CHAPTER XXXTHE BAY
It took them till dusk to reach the foot of the western rise of ground; here they slept under a rock, continuing their way next morning, climbing till they reached the summit of the rise and keeping their course along the edge of a cliff that fell a sheer three hundred feet to the shore below.
Sometimes Raft peeped over the cliff edge and once the girl drew close and looked, too, dizzy with the height, made more dreadful by the gulls flying far below.
At noon, far ahead of them, they saw something that made them pause; a little mound. As they drew closer they knew. It was another cache, a cache made of heaped earth and loose stones with about a foot of sign post protruding from it. The post had been broken off in some storm and blown away.
“There’ll be stuff under there,” said Raft, “and if we have to go back it’ll come in handy. It’s a pointer to the bay anyhow; there must be some landin’ place near here, we’ve only got to keep on.”
They sat down and rested and had some food, eating as much as they wanted now that they hada store to depend on. They had drunk twice that morning from pot holes still half-filled with the rain of a few days ago and they had no need of water—it is the one thing a man never needs in Kerguelen. They were in good spirits; the haunting fear that their provisions might not be enough to last them for the return journey was gone; also, if the bay were near, they could remain now some time, even take up their quarters here to wait on the chance of a ship.
The idea came to them to make a burrow into the cache, now, working with the harpoon and their hands, and for the purpose of verifying the contents; but they put it away, the desire to get on drove them like a whip and they went on, halting towards dusk and sleeping in a hollow that gave them shelter from the wind that was blowing from the south.
Towards dawn the wind changed to the west and at the first rays of light Raft awoke, sat up and sniffed. Then he laid his hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“Smell that!” cried he.
She sat up, her eyes half-blind with sleep.
“Smell the wind!” said Raft.
She turned her face to the west. On the wind was coming the ghost of a smell, faint and horrible and soul-searching.
“That’s a ship,” said Raft.
“A ship!”
“Boiling down blubber. I struck that smell once, seven years ago; it’s blubber. I reckon we’reall right.” He heaved himself on to his feet and the girl half-rose, kneeling, and looked at him.
“Are you sure?”
“Sure as sure; smell it.”
Then, as she sniffed again, she knew. That was not a nature smell; horrible though it was it was not the tragic smell of corruption. It had something, almost one might say, low down about it, little, mean, business-like—it was her first sniff of returning Civilization, the first impression on an olfactory sense cleared and cleaned by the winds of Kerguelen.
She looked at Raft. He was standing, shading his eyes as though staring at the smell. The dawn was at his back, and across the dawn a flight of wild duck was making in from the sea.
Imagine a person walking in a garret from absolute penury to find himself a millionaire. Such a person, were he normal, would feel what the girl felt as the message of that noxious odour struck home to her mind.
Her teeth chattered a little as she rose to her feet. She could not speak and she had to hold her lower jaw with her hand to still it. Then the muscles of her throat did all sorts of queer things on their own account and a violent feeling of sickness seized her that would have ended in an attack of vomiting had it not passed as quickly as it came. Raft, who had ceased staring to the west, saw how she was taken and put his hand on her shoulder.
“You’ll be all right in a bit,” said he, “it comeshard at first. I’ve seen chaps go clean off their heads sniffin’ land after three months of hell and weather. We’ll start in a bit, there’s no call to hurry, and I’ll just take a walk to get the stiffness out of my legs.”
Off he went, away and away, disappearing beyond a dip in the ground.
She knew that he would be away at least half an hour. Thoughtful as a mother for her comfort, yet almost as outspoken, sometimes, as a nurse, he was wonderful.
The dawn broke broader and stronger, peaceful and grey, promising a continuance of the fine weather that had now lasted for three days, three days without wind or rain or threat from the mountains that sat this morning far away and clear cut against the sky.
Then as they went on their way the sun broke over the edge of the high lands and gulls rising above the cliff edge flitted like birds born of snow and fire.
They stopped for ten minutes to breakfast, then they went on, and now suddenly came something new. On the wind they could hear the sound of gulls quarrelling, a sound quite distinct from the ordinary mewing and wheezing of the gulls at peace.
“We’re near there,” said Raft. “Hark at the gulls, they’re fighting over the scraps. Them chaps, whoever they are, have been killing seals and boiling the blubber. The bay’s there.”
He pointed to a higher rise in the ground just before them and to the fact that the land from there sloped down inland at a terrific rate.
He was right.
Ten minutes walking brought them to the end of their journey and to the edge of a cliff two hundred feet high. It was as though a giant had taken a gouge and cut a bay right through the sea cliffs. Far across the water of the bay before them the land rose again in a precipice steep as the one on whose edge they stood.
The ripples of the bay washed in on a beach of black pebbles easily reached by the declivity of the land and on the beach, stewing like witches’ cauldrons, queer looking try-pots were sending up their smoke. Near the pots carcases of sea-bulls lay ripped and gory and being cleared of their blubber by small men, strange-looking, stripped to the waist and with arms and chests splashed by blood.
