as she had learned to love the sea-elephants, or as she would have loved a great carthorse that had stood between her and danger, or a huge dog. She scarcely thought of him as a man—just as a great benign thing, human, but nearer to the heart than any human being life had brought her in contact with till now.
Her almost passionate gratitude had little to do with this measure of him; any kindly man might have done what he had done. It was perhaps the feeling of his great strength, of his possible fierceness that gave the touch of benignity to him.
“Weren’t you afraid of them sea cows?” said he at last, “you must have come clean through them to get to that cave.”
“No,” she replied, “I didn’t mind them, quite the reverse. I came here because of them.”
“Because of them!”
“Yes. They were company.”
“Meaning—”
“Friends.”
“Y’mean to say—friends did you call them? Well, I don’t know, there’s no accountin’.”
He hung in irons. So she had been keeping company with the sea cows—and she talked of them as “friends.”
Now Raft, for all his limitless power of compassion for a female in distress would have slaughtered those same “sea-cows” to the last bull, and without a shred of compunction or compassion, had he possessed kettles to boil down the blubber and a vessel to carry the oil. He had already done in two of the babies for food when she was not looking. The idea of talking about them as friends tickled his mind in a new place. Then, as he glanced at the great bulls taking headers in the sunset light and snorting in from the sea and squatting over the beach, he came as near as anything to bursting into a roar of laughter.
Then he suddenly remembered supper and went off to prepare it.
The girl, left to herself, smiled. He had given her back that power and, like the sea elephants when they repulsed the penguins, he had given her something to smile over. She saw that he could not understand her in the least in a lot of little things, whilst she understood him through and through—or so she thought. She had thoughtthe same about the sea elephants till the great battle, and—she had never seen Raft with murder in his eyes making the elements of beef tea.
He had made a stew for supper out of mussels, canned vegetables, seal meat and a piece of rabbit and when supper was over she went to bed in the bed he had made for her, for he had stripped the cache of all its wearing apparel and the remaining blankets, reserving the blankets for her use.
Then as she lay awake before dropping off to sleep she heard a sudden burst of noise from the night outside. It sounded as though one of the bulls had suddenly perceived a joke and were giving vent to his feelings.
She knew what it was, and she guessed the joke, and then, lying there in the dark, she began to laugh softly to herself with laughter that seemed to ease her mind of some old incubus clinging to it—less laughter than a sort of inverted form of crying and ending up almost in the latter with a few sniffs.
Then she fell asleep and dreamed that Raft had turned into something that seemed like a sea lion. She had never seen a sea lion, but this dream—one looked something like a lion and something like a sea elephant and something like Raft—with a touch of a carthorse. It had flippers, then it had wings, and the setting was the Place de la Concorde which bordered quite naturally the great beach of Kerguelen.
CHAPTER XXVSTORIES ON THE BEACH
For a week after that day not a word was said about their departure for that problematical bay to the westward where ships put in, or where they might put in should they find themselves in the region of Kerguelen. The idea seemed to the girl like one of those nightmare ideas, those terrific tasks which fever or indigestion sets to one in dreams.
It blew during that week as it had never blown before; blew from the north and the south and the west Atlantic oceans of rain driving seawards from the hills and passing off towards the islands, followed by breaks of clear weather and blue sparkling skies filled with the tearing screaming wind.
They talked a good deal during these days and at odd times, and the girl began to get some true glimpses of the mind of her companion, a mind that had never grown up, yet had in no wise deteriorated from remaining ungrown. Raft, who had been round the world a dozen times and more, knew less of the world than a modern child. Fights and roaring drunks and the smoke haze of bar rooms, wharf Messalinas and sailors’ lodging houses haddone him no harm at all. His innocence was vast and indestructible as his ignorance.
Bompard and La Touche were old men of the world compared to Raft; they were of different stuff, and being yachtsmen they had been long rubbed against the ways of high civilization.
To the girl, born and bred amongst all the intricacies of modern life and thought, and with a sense of mind-values as delicate as a jeweller’s scales, Raft was a revelation.
She tried to sound his past. He had no past beyond theAlbatross. He could tell all about theAlbatrossand his shipmates and the Old Man and so forth, but beyond that lay only a ship called thePathfinder, and beyond that a muddle of ships and ports, a forest of masts stretching to a grey time an infinite distance away, the time of his childhood. He had no professed religion and he could neither read nor write.
