THE MORNING SEA
In a moment, night, wearing all her jewellery, was standing above the
sea, the wind had died away, the cormorants had ceased crying, and the
boom of the waves was the only sound beneath the stillness of the stars.
Gaspard turned to his provision store for supper. He had placed the
canned meat and the biscuits close to one of the tree boles, and
to-morrow he would have to make a caçhe to protect them from the sun.
Thinking of this, he ate his supper without appetite or knowing what
he ate; his mind had passed into that dazed condition which comes from
surfeit of sensation; it had fed full of treasure and now was torpid.
When he had supped, he lit a pipe, but scarcely had he done so than
sleep came upon him, the pipe fell from his mouth beside him as he lay
there on the sands, the stars shining upon him and the sea singing to
him; marooned, ragged, without a roof to shelter him, and with the
wealth of emperors at his elbow.
Hours passed and the great moving dome of the stars shifted above the
world; one might have thought the figure on the sand a corpse cast up
by the sea from some wreck. Then it began to move and struggle and cry
out; one might have fancied it attacked by some unseen enemy. It was.
Scarcely had the deep unconsciousness of the first sleep lifted,
admitting the mind into dreamland, than Gaspard found himself
surrounded by his enemies. He was passing through horrible back streets
and men were following him to rob him. Yves, Sagesse, and the chief
engineer of the _Rhone_ were amongst them.
Then the dream changed and he was standing in a bar with Yves, showing
him the treasure, and, behold, the rubies and diamonds had changed to
pieces of glass and the rest to sea shells and rubbish—he had not even
the price of a drink and he had brought Yves in to stand him a bottle
of wine, brought him in arm in arm, boasting of his wealth!
Then he was coming on board at the docks of Marseilles, joining
the ship with the treasure in his pocket, the beautiful spirit of
unreasonableness who presides over the affairs of Dreamland did not
hint to him of the absurdity of the situation, his obfuscated reasoning
faculty was engaged in trying to solve the problem before him—the
problem of how to hide a million’s worth of gems and act as stoker on
a transatlantic steamer at the same time. To increase the difficulty
he had placed the snake of gold under the muffler he wore round his
neck—but it refused to be hidden; and then, all at once, he was back
again in the docks in a tavern, fighting in a corner with his back
to the wall, whilst Malays from the P. & O. boats, Dagoes armed with
sheath knives and a Chinaman—a hatchet man such as he had heard tell
of amidst the stokers—attacked him for his treasure. He awoke gasping
and still fighting his viewless enemies. After a while he fell asleep
again, only to continue his experiences in Dreamland, awaking finally,
just as the sun’s rim was rising above the sea.
The wind was blowing now from E.S.E., and the sea had lost its waves
and had fallen back into quietude and long lapses of swell—the gulls
were back.
Not the cormorants and frigate birds of the northern beach, but the
fishing gulls, the familiar spirits of the island, whose voices had
once terrified Gaspard. They had returned during the night, but they
did not terrify him now. Nothing could terrify him now except, perhaps,
the idea of a robber.
It was extraordinary, the effect of this fortune on this imaginative
mind, stiffening and strengthening it against all imaginary fears save
the fear of material enemies. The man who dreads burglars has no time
to dream of ghosts.
Immediately on waking he turned and placed his hand upon the treasure,
then he sat up facing the brave, bright morning; it was all true, then,
despite his dreams and his visionary enemies he was still in possession
of this incredible and fantastic wealth; his mind, clear now and
strengthened by sleep, could grasp the matter in its true proportions;
the stuff was his by all right, he was lineal heir by the right of
labour and suffering, to the fortune that Sagesse had taken from the
hand of Chance.
He could go to M. Seguin with a clear conscience and ask him to help in
the disposal of these things.
He rose up and walked along the beach, every moment casting back an eye
at the place where the treasure was. The storm had brought treasure of
its own to the beach, other than gems, and the falling tide was leaving
behind it strips of emerald and clear-brown seaweed, starfish, seaweed
whose roots were clinging still to fragments of red branch coral, great
bunches of flying-fish eggs like bunches of white currants, shells
shewing all the tints of opal and pearl.
The great hand of the storm had stripped the sea coves, the tidal
rocks, the gardens of the lagoons, and had cast the coloured harvest on
the sand; the sea itself had a brighter look, a fresher smell; great
depths seemed to have been stirred and the freshness and youth that lie
at the heart of ocean to have been diffused through its being.
O, the vision of the morning sea! The blue distance, the green, curling
waves, the blowing wind; it is the only thing that never grows old;
unspoiled by time or change, it is to-day as it was when Jason sailed
it, when Helen knew it, when the blue-painted triremes clashed beaks at
Salamis in the morning of the world.
When we first saw Gaspard, a stoker fresh from the _Rhone_, sitting
under a palm tree smoking and waiting for Yves, he was a man who would
have been moved not at all by the youth and spirit of this morning sea;
the crushed aesthetic sense, the imagination that had been subdued
to bar rooms and girls of the type of Anisette, would have responded
scarcely at all to this hilarity of blue waves and morning light—but
it was different now. He had changed and the world had changed; the
change was perhaps more subtle than profound, altering rather the point
of view than the viewer, yet he had changed. He had learned to expand
his nostrils to the breeze, to feel pleasure in the morning light, and
satisfaction in the sense of being.