But the clove in this devil’s mixture was the ship moored in the cliff shadows, a small ship like a withered kernel in the shell of the bay, barque-rigged, antiquated, high pooped, almost with the lines of a junk. One might have fancied her designer to have taken for his model some old picture of the ships of Drake.
The try-pots, carcases and busy men left Raft unmoved. The ship held his whole mind.
“Lord! Look at her,” said he.
CHAPTER XXXITHE SHIP
She had been built on the Chu Kiang in the great Junk building yards that lie just below Canton and her bones had been put together by yellow men. Built to a European design China had come out in her lines just as the curve of the Tartar tent tops still lingers in the roof of the pagoda.
She might have been a hundred and fifty tons, not more, maybe less, and the junk pattern had been eliminated and European sticks and decent canvas substituted for lateen sails by the direction of the man who ordered her and who was a smuggler.
She had been built for swiftness as well as cargo and, her builders having been junk builders since the time of Tiberius, she was a failure, sailing like a dough dish; and the yard that built her, having seen her float off, went on building junks.
Then she passed from hand to hand, and dirty hands they were, from the Chu Kiang to the Hoang Ho, and through the Korea Channel into the Japan sea, trading sometimes, smuggling sometimes, and once, as far as the Kuriles, sealing in forbidden waters. She was caught by the Russiansand her crew clubbed to death or sent to the quicksilver mines and then she came back to China, somehow, by way of Vladivostok and was sold and sold again till she fell into the hands of one, Chang, a sea scraper to whom everything came in handy from bêche de mer to barratry and murder.
Chang was modern in some of his ideas, he carried a Swenfoyn-harpoon gun and, having luck down by the Sundas, he collected half a cargo of oil which he sold at Perth; from Perth he had dough-dished along down to Kerguelen after the “big seals.” He had struck this bay by chance and he had struck oil, for all to westward of it lay a stretch of unwashed rock, as good a sea elephant ground as that on the long beach.
The girl standing beside Raft viewed the scene below her with a catch at the heart. The carcases, the little blood-stained busy men, the try-pots like witches’ cauldrons and that strange-looking ship which even to her eyes seemed not as other ships were, all these had a tinge of nightmare. Amongst the men she noted one, big almost as Raft. He seemed their leader.
“Chinks,” said Raft, “Chinee—they’ve got their pigtails rolled up, well, they’re better than nothing.”
He picked up the bundle that he had laid down and led the way to the slope that gave on the beach.
As they came on to the upper part of the beach the “Chinks” noticed them, paused for a secondin their labours and then, finding that it was only a solitary man and woman, went on with their work as though the intruders had been a couple of penguins.
“Cool lot,” said Raft.
The girl paused. The sight of the carcases and the blood at close quarters, the absolute indifference of the blubber strippers at the sight of an obvious pair of castaways, the whole scene and circumstance turned her soul and chilled her heart.
“I don’t like this,” said she. “Those men make me afraid, they don’t seem human—they arehorrible.”
“Wait you here,” said Raft.
He advanced alone across the black shingle and she stood watching him and listening to the stones crunching beneath his feet.
His advance did not disturb the workers.
They seemed working against time. Without any manner of doubt they were anxious to be done with the business and be out of that bay before the next blow came, for the place was fully exposed to the west-nor’west and a storm out of there might easily break their ship from its moorings and send her broadside on to the shingle.
Undersized, agile, with weary-old faces that seemed covered with drawn parchment, they seemed less like men than automata; all save the leader, a gigantic, imperious-looking Mongolian with a thin cat-like moustache, a man of the true river pirate type with a dash of the Mandarin. This man heldin his hand a long thong of leather. Captain or leader, or whatever he might be, he was most evidently the serang of that labour party.
On the shingle where the ripples washed in lay a boat, half-beached.
The big man was Chang, and as Raft approached harpoon in hand, she saw Chang draw himself up to his full height and stand waiting. Then she heard Raft’s voice and saw him pointing at her and inland and then at the ship.
Chang stood dumb. Then all at once he exploded, shouting and gesticulating. She could not make out what he said, but she knew. He was ordering them off. He seemed to be ordering them off the earth as well as the beach. And Raft stood there patient and dumb like a chidden child.
Then she saw Raft nod his head and turn away.
He came back crunching up the shingle. “Sit down,” said he.
She sat down and he took his seat beside her. He had dropped the bundle just there, and as he sat for a moment before speaking he noticed that the fish line securing the mouth of the sack was loose, he carefully retied it.
“You saw how that chap carried on,” said he, “I had to put a stopper on myself. He’s the chap; them little yellow bellies don’t count. He’s the chap, and I’ve got to get him aside from the others.” He spoke rapidly and she saw that his eyes were injected with blood.
