The Beach of Dreams Part 8

It was old Bompard who thought of the latter. La Touche seemed to have no thought for any one or anything but himself. He grumbled all the time during supper, grumbled at the fact that there was no stuff to make a fire with, that they had nothing warm to drink, that some time soon their tobacco must run out. It seemed to Cleo as she lay with her head on the hard sailcloth and her body on the hard sand, covered with the oilskin coat which she had taken off to use as a blanket, that through the league long rumble of the surf she could hear him grumbling still.

She did not care. Hard though the floor was she did not mind, she was chloroformed. Chloroformed by the air of Kerguelen. The air that fills the lungs with life, keeps a man going all day with an energy and buoyancy unknown elsewhere and then fells him with sleep.

She awoke when the whale birds had ceased crying, just after dawn, awoke fresh and new and full of life. She felt none of that troubled surprise which comes when the mind has to adjust itself to the new situation on awakening for the first time after a great disaster. It was as though her mind had already adjusted itself and discounted everything.

She rose up and leaving the oilskin coat and sou'wester on the floor of the cave came out on to the beach.

The fine weather still held and the day was strong, now lighting the beach, the sea, and the distant islands through a sky of high, grey eastward drifting clouds. The boat lay where it had been pulled up, the tide now coming in and legions of birds were flitting and blowing about and stalking on the sands as far as eye could reach.

She came to the cave where the men were. Bompard and La Touche lying on their backs might have been dead but for the sound of their snoring.

Bompard was lying with his wrist across his eyes, La Touche with both hands beside him, clenched. The tins of beef and the bread bags shewed vaguely in the gloom behind them.

She stood for a moment watching them and then, turning, she came down to the boat lying high and dry on the sand. She was trying to realize, that on the morning of the day before yesterday at this hour she had been lying in her bunk on board the _Gaston de Paris_, to realize this and also the fact that her present position seemed scarcely strange.

She ought, so she told herself, to be astonished at what had happened and to be bewailing her fate, yet, looking back now over yesterday and the day before, everything seemed part of a level and logical sequence, almost like the events of a stormy day on board ship. The tragedy of the destruction of the _Gaston_ only partly experienced could not be fully felt.

Standing by the boat she tried to realize it and failed, tried to grasp what she knew to be the horror and pity of it, and failed. She was neither hard nor insensible, she simply could not grasp it.

And her position here with two rough men, very little food and little chance of escape, how she would have pitied herself a few days ago could she have foreseen! Yet here, with the firm sands under her feet and the wind blowing in her face, reality, instead of hurting her as it had done in the boat on awakening yesterday morning, soothed her and rea.s.sured her. Everything seemed firm again and the fear that the ugly coast had raised in her mind had vanished.

She came along the beach looking at the gulls, turned over huge star-fish and picked up kelp ribbons to examine them. Half a mile or so from the cave she was about to turn back when her eye caught a strange appearance on the sea, hundreds and hundreds of moving points drawing in to the sh.o.r.e, white and black points like a shoal of fish only half submerged. It was a fleet of swimming birds.

She sat down on the sand to watch as they took the sh.o.r.e with a rush through the foam. Then, safely beached, the fleet became an army of penguins. She had seen pictures of penguins so she knew what they were and she had read Anatole France's "Penquin Island"--these, then, were the real things and she watched them fascinated as one who sees storyland taking visible and concrete form.

The penguins formed line, broke into companies, drilled a bit and then began to move up the beach.

The figure of the girl did not seem to disturb them in the least.

One company pa.s.sed to the left, one to the right, whilst that immediately fronting her halted a few feet away and saluted her, bowing like little old-fashioned men in black swallow-tail coats and immaculate shirt fronts, little old-fashioned men with sharp quizzical eyes, polished, humorous, polite and entirely friendly.

The company on the right wheeled to examine her as did the company on the left, so that she found herself almost in a hollow square. Wherever she turned there were birds bowing to her or things in the semblance of birds, absolutely fearless, so close that she could have touched them had she carried a walking-stick.

She rose up to allow them to pa.s.s and they went on like mechanical things wound up and released, forming line again and seeming to forget her.

She remembered the guillemots and their rudeness and the way they had stormed and jeered at the boat--did all that mean more than the politeness and friendliness of the penguins? If she were lying dead would not the guillemots pa.s.s her without enmity and the penguins without friendliness, as indifferent to her fate as the wave of the sea on the blowing wind?

They would--as indifferent as the great islands standing out there in the distance, mauve and slate grey against the morning. As she came back along the beach her mind was battling with a problem that had suddenly risen. She had neither brush nor comb nor gla.s.s. Her hair was beautiful and she loved it. Her face was beautiful but she did not love it, it was herself, she could not view it from an independent standpoint, but she could view her hair almost as impartially as a dress and she loved it with the strange pa.s.sion that women have for things of texture.

