THE CROSS
The thing itself startled her less than the fact that she had not seen
it before. It was as though it had been put up whilst she sat to rest.
It was so striking, so palpably evident that anyone coming along towards
the figure-head as she had done must have been attracted by it. To
verify this she walked a few yards away and even as she did so the cross
vanished, shut out from sight by the rock to the left of it. Only from
the point of view of the figure-head could it be seen.
It was as though the beach had tried to frighten her again.
She came towards it, noticing as she came the shortness of the arms. It
was less a cross than a sign-post, a sign-post raised on a mound of
small rocks; it was tarred to preserve it from the weather. From the
left limb close to the post a metal box was hanging by a wire, and on
the post itself, a few feet from the base, there was a plate of
galvanised iron nailed to the wood. On the plate were stamped some
words.
She stepped upon the mound and read: "Kestrel Expedition. Cache I. Don't
disturb 19--"
The date was three years back.
The cache, whatever it might be, was under the mound. Also, this thing
had evidently nothing to do with the wreck, for the embossed metal plate
must have been prepared in some civilized country for the purpose to
which it had been put.
She reached up and tried to detach the box and pulling on it brought
down the slat of wood that formed the arms of the cross, the nails that
had held it having rusted away.
Then, having detached the box, she examined it. It was an ordinary
sailor's tobacco box, she pressed the spring, opened it, and found a
piece of paper folded in four and inscribed as follows, the writing done
with a purple indelible pencil:
Opened the cach.
Took nuthing out.
Stuck in som extry goods
Put the ship about.
To any one that finds it in this blasted hole
Sam Slacum,
Master Mariner. Thresler 19--
Then as an after thought:
"Keep up your spirits."
The date was a year after the date on the post. The cache had not been
visited evidently since then. For three years it had lain here, and for
three years, evidently, only one ship had put in. This dismal thought
took all the pleasure away from the find, she sat down on the rocks
forming the mound and holding the paper in her fingers gave way for a
moment to a depression that came against her like a black, surging sea.
Then she remembered that the cross had been only visible from one point,
that vessels might have been here and not have seen it, that men might
even have landed and found it without leaving the fact behind them,
after the manner of the writer of this paper.
And then, suddenly, and as if from the sky came the thought of
Providence, the feeling that she had been led along the beach to find
the wood and to find this. The remembrance of how she had been saved
from the _Gaston de Paris_ rose up in her mind also--saved almost by a
miracle.
To a person torn from civilization and flung into the arms of Nature the
most terrible thing is the sense of the amorphous, the feeling that
there is no structure in this world where houses are not and laws are
not and streets are not, no power to intervene between oneself and
injury, no thread to cling to. The idea of a Providence to such a person
is like brandy.
The girl remembered the words she had spoken that morning to her
companions when she said that one must not think here but work. There
was no use in thinking of the past or the future, of ships coming or
not, they had been taken care of so far and the feeling came to her that
this would be so to the end.
She rose up, put the paper back in the box and the box in her pocket,
then she turned to the cache.
She walked round the mound to a spot where the covering rocks had fallen
away a bit and going down on her knees began pulling them apart and
carrying them off one by one, dumping them a few yards away. Her rings
hindered her and taking them off she put them in the tobacco box and the
box in her pocket. Under the rocks lay a covering of sand, she fetched
the arm of the cross and scraping away at the sand came upon something
hard, it was the end of a barrel. Then she stood up, flushed with her
work and satisfied.
The stores were there, whatever they might be, and with the help of the
two men they would easily be uncovered. The question whether they would
be of any use after all the years they had lain there recurred to her,
but she put it aside. They would soon see.
Then she started back for the caves taking the slat of wood with her as
a trophy. As she went the recollection of the find followed her
agreeably, she did not know which to congratulate herself most upon, the
wood of the wreck or the cache. Then came the dismal thought of winter,
begotten of the idea of fires. It was the middle of August. Winter lay
ahead. If no ship came to take them off what would their life be like
during the winter months? Imagine this place at Christmas, covered
perhaps with snow! The gloom of this idea pursued her for a mile or more
till all of a sudden she stopped and laughed aloud at her own
stupidity. It was not autumn, it was spring. They were south of the line
and summer lay before them, not winter. That gloomy ghost, fear of the
Future, which spoils so many men's lives in Civilization, had tricked
her and made her miserable and as she cast it from her and pursued her
way she said to herself again: "I will not think, here the person who
thinks and broods is lost."