A new fear seized upon her, a fear akin to the dread she had felt that dark night in the cave when she had caught the sound of La Touche dragging himself close to her, the dread of imminently impending action.
“Let us go away,” said she, “another ship may come; anything is better than having a fight with those men.”
“Have you got that knife safe?” asked Raft. She still wore the fisherman’s knife round her waist. She put her hand on it.
“Yes, the knife is safe.”
“If that chap downs me for good,” said Raft, “stick that knife through yourself. If he doesn’t you take my orders and take them sharp.”
He had risen to his feet and without a word more he came down the shingle again towards the workers, walking in a leisurely way and trailing the harpoon along.
He approached Chang who turned on him again with the anger of a busy man importuned by a beggar. The most heart-sickening thing to the girl was the way in which, after the first driving off of Raft, the great Chinaman and his crew had gone on with their work as though they were alone on the beach. Pity and humanity seemed as remote from that crowd as from the carcases they were handling. Active hostility would have been less horrible, somehow, than this absolute indifference to the condition of others.
Chang did not wait for Raft to speak, this time;he began the speaking, or, rather, the shouting, advancing on the other who began to retreat. Chang, as if wishing to have done with this matter for good, followed him up and at every step the devil in him seemed to rise higher whilst his voice filled the beach.
What a voice that was! Half-singing, half-booming, the “whant-whong-goom-along” of the running coolie chanting as he runs seemed mixed with it, till, his anger breaking bounds, he let fly with the strap in his hand, catching the other across the shoulder of the arm that held the harpoon.
Then Raft killed him.
The girl who saw the killing was less appalled for the moment by the deed than the doer of it. The blow of the harpoon that sent Chang’s brains flying like the contents of a smashed custard apple was like a flash of lightning, it was the thunder that terrified.
Roaring like a sea bull he sprang from the body of Chang towards the crowd who faced him for a moment with their flensing knives like a herd of jackals. The girl, who had sprung to her feet, plucked the knife from her belt and came running, terror gone and a wind seeming to carry her over the shingle; zoned in steel blue light she saw the harpoon flying from right to left destroying everything in its way, knives flying into the air as if tossed by jugglers, a yellow greasy back into which she struck with her knife, a yellow Chinese face falling backwards with eyes wide on her, as if theChinese soul of the creature she had stabbed to the heart were trying to cling to her.
Then she was sitting on the shingle very ill and Raft was coming back to her, running.
The fight was over and the beasts had flown, left and right, she could see them crawling like ants away up on the higher ground. They had dropped their knives and the knives were lying here and there on the shingle where also lay four dead bodies including the body of Chang.
Ten minutes ago there had been fifteen live Chinamen on that beach.
Raft was bleeding from a cut on the arm, his face was gashed above the beard, a knife had ripped his coat and the back of his left hand shewed another wound.
He was laughing and carrying on like a man in drink and now that her stomach was relieved an extraordinary light-headedness seized her. Like Raft, she seemed drunk.
She had been snatched for a moment into a world where to kill was the only alternative to death or worse than death. For a moment she had lived in the Stone Age, she had fought like a savage animal and with the fury of the female, more terrific than the rage of the male. She had been pushed to the edge of things, and it was she who had turned the fight. The man she had killed was in the act of knifing Raft in the back.
“The boat!” cried Raft.
She struggled to her feet, steadied herself, andcame to the boat. They pushed it out till it was nearly water borne; she scrambled in, he followed, and pushed off. Out in the bay the high black cliffs rose above them as if pushed by a scene shifter, the light-headed laughing raving feeling left her, and as they came alongside of the barque to starboard and tied up to the channel plates she was clear headed and calm and able to get on board by the channel without assistance.
On the deck she tottered and fell in the dead swoon of exhaustion.
It is a long journey to the Stone Age and back and the man or woman who makes it is never quite, quite the same again.
CHAPTER XXXIITHE OPIUM SMOKERS
Raft had never seen a female swoon before. He thought for a moment that she had dropped dead and the shock of the business pulled him together like a douche of cold water. Then he saw that she was breathing and took heart, rubbing her hands and poking her in the ribs and calling on her to pull herself together. He would have been more frightened only that he put her condition down to her general unaccountableness in some ways.
In less than five minutes she had come to and was leaning on her elbow and declaring herself to be all right. Then she got on her feet and, taking her seat on the side of the open hatch, looked about her at the dingy deck cumbered with a whale boat and all sorts of raffle. The slight swell of the bay rocked the barque to the creaking tune of block and cordage, whilst overhead the sea-gulls flitted mewing against the vast black cliff that rose three hundred feet sheer from the licking sea.
“You’re all right now?” said Raft dubiously.
“Yes, I feel quite right and strong again—just a little dizzy, that’s all.”
“Mind and don’t tumble back down that hatch,”said he, “I’ll drop below and see what’s to be found if you keep your eye out for them Larrikens. Give me a call if you sight them.”
