CHAPTER XXV
STORIES ON THE BEACH
For a week after that day not a word was said about their departure forthat problematical bay to the westward where ships put in, or where theymight put in should they find themselves in the region of Kerguelen. Theidea seemed to the girl like one of those nightmare ideas, thoseterrific tasks which fever or indigestion sets to one in dreams.
It blew during that week as it had never blown before; blew from thenorth and the south and the west Atlantic oceans of rain drivingseawards from the hills and passing off towards the islands, followed bybreaks of clear weather and blue sparkling skies filled with the tearingscreaming wind.
They talked a good deal during these days and at odd times, and the girlbegan to get some true glimpses of the mind of her companion, a mindthat had never grown up, yet had in no wise deteriorated from remainingungrown. Raft, who had been round the world a dozen times and more, knewless of the world than a modern child. Fights and roaring drunks and thesmoke haze of bar rooms, wharf Messalinas and sailors' lodging houseshad done him no harm at all. His innocence was vast and indestructibleas his ignorance.
Bompard and La Touche were old men of the world compared to Raft; theywere of different stuff, and being yachtsmen they had been long rubbedagainst the ways of high civilization.
To the girl, born and bred amongst all the intricacies of modern lifeand thought, and with a sense of mind-values as delicate as a jeweller'sscales, Raft was a revelation.
She tried to sound his past. He had no past beyond the _Albatross_. Hecould tell all about the _Albatross_ and his shipmates and the Old Manand so forth, but beyond that lay only a ship called the _Pathfinder_,and beyond that a muddle of ships and ports, a forest of mastsstretching to a grey time an infinite distance away, the time of hischildhood. He had no professed religion and he could neither read norwrite.
Yet he had remembered her sou'wester, this man without a memory and hewas always astonishing her by remembering little things she had said orthings 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 theman Harbutt, about the Rich People; and as to sex, beyond a queerinstinctive delicacy and a tenderness due to her weakness and the memoryof how he had found her, she might just as well have been a man, or achild 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 temperaturethat it seemed impossible to lower or raise. She could not fancy himgetting angry about anything. Had she seen him as in the past during oneof his rare sprees, fighting the crowd and tossing men about likeninepins, she would have said: 'This is not the same man'--and maybe shewould have been right.
"Where did you come from," said he one day to her as they sat rain-boundwatching 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 triedto 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 telescopeand the doings of civilisation, as exemplified by Paris, a panorama seenat the little end.
What _were_ they all doing, those crowds that she could visualize soplainly?--deputies, lawyers, military men, shop-keepers, pleasureseekers--towards what end were they going?
Then, with a strange little shock, it came to her that they were going,as a mass, nowhere except from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn; that theywere exactly like the crowd of sea gulls, each individual rotating inits own little orbit, and that the wonderful coloured and spangled crustcalled Civilization was nothing more than the excretion of individualambitions, 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, wasasleep.
One of the disconcerting things about this huge creature was hiscapacity for sleep. He would drop asleep like a dog at the shortestnotice 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 likethis, and at first the vague fear used to come to her that he had beenstricken by some malady in the form of sleeping sickness that made himact like this. She did not know that he had kept awake all those nightshe had looked after her and that the same brain that could sleep andsleep and sleep could put sleep entirely away, just as the great bodythat 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 ofher existence. She had observed the same thing in Bompard and La Touchewho would sit cheek by jowl without a word, as though they hadquarrelled. This trait pleased her, and she fell in with itunconsciously as though his mind had moulded hers and were teaching itthe 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 uponhim. She told him the story of Jack and the Bean Stalk and was delightedto 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--itoccurred in her version--pleased him immensely. Then when she hadfinished she was alarmed to find, from words dropped by him, that heconsidered the story to be true, or at least to be taken seriously. Shedid not disillusion him; to do so she would have had to tell him thatshe had lied. That was the funny part of the thing. He would have saidto himself "what made her lie to me about that chap?" By no possiblemeans could he have imagined a person sitting down to invent in coldblood 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 inthe fo'c'sle sometimes and likely to produce a boot aimed at theteller's head. He had seen men reading books in the fo'c'sleoccasionally and old newspapers, but of literature, fictional orotherwise, he had no more idea than the bull sea elephants of astronomy.
This she intuitively felt and so held her tongue. But she had interestedhim, and she went on, producing from her memory the story of the FortyThieves.
Now he had accepted the bean stalk explanation, for he had never to hisknowledge seen a bean stalk, but the jars in the Forty Thieves herevolted at, for a jar to him was a demijohn, or a thing of that size. Aman could not get into that.
However, on explanation, he passed the jars, and the boiling oil repaidhim. 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 ithappens that children's stories run so frequently to blood and ferocity.
She remembered Anatole France's story of the juggler who juggled beforethe shrine of Our Lady, having no better offering to make to her, andRaft sat spellbound, after having made out that Our Lady was the VirginMary, the patron of Catholic shipmates. She told it so well and sosimply, with unobtrusive foot notes as to monasteries and theircontents, that he could not but see the point, the poor man havingnothing 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 theother chaps doing things for her, she could see him. The story, whosewhole point lies in the supposed non-existence of the virgin as adiscerning being, ought to cast its gentle ridicule not on the ignorantjuggler but on the more learned brethren of the monastery. To Raft theywere all in the same boat, and as to whether she could see them or nothe didn't know.
The story fell flat, horribly flat, told to the absolutely simplehearted, and to the Teller, after explanations were over, it seemed thatthe Listener had in some way cut op
en modern genius and exposed a littletricky mechanism working on a view point of chilled steel.