Yet he had remembered her sou’wester, this man without a memory and he was always astonishing her by remembering little things she had said or things she had wished for.
Of social distinction, beyond the division of afterguard from fo’c’sle, he seemed to possess little idea, save for a vague echo, caught from the man Harbutt, about the Rich People; and as to sex, beyond a queer instinctive delicacy and a tenderness due to her weakness and the memory of how he had found her, she might just as well have been a man, or a child like himself.
Another thing that struck her forcibly was the sense of his good humour. His mind seemed to possess an equable warm temperature, a temperature that it seemed impossible to lower or raise. She could not fancy him getting angry about anything. Had she seen him as in the past during one of his rare sprees, fighting the crowd and tossing men about like ninepins, she would have said: ‘This is not the same man’—and maybe she would have been right.
“Where did you come from,” said he one day to her as they sat rain-bound watching the gulls dashing about over the crests of the incoming seas.
“I came from Paris—you have never been to Paris?”
No, he had never been to Paris. He knew of the place, it was in France. Then she thought that she would interest him by trying to describe it. She spoke of the busy streets and the great Boulevards, then she tried to describe the people and what they were doing and then, as she talked, it was just as though Kerguelen had become the big end of a telescope and the doings of civilisation, as exemplified by Paris, a panorama seen at the little end.
Whatwerethey all doing, those crowds that she could visualize so plainly?—deputies, lawyers, military men, shop-keepers, pleasure seekers—towards what end were they going?
Then, with a strange little shock, it came to herthat they were going, as a mass, nowhere except from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn; that they were exactly like the crowd of sea gulls, each individual rotating in its own little orbit, and that the wonderful coloured and spangled crust called Civilization was nothing more than the excretion of individual ambitions, desires and energies.
Then, when she had finished her talk about the wonderful city of Paris, she found that Raft, comfortably propped against the cave wall, was asleep.
One of the disconcerting things about this huge creature was his capacity for sleep. He would drop asleep like a dog at the shortest notice and lie with his face in the crook of his arm like a dead man. She would watch him sometimes for half an hour together as he lay like this, and at first the vague fear used to come to her that he had been stricken by some malady in the form of sleeping sickness that made him act like this. She did not know that he had kept awake all those nights he had looked after her and that the same brain that could sleep and sleep and sleep could put sleep entirely away, just as the great body that lolled about like the sea elephants, could, like the sea-elephants, become a thing, tireless, and capable of infinite endurance.
Then again, he would smoke in silence for ages as though oblivious of her existence. She had observed the same thing in Bompard and La Touche who would sit cheek by jowl without a word, as though they had quarrelled. This traitpleased her, and she fell in with it unconsciously as though his mind had moulded hers and were teaching it the taciturnity of the sea.
One day, during a brief spell of calm when they were seated in the sun, dinner over and nothing to do, she tried the effect of literature upon him. She told him the story of Jack and the Bean Stalk and was delighted to find him interested when he had got his bearings and knew that a “giant” was a man fifty feet high; the cutting open of the giant—it occurred in her version—pleased him immensely. Then when she had finished she was alarmed to find, from words dropped by him, that he considered the story to be true, or at least to be taken seriously. She did not disillusion him; to do so she would have had to tell him that she had lied. That was the funny part of the thing. He would have said to himself “what made her lie to me about that chap?” By no possible means could he have imagined a person sitting down to invent in cold blood for the amusement of others a yarn about what never happened; no, it would have struck him as one of those lying personal yarns heard in the fo’c’sle sometimes and likely to produce a boot aimed at the teller’s head. He had seen men reading books in the fo’c’sle occasionally and old newspapers, but of literature, fictional or otherwise, he had no more idea than the bull sea elephants of astronomy.
This she intuitively felt and so held her tongue. But she had interested him, and she went on, producingfrom her memory the story of the Forty Thieves.
Now he had accepted the bean stalk explanation, for he had never to his knowledge seen a bean stalk, but the jars in the Forty Thieves he revolted at, for a jar to him was a demijohn, or a thing of that size. A man could not get into that.
However, on explanation, he passed the jars, and the boiling oil repaid him. He seemed to delight in torture and blood.
“Where did you get that yarn from?” asked he.
“Out of a book,” said she.
“Got any more?” he asked.
“Plenty,” she replied casting round in her mind, and wondering how it happens that children’s stories run so frequently to blood and ferocity.