The Larrikens were nowhere to be seen; they were in the high ground hidden, and no doubt holding a council of war, but sight or sound of them there was none.
She nodded and he dropped below into the cabin.
The cabin of Chang was clean, almost dainty. Two smaller cabins opened from it, one evidently for Chang and the other for his second in command. Raft in his hurried look round saw a lot of things including a rack containing six rifles and two heavy revolvers resting on an ammunition box filled with hundreds of cartridges. He opened the lazarette beneath the cabin flooring; it seemed well-stored, and on a shelf in the main cabin there were some provisions including a tin of biscuits.
He brought up the biscuits, the two revolvers and a pocketful of ammunition and, taking his seat on the hatch edge beside the girl, opened the tin; then he went forward and hunted for water, found the water cask and, getting a tin pannikin from the galley, brought her a drink.
He had never loaded or fired a revolver; the girl had, and she shewed him how, the echoes of the cliffs answering to the ear splitting reports as he made a few practice shots, and the guillemots squalling and rising in clouds from their perches on the rock.
“We’re fixed all right now,” said he, “and we can have those chaps on board when they’re ready to come.”
“On board!”
“Oh, they’ll come right enough, they’ve got no grub on land.”
“Come—but do you mean to say you will let them?”
“Who’s to work the hooker out of the bay?” he answered, “Not you and me. We’ve got to get them aboard. There’s no harm in them now they’re licked.”
He spoke with a knowledge of men absorbed from the whole world over. The Chinese were licked and like dogs they would come to heel. He knew it, for he knew men. He had put the fear of God into them, he and the girl; the thing was over. Give the “Chinks” time to lick their wounds and swallow their gruel and they would be right as pie. He had seen a whole ship’s company licked by a little man of great will, and in hundreds of experiences and fights he had found that a beaten man, be he strong as ten, is to be led like a child. He was right. Next morning—they slept on deck that night keeping watch alternately—the “Chinks,” hungry and starving for a suck at their opium pipes appeared, the whole eleven of them, and coming down the beach like a troop of children stood in a line; then they began to wail.
Wail and wag their heads and wave their hands.Kerguelen, coming on top of the licking, had broken them to pieces. Then the whole lot kow-towed like one man, knees and forehead on the shingle.
Raft got into the boat and rowed off for the beach bringing them aboard four at a time and as each lot reached the deck they kow-towed to the girl and then trotted forward to the fo’c’sle, disappearing like rats, their teeth chattering from exposure during the night, stripped to the waist as they were, and never could one have imagined these little cringing harmless looking men the jackals of the day before.
When the whole lot were in the fo’c’sle Raft gave them time to settle, then he went down amongst them revolver in pocket. They had lit a lamp, some had lit opium pipes and some were lighting them, and they lay about like creatures broken with cold and weariness. He nodded to them and left them to the opium that would drive the chill from their bones, then coming on deck stood beside the girl.
“They’ll be able to work the ship to-morrow,” said he, “told you they’d be all right; reckon they won’t mind changing that big chap I knocked out for us.”
“They don’t seem to be able to speak a word of English,” said she.
“Oh, I reckon I’ll do the steering till we get clear of this place,” said he, “they’ll handle the sails without knowing English and once we’re clearwe have only to make north till we strike a Christian ship.”
“They seem so harmless,” she said, “and when I think of that fight—and of what I did—”
“You fought fine—damned fine,” said Raft, “damned fine.” He put his arm round her, not as a man puts his arm round a woman, but as a shipmate puts his arm round a shipmate.
CHAPTER XXXIIIMAINSAIL HAUL
That night Raft and the girl took it in turns again to keep watch on deck. They might just as well have gone below for all the trouble the crew could have given them. These gentry had fought bitterly because they had been attacked. Raft had frightened them. There is a form of bravery which one might liken to inverted terror. Rats shew it when they are cornered, and so do men. They had seen their boss killed with a blow and the destroyer hurling himself on them and, though they were peaceable men, they fought. These same peaceable men, be it understood, would, all the same, have murdered a human being for profit could they have done so with reasonable safety.
When the girl came on deck in the morning, after her watch below, she found the deck busy and Raft with his hands in his pockets leaning against the port bulwarks and watching the busy ones.
“They’re in a thundering hurry to get out,” said Raft. “That chap,” pointing to a “chink” that seemed a cut above the others and was evidently the mate, “has been pointing to the sky and out there beyond the bay. They seem tosmell bad weather coming. I nodded my head to him and he’s working the hands now for all they’re worth.”
“The wind is blowing from the land,” said the girl.
“Yes,” said Raft, “it’ll take us out without towing, unless it changes.”
The hatch cover had been put on and the boat brought to the davits, some of the crew were up aloft scrambling about like monkeys, others were making ready to haul on the halyards and a fellow was unlashing the wheel. There was not a face in all the crowd that did not bear the signature of Anxiety writ on parchment.
The fear of weather, the fear of Kerguelen, and the fear of that bay, which was evidently haunted by evil spirits, drove them like a whip.