The hair of Cleo de Bromsart had been waited upon like a divinity by many a priestess in the form of a maid. It had been dressed and shampooed and treated by artists and adepts, the hours of brushing alone if put together would have made a terrific total. The result was perfection, and even now, after all she had gone through, it shewed scarcely disarrangement, l.u.s.trous and beautiful, dressed with artful simplicity in the Greek style and outlining the perfect curves of her head.

The wind was blowing now in gusto from the sea, but she scarcely noticed it as she walked, facing the problem that shipwreck had put before her, a problem the first of a long queue ranging from soap to a change of garments.

She was fighting it and at the same time battling with the strengthening wind when suddenly something sprang on her with the yell of a tiger and flung her on the sand, pinning her there.

CHAPTER IX

THE WOOLEY

It was the wind. The Wooley, which is the fist of Kerguelen suddenly clenched and hitting out from the shoulder of the great islands now suddenly stormed about with foam and veiled in spray.

Half stunned, she twisted round, still lying but fronting it now with her arm protecting her face. The beach had loudened up in thunder from end to end but the yelling Wooley as it met the cliffs and howled inland almost drowned the thunder of the waves. Then it died down as suddenly as it had come, and the boom of the surf rose high, as the girl, gathering herself together, got up and struggled on.

She was no longer thinking of her hair. It was the first lesson of the school of Kerguelen. "Here you shall think of nothing but the moment, of the ground beneath your feet, of the bite you put in your mouth, of the rock that stands before you."

When she reached the cave with her petticoats thrusting about her she was met by the two men and as she came up to them La Touche was cursing the wind. The Wooley had all but blown him down too. He had got up sooner than Bompard and had received the full face of it "in the pit of the stomach." He seemed to look on it as a personal matter affecting him alone.

Even as he spoke a sudden calm fell, lasted for a moment, and was followed by a howl from inland.

At a stroke the wind had changed right round and was blowing now from the mountains. Here in the shelter of the cliffs they scarcely felt it but the shift had raised an appalling cross sea. Right away to the islands there was nothing but tumbling foam, waves standing up and fighting waves in a battle that spread for leagues.

"It's well for us we didn't fall in with this yesterday," said Bompard "a ship couldn't stand it."

"And what ship will ever poke her nose in here to take us off do you think?" asked La Touche. "This is what you get every day of the week, if all accounts are true--this, and worse. I tell you we've come to the wrong place. There's no getting over it. We've come to the wrong place."

"Well, right or wrong, here we are," said Bompard "Mon Dieu! to hear you talk you'd think we'd come here on purpose--come, get a move on and let's have some grub."

He turned into the cave and they fetched out the can of beef they had opened yesterday, some biscuits, and a water breaker, and sitting at the cave mouth they ate just as the men of the Stone Age ate, with the palms of their hands for plates and their fingers for forks. They spoke scarcely at all. The ill-humor of La Touche seemed like a contagious disease, even Bompard, the imperturbable, seemed glum.

It was the girl who broke the strain.

Suddenly she began to speak as if giving voice to carefully thought out ideas. Yet what she said was absolutely spontaneous, the result of a quick, educated mind suddenly grasping the essentials of their position, suggestion breeding suggestion.

"There's no use in grumbling," said she. "That wind knocked me down as I was coming along the beach. I didn't grumble, and there is no use in thinking. I was thinking as I walked along that I had no brush and comb to do my hair with, you two have short hair and you can't imagine what it is to a person with long hair when they find themselves without a brush and comb. I was grumbling to myself about it when the wind knocked me down. I want just to tell you what is in my mind: we will die or go mad if we do not forget everything as much as we can and not think of to-morrow or yesterday or ships coming to take us off. We have to fight all sorts of things that don't care in the least for us and we have to work. Everything here is at work in its own way. Well, we must do as everything else does or die."

"It's easy to say work," said La Touche munching a biscuit, "but what is one to work at?"

"We want food for one thing, our provisions won't last forever."

"There's rabbits enough," said Bompard. "Remember those rabbits we saw running out on the beach last evening?"

"I can snare rabbits all right," said La Touche, "but where's the wire to make snares with--see--we're caught everywhere."

"Wait," said Bompard.

He got up and went down to the boat, hunted in one of the lockers and returned with a spool of wire.

He flung it at La Touche.

"There's your wire," said he.

Cleo's eyes brightened. The spool of wire seemed to her a fruit suddenly born from her words; she had accomplished something, it was perhaps the first real accomplishment in her life.

"Where did you get it from?" asked La Touche.

"The forward locker," replied Bompard.