She remembered Anatole France’s story of the juggler who juggled before the shrine of Our Lady, having no better offering to make to her, and Raft sat spellbound, after having made out that Our Lady was the Virgin Mary, the patron of Catholic shipmates. She told it so well and so simply, with unobtrusive foot notes as to monasteries and their contents, that he could not but see the point, the poor man having nothing to offer but his stock in trade of tricks, offered it.
Well, what of that? It was the best he had, and, if she could see the other chaps doing things for her, she could see him. The story, whose whole point lies in the supposed non-existence of the virgin as a discerning being, ought to cast its gentleridicule not on the ignorant juggler but on the more learned brethren of the monastery. To Raft they were all in the same boat, and as to whether she could see them or not he didn’t know.
The story fell flat, horribly flat, told to the absolutely simple hearted, and to the Teller, after explanations were over, it seemed that the Listener had in some way cut open modern genius and exposed a little tricky mechanism working on a view point of chilled steel.
That Raft, in fact, was so big in a formless way that he was much above the story.
She remedied her blunder on the next storytelling occasion with Blue Beard.
Then the weather broke fair and the islands drew away and the clouds rose high and the white terns, always flitting like dragon-flies amidst the other birds, rose like the clouds, they always flew higher in fine weather, and with the smooth seas a new thing shewed like a sign: the little sea elephants were no longer confining themselves to the river and near shore. Some of them were taking boldly to the sea. Their small heads could be seen sometimes quite a long way out.
This fact gave the girl food for thought. The summer was getting on.
It almost seemed that Ponting was right, that no ships would venture into that sea between the islands and the shore, and that their only hope of rescue lay in that bay away to the west, heaven knew how far.
Then an idea came to her. Two ships had already been here for certain: the wreck and the ship of Captain Slocum, then there was the cache, some ship must have left that.
She told Raft what was in her mind but got little consolation from him. He opined that the wreck wouldn’t have been a wreck if she had kept clear of this dangerous water, that the cache might have been left by people who had landed somewhere else, and as for Captain Slocum’s ship she might have been a whaler. Whalers according to Raft were always off the beaten track and poking their noses into places where honest deep sea ships would not dare to go.
“Well, then,” said she, “how about that bay you spoke of?”
“Oh, that place,” said Raft.
“Yes.”
He hung silent for a moment as if revolving the question in his mind.
“But you were set against it,” said he at last.
“Yes, I know, but I am stronger now, and it seems useless staying here till perhaps the winter comes.”
She paused and looked towards the islands. She hated the idea of that journey which she pictured over rocks and across plains, where? In search of a place that might not exist, and where, if it did exist, no ship might perhaps be found. An almost hopeless journey involving unknown hardships.
“You ain’t strong enough,” suddenly said Raft.
It was as though he had touched some spring in her character that set the machinery of determination working.
“I am strong enough,” she replied. Then after a moment’s pause something in her began speaking, something that seemed allied to conscience, rather than thought, something that spoke almost against her will.
“We ought to go, we ought not to lose any chance. It seems almost hopeless, but it is the right thing to do. To stay here is not fighting, and in this place one has to fight if one wants to live or to get away. I feel that. To sit here with one’s hands folded is wicked.”
“Well, I believe in making a fight,” said the other, “question is, will we be any the better.”
“There’s always the chance.”
“Ay, there’s always a chance.”
Then an idea came to her.
“How about the boat?” she asked.
“That old boat along the beach?”
“Yes, suppose we took her and rowed down the coast.”
“There aren’t no oars in her.”
“There are oars. I hid them amongst the bushes and I can find them again.”
Raft considered the proposition for a moment, then he shook his head and tapped the dottle out of his pipe.
“Not with them winds that get you here,” said he, “they let out when you’re least expecting itand we’d be on to the rocks and done for. I’m not saying if we had a boat crew we mightn’t try, but we’re under-handed. No, we’ll have to hoof it if we go.”
“Hoof it—what is that?” asked she.
“Walk it,” replied Raft, “and I’m thinking it’s beyond you, you aren’t fit for travelling rough, like me.”
“Aren’t I?—I suppose I don’t look strong, but I am, of course I’m not as strong as you, but I can keep on once I begin, and I have been through a good deal ever since that night we were wrecked, I don’t think any journey we could make would be worse than that. And I was not prepared for all that as I am now for anything that may happen. Think of it, we had all been sitting at dinner, it was only a little while after dinner and I had my evening frock on.”
“Your evening which?”