The mainsail was set to a chorus like the crying of sea fowl and the foresail and jib. The tide coming in held the barque to a taut anchor chain with her stern to the beach and the wind ready to take her. The mate was at the wheel and now from forward ought to have come the sound of the windlass pawls and the rasp of the rising anchor chain. It didn’t. From the group of Chinese collected there came, instead, a clang followed by a splash.
“Why, the beggars have knocked the shackle off the chain,” cried Raft. “Lord blessmysoul, never waited to raise the mud hook?”
“Does it matter?” she asked.
“Sure to have a spare one,” answered he, “but it gets me, that’s Chinee all over, they’re rattled.”
“Look!” she cried, “we’re moving!”
The cliff’s were beginning to glide landward and the bay’s mouth to widen, sea-gulls flew with them screaming a challenge, and the guillemots lining the cliff ledges broke into voice, echoes and guillemots storming at them as they went.
Then the sea opened wide under the grey breezy day and the great islands shewed themselves away to the east. To the west and the north all was clear water.
Raft and the girl walked to the after-rail and looked at the coast they were leaving; it seemed horribly near and the great black cliffs only a gunshot away. If the infernal wind of Kerguelen were to arise and blow from the north even now they might be seized and dashed back on those rocks, but the south-east wind held steady and the cliffs drew away and the coast lengthened and new cliffs and bays disclosed themselves, till they almost fancied they could see, away to the east, the great seal beach where the remains of the dead man lay in the cave and where the great sea-bulls were without doubt taking their ease on the rocks.
And now came the last call of Kerguelen, the voice of the kittiwakes:
“Get-away—get-away—get-away.”
Raft, as they stood and watched, put his arm over the shoulder of the girl and as she held the great hand that had saved her and brought her sofar towards safety her mind, miles away, kept travelling the long road from the caves.
“I’m thinking of the bundle and all the poor things in it,” said she, “it will lie there forever on the beach, waiting to be picked up—it’s strange.”
“I was thinkin’ the same thing myself,” said Raft, “and the old harpoon I licked that chap across the head with.”
CHAPTER XXXIVTHE CARCASSONNE
Raft had found other things than arms and ammunition in the cabin, he had found a box containing nearly three thousand five hundred dollars, partly in American money and partly in English gold coin. Chang had stowed it in his chest, a big cedar-wood affair containing all sorts of oddments, including a can of blue label Canton opium, cigars, a couple of suits of fine silk and a woman’s gold bracelet.
Chang had evidently been well-to-do in his way and a man of refinement. His bunk bedding was of the finest quality and on a shelf near the bunk lay piled new-washed sheets and pillow cases. The girl took his cabin and slept in his bunk. Long ago, in the world that was slowly coming back to her, the idea of sleeping in the bunk of a Chinaman she had seen killed would have revolted her, now, it did not trouble her at all. She only knew that a mattress and clean sheets were heaven, even if she had to sleep with a revolver under her pillow. Then in a day or two she only put the revolver there as a matter of routine. The “Chinks” gave evidence that so far from making trouble they were extremely anxious to propitiateand please, and the man who had evidently served Chang appeared in the cabin tidying things and laying out the food, whilst the man who had evidently been mate worked the ship in his own weird way seeming scarcely ever to sleep. He had laid the course almost due north, taking the sun with a back-stick that might have come out of the Ark, working out his calculations in the fo’c’sle in his own head. Raft did not know, he knew nothing of navigation as a science, nor did he care, they were going north and day by day drawing into the track of ships, that was enough for him.
One day the girl said to him: “Suppose these men make trouble over that man you killed—and those others.”
“Let them,” said Raft, “I’ll tell my yarn—it’s plain enough—I’m not going to tell no lies. The chap tried to drive us off, and we lost and near done for, and he hit me a welt on top of all. He got his gruel.”
She had played with the idea of making up a story for the sake of Raft; she felt ashamed of the idea when she heard his words.
“I’m thinking of that money down below,” said he, “it belonged by rights to that big chap. If a ship takes us off we’d better hand it over to the mate or just leave it there for him to take.”
“Yes, we don’t want the money,” she replied, “I have plenty.”
“You! Where have you got it?” asked he, looking her over.
“In France,” she replied. Then she laughed. It was the first time she had laughed since that day when the sea-bulls had driven the penguins off, and Raft, as though her mirth were infectious, laughed also.
It seemed a joke to him, somehow, the idea of her having money in France.
The idea of her being one of the Rich People had never worked its way into his head. She was just herself, different it is true in some indefinable way from anyone he had ever met, speaking differently, acting differently, but made used to his mind by struggle and adversity. He scarcely thought of her as a woman, yet he was hugely fond of her, a fondness that had begun in pity and had been strengthened and made to grow by her pluck. He liked to have her near him and when she was out of sight he felt a bit astray. He never bothered about the future, so the idea of parting with her had not come to him.
