EVENING
All this time, steadily as the tide, the sun had been sinking; he had
dropped through a dazzling azure sky and he was now hanging almost in
touch with the western horizon, a ball of fire in a sky of dazzling
gold; momently the gold of the sunset took possession of the sky,
spreading up, up, till the very zenith was reached, and down, down,
till the gilding reached the eastern sky line. The world now seemed
clipped in the cup of a great golden flower, and the little ripples
that came sighing in round the low tide reefs showed their foam like
fleeces of gold. Not a trace of cloud shewed in the golden sky, not a
wave on the golden sea; in that wonderful sunset the palm tops burned
like fingers of flame, and as music lights the soul of man, so did the
golden and glowing atmosphere the heart of the lagoon.
The ship in the water below answered to the magic of the light;
the thing that had been grey and dismal as death was in a moment
transformed to a dream of colour, the brains of frost-white coral
became golden lamps; starfish, sea-flowers, coraline growths, pink,
crimson, indigo, pale yellow, colour and form, all lent their adornment.
Shadowless on her bed of dazzling sand she hung for a moment, burning
in full sight, clear to the eye as though she were floating in air and
exquisite as a jewel, then just as she had bloomed she faded out, her
colour and beauty passing with the fading light, and as night swept
over the sea like the shadow of a violet-wing, she vanished utterly,
whilst the lagoon filled with darkness and the first stars cast their
shimmer on its surface.
“_Eh bien?_” said Yves, as he rose to his feet and stretched himself.
The Moco, who had also risen to his feet, looked around him at the
world of darkness that had displaced the world of gold; he had seen
many things, but nothing that had ever struck his imagination so
vividly as the sight now veiled by darkness. His mind could not reason
on the question or refute by logic the feeling in his heart that what
he had seen was evil.
All that gaiety and colour decking the ruin of man’s work was like
laughter coming from under the seas.
Yves felt nothing of this.
“Come,” said the Moco, turning towards the shore, “let’s go back.”
As they tramped their way through the brushwood they talked of the
thing they had seen. Yves thought that from the height of her poop she
must be very old, or it might be that it was only a very big deck-house
snowed over with coral; he slapped his thigh as he walked, pleased with
the idea of the snow; when a boy in Brittany he had seen things heaped
with snow and bulked out in size, carts, barrels, and so forth, just as
the old ship was heaped and bulked out with coral; but the simile was
lost on Gaspard; you do not get snow at Montpellier to any extent; also
his mind more trained by early education, and more supple by heredity,
refused to draw images from gross bulk; the colours appealed to him;
“_mordieu_,” said he, “she reminds me most of a ship of flowers I once
saw drawn along in the carnival procession at Montpellier.”
“Flowers,” laughed Yves, “where would you get flowers under the sea?”
The stupidity of Yves roused Gaspard’s ever-ready anger.
“From the devil, maybe—I was not talking of flowers under the sea; I
was talking of what I had seen in Montpellier.”
They had reached the southern beach, where the palm trees grew, and
Yves set about lighting a fire of dry brushwood; when it was burning he
heaped on some wreck-wood; the ship of coral, the wreck of the _Rhone_,
their position, all were banished from his mind by the business in hand.
When supper was finished they sat each with his back against a palm
tree. The work of the day was over. They had rigged up a rough sort of
tent with the boat sail and some broken spars, but the warm night held
them in the open.
The red light of the fire lit the white sand to within a few yards
of the sea edge, where the waves were falling gently, rhythmically,
drowsily, Haassh—Haassh—Haassh—a chill and dreamy sound. Above, the
sky solid with stars, voiceless, windless, seemed a thing more alive
and active than the sea. From the slight elevation where they sat a
ghostly white streak on the starlit sea to the southward indicated the
reef that had slain the _Rhone_; only at low tide and half way between
flood and ebb tide did the snow of the surf indicate the position of
the murderer.
“She had a lot of gold in her for Havana,” said Yves, breaking silence
and nodding in the direction of the reef; “seems a pity that it should
be lying there under the sea and no one to spend it.”
“See here,” said Gaspard, “it’s strange I was thinking of that hooker
lying in the lagoon over there.”
“Yes?”
“I was thinking, maybe, there is stuff worth looking for a’board her if
one could get at it.”
Yves laughed.
“Yes, if you could get at it—if you could get at it—and she built
over with coral a foot thick; and if you could break through it what
would you find? dead men’s bones. It’s like your flowers under the
sea.” He tapped the dottle out of his pipe, rose, stretched, and
turned toward the little tent, whilst Gaspard without a word continued
smoking; he could have struck Yves.
The son of a tradesman in Montpellier, he possessed still some
rudiments of the education he had received before that fatal day when,
driven by the instinct of wandering and the hatred of restraint, he had
run away to sea. Yves, the son of long generations of sailors, had gone
to sea as a duckling goes to the pond. Gaspard had been taken there by
his imagination. He knew himself superior to the lumbering Yves whose
fingers were like fish-hooks, who had the manners of a bear and the
walk of a walrus, yet Yves was always proving himself (by chance, no
doubt) the better and the luckier man.
He turned in under the shelter of the tent where Yves was already
snoring, and he slept and dreamt of the docks of Marseilles, of
Anisette, and of Yves.