“Dress. They were all rich people on board the yacht and they put on different clothes always for dinner. It seems stupid—well, I was down below and I suddenly felt that I must get on deck, so I put on these clothes and my oilskin and sou’wester, then, as I was coming upstairs the collision happened. I got on deck and it was quite dark until the electric light was put on, then I saw the stern of your ship with the name on it.”
She paused with a little shudder and seemed visualizing the terrible picture again.
“Heave ahead,” said Raft interestedly.
“Then I was thrown into a boat and forgot everything until I woke in the early morning alone with those two men. It was all just like that. I wasn’t prepared for hardship as I am now, and I hadn’t a companion like you. Those two men were no use.”
“How’s that?” asked he.
“Well, they were always grumbling.”
“Swabs.”
“I didn’t mind that so much, but they were no use, they wouldn’t do things. I had to make them go and hunt for firewood, they might just as well have had no hands. Bompard, the oldest one wasn’t so bad—”
“It was the other chap you done in,” said Raft. “Well, I reckon you’ve been through it. Rum thing I saw you first when I was handling a topsail in that blow. The weather broke and I was holdin’ on to the yard when I sighted you away to starboard with the sun on you. Old Ponting was close to me and he yelled out he’d seen you before and give you your name, theGaston de Paree.”
“And we sighted you,” said she, “I was down below when the steward came with a message that there was a ship in sight, I came up and there you were with the sun on you and the storm clouds behind, and do you know you frightened me.”
“How so?” asked Raft.
“I don’t know. I felt there was going to be a disaster of some sort—it was almost like a warning.”
“Well, there’s no saying,” said Raft. “I’ve known a chap warned he was going to be drowned, and drowned he was sure enough. I was down below asleep and shot out of my bunk by the smash; then I was on the main deck, the chaps all round shouting for boats, and if you ask me how I got off I couldn’t tell you. One minute a big light was blazing, then it was black as thunder. My mind seemed to go when the black came on, I’d no more thought than a blind puppy. Something saved me. That’s all I know.”
“God saved you,” said the girl.
“Well, maybe He did,” said Raft; “but what made Him let all the other chaps drown?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, “but He saved you just as He saved me. I know He looks after things. Look at those sea elephants and the gulls; He leads them about by instinct.”
“What’s that?” asked Raft.
“Instinct,” said she, suddenly formulating the idea, “is God’s mind, it tells the birds and elephants where to get food and where to go and how to avoid danger; you and I have minds of our own, but our minds are nothing to the minds of the birds and animals. They are never wrong. Look out there at those porpoises.”
“Them black fish,” said Raft, shading his eyes.
“Yes, well, look at the way they are going along, they are on a journey, going somewhere, led by instinct, and I think when human beings find themselves having to fight for life they fall back on instinct,the mind of God comes to help them. Look at me. I believe I found that cache led by instinct and I would never have pulled through only instinct told me I would, somehow. God’s mind told me.”
“Well, there’s no saying,” said Raft.
“I don’t want to leave here,” she went on, “but I feel we ought to go. The chances seem small, even if we find that bay; still, I feel we ought to go.”
“I’m feelin’ the same way myself,” said Raft.
“Then we will go and the sooner we start the better.”
“I’m thinking of them porpoises,” said Raft.
“What about them?”
“Well, there’s a saying they hug the shore pretty close if bad weather is coming. It’s fine to-day, but I’ve a feeling there’s going to be another blow soon and maybe we’d better wait till it’s over—maybe it’s instinc’,” he finished, looking round shyly.
The girl laughed. “If you feel like that,” said she, “we had certainly better wait. Maybe the porpoises were sent to tell us.”
“There’s no saying,” replied he. They were seated on the rocks just where she had watched the great battle and far and near the “sea cows” were sunning themselves on the rocks whilst beyond the seal beach the penguins were drilling in long lines. Scarcely a breath of wind stirred and the sea lay calm like a sheet of dim blue glass to where the islands sat beneath the sky of summer.
But the islands had drawn closer since morning and the birds seemed busier than usual and more clamorous. To the eastward where the cliffs rose higher, guillemots had their home on the ledges of basalt and the wheezy bagpipe-like cry of them came in bursts every now and then as though they were angry about something, whilst the cry of the razorbills and the “get-away, get-away” of the kittiwakes had a sharper note. The puffins alone were calm, swimming in coveys on the glassy water and leaving long ripples in their wake.