And she? When Raft was out of her sight she felt astray. Her mind had spun between them a tie, of a new sort in a world grown cynical and old and cold; an affection permanent as the hills, warm as summer. Everything good in her loved Raft, it was the affection of a mother for a child, of a child for a mother.
He had nursed her back to life, he had brought her life, and never once since that day had he chilled her with a littleness or broken a thread of what was spinning in her heart. He was illiterate,he was rough, but he was Raft. He was the great beach of Kerguelen and the sea-bulls and the distant islands, he was the hand that had destroyed Loneliness and driven away Death, the child who had listened to Jack and the Bean Stalk, the Lion that had destroyed Chang, the companion in a loneliness ringed with despair.
One morning beyond the 40th parallel, and some two hundred miles to the nor’west of St. Paul, the Chinese mate plucked Raft by the sleeve and pointed into the west.
The day was clear with a wind just enough to fill the sails of the barque and a long blue leisurely swell running from the south. Away in the east was a trace of smoke as though a grimy finger had stained the sky just above the sea-line.
“Ship,” said the mate.
It was the one word of English that he knew. Raft was about to shout and run to the cabin hatch to call the girl. Then he held himself back. It might be a false hope. Yet if he had thought he might have known that a ship in the east meant a ship right across their course, here, where there were no trade tracks north and south.
Then above the sea-line and clear of smoke he saw her hull.
He pointed to the halyards and the mate understood. The mate was evidently desperately anxious to be quit for good of his self-invited passengers, for when Raft came on deck again with the girl they found the barque under bare poles rolling tothe swell and a Chinese flag half-masted flicking in the wind.
Also, away across the sea, sheering towards them and making to cross their bows a mile away a two funnelled steamer whose funnels closed to one as she shifted her helm to get within speaking distance of them.
She was theCarcassonne, a seven thousand ton freighter carrying passengers, a French boat, bound from Sydney to Cape Town and Marseilles.
Raft, the day before, had taken the Chinese mate down to the cabin and shewed him Chang’s money and had presented it to him and the crew in pantomime.
It was honesty. It was also a good stroke. There was no trouble when theCarcassonne, her huge bulk rolling gently to the swell, dropped a boat, though indeed had the companions of Chang wished to raise trouble they would have found themselves seriously handicapped, dumb as they were in every language but their own.
Chang had been their linguist as well as their leader. They had literally lost their tongue.
CHAPTER XXXVMARSEILLES
On board theCarcassonnethe girl had broken down as though all the exhaustion she had defied had waited for that moment to fall upon her.
But the energy that had held her above defeat and had given her hope when things seemed hopeless was there, undestroyed, and when the turning point came she rallied swiftly. She came on deck one morning where Bathurst lay a point invisible beyond the blue sea to starboard and sitting in a deck chair made friends with the other passengers.
It seemed to her almost impossible that the same world should hold Kerguelen and at the same time this paradise of azure blue sky and tepid wind.
Raft had told her story before reaching Cape Town and the loss of theGaston de Pariswas now old news in Europe, and the fact that of all theGaston’scrowd only the beautiful Cléo de Bromsart had been saved.
Raft had joined the crew of theCarcassonne, sleeping in the foc’s’le, where there were several English speaking sailors, and as much out of his element as a man used only to masts and spars canbe on a steamboat. However, he swabbed decks and did odd jobs without a grumble and he was swabbing the deck on the morning she came up; he dropped the business for a moment to take the two hands she held out to him.
All through that time below she had been wanting Raft and his big hand to pull her through. Satisfied, knowing he was on board and all right, but wanting him all the same.
On the old barque once or twice had come the stray thought of how Raft’s figure would accommodate itself against the background of the world she knew.
Well, here was the world she knew, or part of it; a deck, clean as a ball-room floor and as spacious, passengers in deck chairs, reading novels, and a manicured French surgeon ready to talk art or philosophy to her, polished, but rather narrow of shoulder.
And against all that stood Raft, rough and in the clothes he had worn on the beach, for there was not a man on board whose clothes would have fitted him comfortably.
Well, he was not incongruous with this background, simply because he destroyed it. In a ball-room it would have been the same. He carried with him his background of high black cliffs and miles of beach and flying gulls and breaking sea, and in a flash came to her the fact that he dwarfed and belittled the other people around just as nature dwarfs and belittles art.
She held both his hands for a moment, managing to pat them, somehow, as she held them, asking him what on earth he was doing with the swab he had just dropped. She had an idea that the ship people had put him to work, but before the idea had risen to indignation heat he reassured her.
“I must be doing,” said Raft. “Not that there’s much to be at in this old kettle. You’ve got your legs back, well, that’s good. I had it out with that doctor chap and he told me how you were going from day to day, but I’ve been wanting the sight of you.”
He put his hand on her shoulder as he might on a pal’s, then he crossed his arms. “And well you look,” said he.
