SPANISH GOLD
From the salt-white sand of the beach to eastward, and some two hundred
yards from the palm-clump a ridge of coral rocks ran out into the sea
like a natural pier. The water lay deep off these rocks and the fishing
would have been good had the ship-wrecked ones possessed lines and
hooks.
Gaspard, next day, late in the afternoon was standing at the end of
this coral pier, the sea of an incredible blue, sailless, forlorn,
came glassing shoreward in long gentle lines of swell, slobbering and
sighing by the rocks and breaking sadly on the sands.
When the sea comes in like this in long spaced undulations a voice
steals through her voice, the something tragic, the _quid obscurum_
that hides in nature and speaks through the elements and the passions
is heard. The sea has a hundred voices, Gaiety, Triumph, Strength,
Sadness, Regret, the wave speaks them all. But stand on a day like this
on a desolate island in the tropics and listen to the voice that steals
from all that splendour of light and gaiety of colour, the violent
heaving wastes of water, the triumphant sun, the sky of living blue,
through all these, from all these you will hear a voice, it is borne by
the languid voice of the sea.
It is the voice of Loneliness.
Loneliness—Fate, Death, Tragedy—all these are dwarfed before her,
to escape from whom the very atoms of matter cling together, animals
join in herds, men in communities. She who says to man “I walk by
you from the cradle to the grave, with me you go forth from the world
alone, because of me you work out your fate alone, by the shores and
desolate plains of the north I shew my face, by the tropic sea men hear
my voice. I am she who makes Death terrible. I am she who makes Love
beautiful. Love my only enemy.”
Gaspard, standing on the reef, heard the voice, his eyes were fixed on
the green water in the shadow of the rocks, an albicore like a flashing
sword had passed a moment ago, now there was nothing to be seen but
the crystalline vagueness through which here and there floated a scrap
of fucus. Just in that second, held between the sound of the sea and
the mesmeric crystal of the water his mind heard Loneliness speak.
Just in that moment was borne in on him dimly, and without awakening
true comprehension, the tragic fact of human isolation, the fact that
each man is on a desert island set round by the sea of life, and that
there alone he must work out his fate, unless from some island in the
distance Love should bring him help.
The fact came to him as a sensation rather than a thought, the grave
harmonics of the sea had whispered to him this eternal truth, the fact
which is the master fact of life.
Suddenly, from behind, as he stood there gazing into the depths came
a voice that made him turn. Yves far away amidst the low bushes was
beckoning and calling to him, capering, gesticulating, flinging his
arms about. Yves seemed to have gone mad, and Gaspard, making along the
rocks, ran across the sand, and through the bushes towards him.
Over the bushes the air was shaking with the heat, Yves was much
farther off than he had seemed from the rocks; he was almost at the
centre of the islet, and now as Gaspard made his way through the bushes
he saw that his companion held something in his hand.
“Hurry up, lazy bones,” cried Yves, “and see what I have found.” He
waved the thing in the air, it was a belt with a brass buckle and a
pouch attached to it. He was laughing, one might have fancied that he
had fallen on some great, good fortune.
He had.
“Look,” cried Yves. He opened the pouch, it was filled with big pieces
of gold; they had been wrapped in oilskin, he had flung the oilskin
away and he stood with his two great hands outspread clasping the pouch
and the treasure bursting from it.
Gaspard at the sight gave a cry that rang across the islet and was
answered by the ever-wheeling gulls.
“Gold!” cried Gaspard, seizing a piece from the hand of Yves. He
examined it, bit it, glanced at it again. He seemed dazed and had the
look of a man who, long a prisoner in darkness, had been suddenly
brought face to face with a powerful light. The piece of gold was
Spanish, a piece of eight, heavy, and stamped with the stately effigies
of a vanished king.
“Look!” cried Yves, taking the coin back from the hand of Gaspard and
replacing it in the pouch with the others. “Look!” As he buckled the
pouch he pointed with his foot at something amidst the bushes. Just
here the bushes were thinner than elsewhere and here the ground was
raised in a little mound. Amidst the bushes, white and desolate, lay
some bones. They were strewn hither and thither. One might have fancied
that here once lay a skeleton, the embers of a man that some wind had
blown upon and scattered. A skeleton, in fact, had once lain here,
on or amongst the bushes, but so long ago that the bushes dying and
growing again had cast the fragments apart. The skeleton of a man; the
skull which Gaspard had picked up and was now holding in his hand told
that.
It was a strange skull, small and deformed, hideously broad across the
cheek-bones; the bones of the thigh easily distinguished by even the
untrained eyes of the sailors were unequal in length, the shorter of
them had been injured or broken, for it shewed the thickening where
callus had formed.
“Pah!” cried Gaspard, flinging the skull down. “He must have been a
beauty whoever he was—and look.” He picked up an old pistol-barrel,
eaten away by rust, the trigger plate thin as a leaf and crumbling like
a withered leaf to the touch lay near. Many, many years of exposure it
must have taken to eat the metal away like that. Yves glanced at the
thing without interest. “Come,” said he, and turning, he led the way to
the southern beach. Here under the palm trees he sat down, opened the
pouch, and rattled the gold pieces on the sand between his outspread
legs.