That Raft, in fact, was so big in a formless way that he was much abovethe story.
She remedied her blunder on the next storytelling occasion with BlueBeard.
Then the weather broke fair and the islands drew away and the cloudsrose high and the white terns, always flitting like dragon-flies amidstthe other birds, rose like the clouds, they always flew higher in fineweather, and with the smooth seas a new thing shewed like a sign: thelittle sea elephants were no longer confining themselves to the riverand near shore. Some of them were taking boldly to the sea. Their smallheads 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 ventureinto that sea between the islands and the shore, and that their onlyhope 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, someship 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 keptclear of this dangerous water, that the cache might have been left bypeople who had landed somewhere else, and as for Captain Slocum's shipshe might have been a whaler. Whalers according to Raft were always offthe beaten track and poking their noses into places where honest deepsea 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 heretill perhaps the winter comes."
She paused and looked towards the islands. She hated the idea of thatjourney which she pictured over rocks and across plains, where? Insearch of a place that might not exist, and where, if it did exist, noship might perhaps be found. An almost hopeless journey involvingunknown hardships.
"You ain't strong enough," suddenly said Raft.
It was as though he had touched some spring in her character that setthe machinery of determination working.
"I am strong enough," she replied. Then after a moment's pause somethingin 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 almosthopeless, 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, willwe 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 themagain."
Raft considered the proposition for a moment, then he shook his head andtapped the dottle out of his pipe.
"Not with them winds that get you here," said he, "they let out whenyou're least expecting it and we'd be on to the rocks and done for. I'mnot saying if we had a boat crew we mightn't try, but we'reunder-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'tfit for travelling rough, like me."
"Aren't I?--I suppose I don't look strong, but I am, of course I'm notas strong as you, but I can keep on once I begin, and I have beenthrough a good deal ever since that night we were wrecked, I don't thinkany journey we could make would be worse than that. And I was notprepared for all that as I am now for anything that may happen. Think ofit, we had all been sitting at dinner, it was only a little while afterdinner and I had my evening frock on."
"Your evening which?"
"Dress. They were all rich people on board the yacht and they put ondifferent clothes always for dinner. It seems stupid--well, I was downbelow and I suddenly felt that I must get on deck, so I put on theseclothes and my oilskin and sou'wester, then, as I was coming upstairsthe collision happened. I got on deck and it was quite dark until theelectric light was put on, then I saw the stern of your ship with thename on it."
She paused with a little shudder and seemed visualizing the terriblepicture again.
"Heave ahead," said Raft interestedly.
"Then I was thrown into a boat and forgot everything until I woke in theearly morning alone with those two men. It was all just like that. Iwasn't prepared for hardship as I am now, and I hadn't a companion likeyou. 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 dothings. I had to make them go and hunt for firewood, they might just aswell 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'vebeen through it. Rum thing I saw you first when I was handling a topsailin that blow. The weather broke and I was holdin' on to the yard when Isighted you away to starboard with the sun on you. Old Ponting was closeto me and he yelled out he'd seen you before and give you your name, the_Gaston de Paree_."
"And we sighted you," said she, "I was down below when the steward camewith a message that there was a ship in sight, I came up and there youwere with the sun on you and the storm clouds behind, and do you knowyou frightened me."
"How so?" asked Raft.
"I don't know. I felt there was going to be a disaster of some sort--itwas almost like a warning."
"Well, there's no saying," said Raft. "I've known a chap warned he wasgoing to be drowned, and drowned he was sure enough. I was down belowasleep and shot out of my bunk by the smash; then I was on the maindeck, the chaps all round shouting for boats, and if you ask me how Igot off I couldn't tell you. One minute a big light was blazing, then itwas black as thunder. My mind seemed to go when the black came on, I'dno more thought than a blind puppy. Something saved me. That's all Iknow."
"God saved you," said the girl.
"Well, maybe He did," said Raft; "but what made Him let all the otherchaps drown?"
"I don't know," she replied, "but He saved you just as He saved me. Iknow 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, ittells the birds and elephants where to get food and where to go and howto avoid danger; you and I have minds of our own, but our minds arenothing 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 findthemselves having to fight for life they fall back on instinct, themind of God comes to help them. Look at me. I believe I found that cacheled by instinct and I would never have pulled through only instinct toldme 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 oughtto 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 porpoise
s," said Raft.
"What about them?"
"Well, there's a saying they hug the shore pretty close if bad weatheris coming. It's fine to-day, but I've a feeling there's going to beanother blow soon and maybe we'd better wait till it's over--maybe it'sinstinc'," he finished, looking round shyly.
The girl laughed. "If you feel like that," said she, "we had certainlybetter wait. Maybe the porpoises were sent to tell us."
"There's no saying," replied he. They were seated on the rocks justwhere she had watched the great battle and far and near the "sea cows"were sunning themselves on the rocks whilst beyond the seal beach thepenguins were drilling in long lines. Scarcely a breath of wind stirredand the sea lay calm like a sheet of dim blue glass to where the islandssat beneath the sky of summer.
But the islands had drawn closer since morning and the birds seemedbusier than usual and more clamorous. To the eastward where the cliffsrose higher, guillemots had their home on the ledges of basalt and thewheezy bagpipe-like cry of them came in bursts every now and then asthough they were angry about something, whilst the cry of the razorbillsand the "get-away, get-away" of the kittiwakes had a sharper note. Thepuffins alone were calm, swimming in coveys on the glassy water andleaving long ripples in their wake.