As he stood looking away to southward over the blue sea, he heard the
voice of the spirit that had mostly wrought the change in him. It was
the voice of Martinique calling to him, the voice of Marie.
_Ché._
In a moment and for a moment, Fortune, the island, everything, was
forgotten.
_Ché._
The little word came on the breeze to him. Was she, too, standing on
some beach or headland gazing over the sea towards him? Was the little
word a butterfly of thought blown to him on the breeze that was
blowing from there?
Who can say, but he heard it as distinctly as he had heard it that
evening when standing on the road to Morne Rouge and looking down at
St. Pierre, he had waited for her and she had come to him.
He turned away from the sea, then he turned to it again and swept the
horizon as though looking for a sail. There was nothing to be seen.
He walked back along the sea edge in the direction of the palms; the
seven palms had been cast down by the rush of the hurricane, just as
the stakes of a stock fence might be cast down by the rush of wild
cattle; now, and for the first time, the thought occurred to Gaspard
that with the palms gone the islet would be less likely to attract the
attention of a passing ship. He looked at them as they lay, and then
he approached the bundle of treasure and the glittering snake of gold,
which were lying by the bole of the westernmost of the fallen trees. He
touched the bundle with his foot. The action seemed half involuntary;
he did not seem to be thinking of the bundle or its contents. Nor was
he.
He was thinking of Marie.
A wild longing, such as the prisoned bird may feel for the blue sky,
filled him, subordinating everything else to the thought of the being
he loved.
Ever since _La Belle Arlésienne_ had dropped Martinique behind her this
longing had been living and growing in his heart; the treasure fever
had obscured it, the storm had veiled it, the finding of the treasure
had pushed it aside, but it was there, growing, and patiently waiting.
It was the master passion of his life, the thing beside which all other
things were nothing, though for a moment they might veil it, as a
cloud veils a star, or a mist a mountain.
He turned away from the treasure and walked towards the bushes, then
he began to cross the islet, taking the path that Sagesse’s sailors
had made for the boat. Though he was profoundly engaged in thought, he
noticed quite little things, as, for instance, that the salt crystals
were nearly gone from the leaves of the bay-cedar bushes.
Half way across, where a view of the northern horizon could
be obtained, he raised his head and scanned the sea line.
Nothing—nothing—Ah! stop! What was that?
A tiny flake of feldspar seemed clinging to the sky horizon in N.N.W.
In the wonderful half wheel of crystal blue this microscopic flaw might
have been passed over by a casual observer. Gaspard folded his arms
and stood gazing at this speck, his lips parted in a half smile, his
eyes fixed. Had you been close to him, you would have noticed that he
scarcely breathed.
The thing did not seem to alter in shape or increase in size, yet
he knew that it represented the topsails of a ship hull down on
the horizon. It was just so that he had first glimpsed _La Belle
Arlésienne_ from the open boat.
Then it increased in size. After keeping him in suspense for what
seemed an age, suddenly his brain was able to say of the vision upon
his retina, “It is bigger.”
Then, as he watched it increase, all doubt passed: It was a vessel of
some sort steering southward. The wind was blowing now steady from
E.S.E.; she would pass the island to westward, perhaps quite close, for
it was all deep water there.
His mind, up to the moment of sighting the sail, had been filled with
the thought of Marie, the craving for her had brought him here to look
out for a sail. Now, after the first joyous leap of the heart, Marie
was for the moment forgotten. It was as though the sail space on the
sky had been a doorway through which the world had rushed in upon him.
He turned and ran back to the southern beach, picked up the treasure
bundle and forced it into his pocket, picked up the jewelled snake and
placed it round his neck under his shirt.
The collar of the flannel shirt scarcely concealed it; it would
never do to board a vessel with such a gem so lightly concealed, so,
hurriedly, with absurd haste, as though the ship were already abreast
of the island and there was not a moment to lose, he stripped off his
coat and shirt. For a moment he thought of placing it round his waist,
but it was not long enough to serve as a belt—then he did what the
jeweller who had designed the thing intended its wearer to do—made an
armlet of it.
It clung to perfection, and he resumed his shirt and coat. The banknote
that he had taken from the pocket-book of Sagesse, the white pearl, and
the gold coin, were all in the left hand coat pocket; he felt them over
with his left hand whilst his right examined again the bulge made by
the jewels contained in the right hand pocket.
It was not so very noticeable and no one would have dreamed that it was
caused by treasure. He looked around him on the sand to make sure that
he had forgotten nothing, and then came back to the vantage point in
the centre of the islet.
Yes, there she was, palpable to the sight and definite, no longer a
smudge on the sky-line, but a vessel with all sail set and steering,
one would have thought, straight for the islet.
Then, assured of this, he set to with his sheath knife, cutting dead
brushwood and heaping it on the pathway; the smoke of a signal fire
was his only chance of attracting her attention; and having made his
preparations he knelt down by the heap and put his hand in his trousers
pocket for his tinder box and steel.
It was gone.