“Doctor Petit,” said the girl, speaking in French, “this is Raft, the bravest and best man in the world as you will know when I tell you all. Shake hands with him.”
The doctor shook hands.
The passengers, and the first officer, across the bridge canvas, watched all this with curiosity. They knew something but they did not know all. They did that night when she had told them as best she could.
After that she met him often on deck, giving him a word or stopping for a chat, and it was now that she began to think and make plans as to the future.
Raft had become part of herself, they werebound together as perhaps no two such contrary beings had ever been bound. The idea of Love, the idea of Marriage, all conventional ideas as between grown-ups of opposite sex were as absurd in relation to them as they would have been in relation to two children who had grown attached one to the other.
As regarded one another they were in fact two children, for Raft had never been anything but a child and Kerguelen and Raft combined had awakened the primitive and the child in her, giving her the power of affection that makes a little child throw its arm round the neck of a dog.
But the world could not understand that, and Raft to the world was a rough sailor man, and she, to the world, was Cléo de Bromsart.
She would lie awake at night listening to the pounding of the screws and thinking of this—contrasting the figure of Raft with the world she knew and the world she knew with the figure of Raft.
Madame de Brie, her nearest relation, would pass before her mind’s eye with her gold eye glasses, and the Comtesse de Mirandole and a host of others; and the queer thing was that the vaguest feeling of antagonism tinged her mind towards these estimable people. They seemed forgeries, impudent forgeries of the handwriting that had first written the word Man on the earth. She had seen the original writing.
She felt also towards them the antagonism of the child to the grown up, and of the person whocan’t explain to the person who stands waiting for an explanation.
Then she would laugh quietly to herself, for no woman, surely, was ever in a similar position. Then, casting her mind back, she would sometimes choke a little with tears in her throat, tears for herself, dying of loneliness, and for the hand that had brought her back from death.
They passed the entrance of the straits and Gibraltar, and one bright blue winter’s morning they entered the harbour of Marseilles, with Marseilles before them blazing in the sun and the bugles of Fort St. Jean answering the crying of the gulls and the drums of Fort St. Nicholas.
Cléo was dressed in the same clothes she had worn on her escape from theGaston de Paris. She had borrowed a hat from one of the ladies on board and stockings and other things from another lady; but she still wore round her waist the leather belt with the empty knife sheath.
As she stood on deck, now, waiting whilst theCarcassonneberthed at the wharf alongside a great Messagerie steamer, she carried over her arm the oilskin coat and, by its elastic band, the sou’wester. They were old friends.
Then when the hawsers had been passed and the gang plank was being run out she saw amongst the crowd on the wharf Monsieur de Brie and Madame de Brie, also a number of well-dressed people, Parisians some of them.
Then she was being embraced by Madame deBrie and trying at the same time to acknowledge the salute of Monsieur Bonvalot, her lawyer and man of affairs, a stout pale man with long Dundreary whiskers who had come from Paris to receive her.
All this crowd had not come purely on account of Cléo. Beside the people interested in her there were several friends and relations of Prince Selm, also his lawyer.
“I have taken rooms at the Hotel Noailles,” said Madame de Brie, “and I have brought you some clothes. Oh, my poor child, what you must have suffered. But why did the people on board not lend you some better things?”
“Oh, my clothes are all right,” said Cléo, “people wanted to lend me things, but I am quite comfortable in these.”
She was looking about in search of Raft who was nowhere to be seen.
Then she was seized by the rest, by the Comtesse de Mirandole, by Madame de Florey, and several others who had stopped at Marseilles—on their way to Monte Carlo—to meet theCarcassonneand greet the girl who had alone survived the wreck of theGaston de Paris, some of these people knew her only slightly, but once a person becomes famous or notorious it is astonishing how slight acquaintanceship blossoms into full friendship.
Several photographers from the illustrated papers were amongst the crowd and a Pathé operator was on the quay.
Cléo was already recovering that sixth sense, which one might call the social sense, and, as she talked almost to half a dozen people at once, answering questions and receiving felicitations, this sixth sense told her quite plainly that she was being criticised by her felicitators, that in their eyes she was a guy. That the old velour hat she had borrowed, the hair that shewed beneath it, her face, which had still upon it a reflection of Kerguelen, her old skirt and coat—all these things, singly and taken together, were exciting in the minds of these Parisians a pity which was not unrelated to humour. She did not mind, she was looking for Raft.
It seemed to her that all these people, excellent in their way, had a tinge of unreality about them. On the voyage she had sometimes vaguely dreaded that Raft might be pushed away from her, despite herself, by the contrast between him and her own order. It had come to her that the difference between the beach of Kerguelen and the Avenue Malakoff might take her like a giant of mind and divorce her from her allegiance to him. That the good companion, the true friend, the person she loved might alter completely under the touch of social alchemy.
Raft was impossible. She knew that. More impossible even than a sea elephant from that far beach where life was real and Paris a dream. Impossible in Paris where life was false and the far beach a dream.