When she reached the caves the men had not yet returned; leaving the
slat of wood leaning against the cliff she came down to the boat and
stood for a moment looking at the sea. The tide was far out now and
coming in again, the sea had fallen to a gentle glassy swell and the
treacherous wind had died away to a faint breeze. Out there where the
waves were coming in and at the limit of the sands rocks were uncovered,
shaggy, black rocks that seemed covered with fur. She came down to them
and found that the fur was a coating of mussels. Here was another find.
She began to pick them and then, running back to the cave for the baling
tin, filled it to the brim, and placed it in the boat. Having done this
she sat down with her back to the boat to rest and wait for the men.
They ought to have returned by this. The thought that some disaster had
happened to them came to her and tried to creep into her mind, but she
drove it out promptly, stamped on it and began to think of how they
would cook the mussles. They would make a fire with the slat she had
brought back, it was tarred and would burn finely, with that and some
of the bottom boards of the boat, unless Bompard could be persuaded to
go and cut some wood from the wreckage three miles away. Then she
thought how fortunate it was that men smoked. La Touche had a Swedish
match box nearly full of matches and Bompard had a tinder box, one of
the sort that makes a spark by the striking of a wheel against a flint.
Then she yawned.
She had been in the open air since early dawn and it was now noon. She
was not tired, but she was filled with a craving for something, yet she
could not tell what this something was that she wanted and without which
she felt somehow lost. Then she knew--it was a roof.
A person accustomed to live under a roof and suddenly condemned to live
in the open suffers nothing for the first few hours. Then there
gradually comes upon him a weariness and distress almost unimaginable to
those who have not experienced it. He craves not only for a roof but for
walls around him to protect him from the great open spaces that seem
sucking away his individuality. A man living absolutely in the open
without tent or cave or house wherein to concentrate himself would
surely and without doubt either become mad or descend to the level of
the beasts.
She came up the beach to the cave where she had slept, went into it, and
sat down, her mind finding instant relief from the craving that had
filled it. Her hands went up to her hair and began to arrange it as best
they could. Had she been alone on the beach she would have taken the
pins out and left it loose for the winds to comb and blow about, but the
thought of the men prevented her. She did not like the idea of their
seeing her going about with her hair down; after her experiences in the
boat it seemed absurd to quibble over a thing like this and she tried to
argue with herself without avail. It seemed to her that if she went
about in _negligé_ like that she would lower herself. How? There was
nothing unwomanly in flowing hair, there was nothing indelicate. No, but
women of her class never appeared before men in that fashion, she would
lower herself socially.
A fool would have laughed at her, holding that amidst castaways there
was no such thing as social position, and, though fools are not
inevitably wrong in their opinions, he would have been wrong.
Though Bompard and La Touche had dropped the "mademoiselle" in
addressing her, they treated her since landing with a certain respect
which would have been wanting had she been a woman of their own class.
The class difference held and was a greater protection to her than
anything else. In their eyes she was not a woman, but a lady, a fact
that chilled familiarity, or worse, and, with the aid of her superior
intelligence, gave her authority.
She felt this instinctively and determined that at no time and in no
manner would she allow her position to degrade.
Then, having done what she could to her hair she took the rings from the
tobacco box and put them on. She would have much preferred not to have
worn them, they irritated her, but they were part of her insignia and
she put them on.
As she was putting the tobacco box back in her pocket something looked
in at her. It was a rabbit, a grey fat rabbit that had lopped right to
the cave mouth; it sat up for a moment on its hind legs, looked in, and
then lopped off without any hurry, as though a girl seated in a cave
were an accustomed object and a human being something not to be afraid
of.
This fearlessness of the rabbit would have started her on a long and
dismal train of thought had she not checked herself in time and like the
man in the haunted house who kept the fear of ghosts away by thinking of
plum puddings, she started to work, re-folding the sail that had served
her for a pillow the night before; then she took the oilskin coat out
and shook it, and folding it, placed it by the left wall of the cave
with the sou'wester on top of it. She was tidying her house.
Then she went into the men's cave and did a bit of tidying there,
stacking the tins more neatly and putting the odds and ends together.
The sight of the cotton waste gave her an idea and going down to the
boat she emptied the mussels from the baling tin on to the sand, filled
the tin with sea water and bathed her face and hands, drying them on
the cotton. She had finished this operation and had got the mussels back
in the tin when a shout caused her to turn.
It was the men, they were coming along the beach from the break in the
cliffs. Bompard leading, La Touche lagging behind.
Bompard was carrying something under his arm, it was a Kerguelen
cabbage. La Touche carried nothing.