The Beach of Dreams Part 23

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.

What _were_ they 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 her that they were going, as a ma.s.s, 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 trait pleased 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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, producing from 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 pa.s.sed 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 un.o.btrusive 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 gentle ridicule 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 Sloc.u.m, 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 Sloc.u.m'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.