Raft at a dinner party! Raft at one of those elegant afternoons where the talk would run on the politics of the moment, on symbolism, on Bergson, or Iturrino or the works of Othon Friesz—! He could not be her companion in that place, in that atmosphere, within leagues of those people.
She was not thinking that now. “These people” around her seemed strangers; they had in fact always been strangers, strangers who had kissed her, conversed with her, dined with her, but strangers; the one, true, living, warm friend, the only one she had ever known, was Raft. It was the penguins and sea-bulls over again, the polite, bowing, absolutely correct penguins, the warm lumping, living sea-bulls.
Her heart, chilled by stephanotis-scented kisses, words of felicitation and the fat smiles of men in tall hats and tight-buttoned overcoats, chilled by Monsieur de Brie’s gold rimmed eye glasses, chilled by a social state that had never warmed her, cried out for Raft. Kerguelen and that beach, where, even now, the sea-bulls might be lingering, seemed a warm and blissful vision, real, alive, a place where life meant living.
Ah, here he came. He had been helping to fix a hawser at the bows. She ran towards him.
“Ah, there you are. Now, you are coming with me. I have told the captain and he said this morning it would be all right as you were not signed on.”
“Right,” said Raft, “but where are you going?”
“To an hotel.”
He looked about him. He saw the crowd on deck but he did not connect it with her. He was out of his reckoning. He had never thought of what would happen in port as regarded her, or where he would go or what he would do; making plans was not in his way. In the ordinary course of things he would have gone to the British consulate and the Shipwrecked Mariners’ people would have returned him, carriage paid, to England. He had always been in the hands of others and of chance.
She—he had always called her She, and here, be it said, he did not know her name, never having asked—She had now taken him into her hands and he felt vaguely that she was a power on this new beach where he was stranded.
Had you told him that she was a woman of society and very wealthy his idea of her power would not have been increased; he knew nothing of wealth or society. She was She in her old dress that he knew so well, and still carrying the sou’wester he had fetched from the cave where she had done that chap in, and as for any idea of being under an obligation to her for food or housing he had none. He would have done the same for her.
Yet, to tell the truth, the docks, with no money in his pocket and the cold prospect of brilliant Marseilles, had made him feel adrift like a lost child. Civilisation had affected him as it hadaffected her, so that something, now, made him put his hand on her shoulder to get the touch of her, and she, knowing that every eye in all that party behind her was upon them, took the great hand and held it and patted it.
It was as well to take her stand at once, though she was scarcely bothering about that. Then, still holding his hand, she came along that white deck towards the gang-plank. The officers knew and, as they bade her good-bye, they nodded to Raft, but the Parisians knew nothing but that Cléo had gone clearly mad—and that that awful sailor had placed his hand on her shoulder, familiarly!
There were several automobiles waiting by the wharf and Madame de Brie, half-dumb and slightly agitated, having pointed out the car she had reserved for Cléo, the girl introduced Raft.
“This is Raft who saved my life,” said Cléo.
Then she took Raft by the arm and pushed him into the seat beside the chauffeur; having done that, she got into the car, following Madame de Brie. The Comtesse de Mirandole got in, also, followed by Monsieur de Brie and his gold eye glasses.
The mistral was blowing so that the windows of the car had to be kept closed.
Used to fresh air, the girl nearly choked at first with the stuffiness of the car. The olfactory nerve is really a prolongation of the brain, as though thebrain, distrusting the other senses, had pushed out a trustworthy scout to see what the world and its contents were really like. The sense of smell never lies; it is of all senses the truest and it handed along without comment to the brain of Cléo the faint perfume of the stephanotis affected by Madame de Brie and of the Yoya-yoya affected by the Comtesse de Mirandole, also traces from the varnish and upholstery of the car.
“Who, my dear, is that man,” asked Madame de Brie. She had almost said “that dreadful man” but she had checked herself.
“Man—Oh, that is Raft. He saved my life.”
“How delightful,” said the Countess, “and he seems quite a character.”
“Quite,” said Madame de Brie half-heartedly, “but my dear Cléo, you will excuse an old woman for suggesting it, your generosity must be on its guard, he placed his hand on your shoulder, quite familiarly it seemed to me.”
“Well,” said the choking Cléo, “why should he not? I have slept with my head on his chest on a rock and I have stabbed a man who was trying to kill him. Between us we fought a whole crowd of Chinamen. He had a harpoon and I had a knife and we beat them and took their ship. Do you mind having the window a wee bit open? I feel rather faint.”
“That’s better,” said she to the speechless other ones, “I’m so used to fresh air that I can’t bear to be closed in.”
“But my dear Cléo,” suddenly broke out the old lady, “what do you intend to do with him?”
“Do with him? Nothing. He’s my friend, that’s all. Ah, here we are.”
The car had drawn up in the courtyard of the Hotel.