THE AWAKENING
The great beach of Kerguelen shews above tide mark long stretches where
no sand is, only rock. Basalt planed and smoothed by the seas of
countless ages, level as a ball-room floor and broken by rifts and pot
holes, between tide marks these pot holes serve as traps for all sorts
of sea creatures. Once the waves must have beaten right up to the low
and broken basalt cliffs full of caves floored with sand, but volcanic
action raising the beach has pushed the tide mark out leaving a shore
varying in width from half a mile to a few hundred yards.
This is the breeding place of the sea elephant. Half way between the
lizard point and the point further to the east a river comes down
disembarging through three months; on the banks of this river is the
seal nursery where in summer the young sea elephants tumble and play and
take their swimming lessons, whilst the mothers lie on rocks and the
fathers fish and hunt and fight in battles, the roaring of which
resounds for miles. Here the penguins drill and hold councils and law
courts and marry and get divorced and hold political meetings, here the
rabbits play and the terns foregather, and here the winds that blow
from everywhere but the east, hunt and yell and pile in winter a twenty
foot sea that breaks in seven miles of thunder under seven miles of
spray thick as the smoke of battle.
Duck and teal haunt the place and gulls of nearly every known kind snow
it and flick it with movement. Yet above the thunder of the waves and
the cries of the birds and the shouting of the winds when they blow,
there hangs a silence--the silence of the remote and prehistoric. The
living world of men seems cut off from here by far away doors and
forever.
After supper they had explored the cave mouths in the cliff opposite to
where the boat had beached. There were three caves just here. One was
impracticable owing to water dripping from the roof, but the other two,
floored with hard sand, were good enough for shelter. The men had stowed
the provisions and themselves in the western mast giving the girl the
other and the boat sail for a pillow.
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 Cléo 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 reassured
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 shore, 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 shore 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 passed 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 pass 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 pass 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 glass. 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 passion that women have for things of texture.
The hair of Cléo 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, lustrous 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.