Gaspard, who had followed him without a word, stood, without a word,
looking on.
Yves counted the pieces; there were twenty-one of them and he was
disappointed; there had seemed more. He began to recount them. He had
scarcely done so when Gaspard broke silence.
“Look here,” said Gaspard, “half of that falls to my share; half of
that belongs to me by all rights.”
Yves stopped his counting and looked up. It was the tone of Gaspard’s
voice rather than his words, perhaps, that caused the expression upon
his broad, sun-burnt face. A heavy, unfriendly expression, such as the
face of a croupier might wear when some punter disputes the game.
“Yours?” said Yves, “and who found them?”
“That’s neither here nor there,” said the Moco, “you found them, it is
true, but it was only a question of luck. I might have found them just
as easily, and if I had I would have gone shares.”
Yves knew this to be a fact. Gaspard was the soul of generosity.
Generosity was not predominant in the soul of Yves. He was a
good-hearted man, but the Breton peasant was uppermost in his nature;
he had made this great haul of golden fish entirely with his own hand,
and now he was called upon by a man more generous than himself to share
it.
He said nothing for a moment, but went on counting the pieces; then,
as if addressing them, “Yes, it’s easy to talk of luck—but would I
have found them if I had been lying lazy on the beach, or staring into
the sea like some people? No, I was hunting for dead brushwood, doing
something for my living, and I found them.”
“Then keep them,” cried Gaspard, and turning on his heel he walked down
to the sea edge. He walked for a bit along the sand, then, with his
arms folded, he stood looking at the sea.
His mind had left the subject of the money and was clinging to the true
grievance he had against Yves. The poisonous source of hatred. Anisette.
But the grievance of the money was there as well, and all at once by
some alchemy of Satan the hundred grudges petty and large that he
had against his companion joined together and formed the figure of a
monstrous Yves, a creature he hated, and who, so the devil whispered,
hated him.
The sun was now near its setting, and as Gaspard stood there with arms
folded looking at the sea, the eternal crying of the gulls took on a
new meaning; they were saying a new word:
“Yves,—Yves,—Yves.”
It seemed as though the very gulls were mocking him.
“Yves,—Yves,—Yves.”
He turned and strode up the sand to where Yves was sitting beneath the
palm trees.
The sun was sinking now over Tampico way in a sky of living gold, the
western sea, leaping to meet him, flashed his splendour to the very
shores of the islet; each flake of foam seemed a flake of primrose
light and the sands stretched like sands of gold by the shores of the
golden sea.
Gaspard came right up to Yves, the splendour of the sunset on his face,
his hands clenched in his pockets, his lips dry.
“All the same,” said Gaspard, as though he were continuing a
conversation, “you are a thief, and a son of a thief—more fool I to
chum with a dog of a Ponantaise.”
Yves rose up; he was a slow man to wrath, but terrible when roused.
The belt and the pouch containing the money were lying at his feet; he
kicked them aside as he faced the Moco.
“You say—”
“I say what I have said.”
“After the fashion of the monkeys,” replied Yves, “that say what they
have said all day long—_drop that!_”
The Moco had whipped the knife from the sheath in his belt. Both men
wore knives, but the Ponantaise had not drawn his. He stood with his
arms folded across his immense chest, literally as though he were
nursing his wrath.
“It is well known,” said Yves, his eye on the knife, “that a Moco and a
woman can only fight with their claws and tongue.”
Gaspard dropped the knife; then he stooped and picked it up as if to
replace it in his belt; he seemed half mad with rage and not to know
what he was doing.
That was the moment of his life; the next he might have replaced the
knife in its sheath and all would have been well, had not Yves, whose
anger had suddenly passed from his control, spat at the Moco a word.
A word of one syllable, one of those dead rats of language that these
men fling at one another in jest, but when spoken in anger are worse
than a blow.
The Moco flung himself back as though a snake had struck at him, then
the knife in his hand flashed through the air and Yves was on his back
on the sand kicking and coughing and whistling at the sky.
The knife had just touched the jugular vein in his neck; the air
rushing into the vein made the whistling noise, but Gaspard knew
nothing of this. He strode up to the body of his companion with fists
clenched, prepared for battle, and certain that his antagonist would
spring to his feet and face him.
Then he saw that Yves was dying. Dying of nothing, apparently, for the
knife was on the sand almost unstained and the stricken man shewed no
wound to speak of, just a scratch on the neck from which the black
blood oozed in froth.
Had Gaspard raised his eyes to the west he would have seen that the
great sun was now cut in half by the sea, dying in a scene of splendour
indescribable, but he saw nothing, nothing, but the face of Yves.
For a moment he stood, the last fiery rays of the sun casting his
shadow far away along the sand. Then he was kneeling by the body,
shaking it by the arm, calling upon it to wake up—to come to life!