THE STROKE
As she lay, listening, through the black darkness and the singing of the
sea came a faint sound as of something dragging itself along the sand at
the cave entrance. She clutched the knife and sat up. A waft of wind
brought with it a tang of stale tobacco and rain-wet clothes. It was La
Touche.
She drew up her feet and sat crouched against the sailcloth, the knife
half-held in her lap, her fingers nerveless, her mind paralysed with the
knowledge that now, immediately, she would _have_ to fight, that the
Beast was all but upon her. She knew.
She could hear him breathing now and the faint sound of his hands
feeling gently over the floor of the cave. He was searching for her, the
fume of him filled the place, he was almost in touch with her, yet still
she sat helpless as a little child, paralysed in the blackness, as a
bird before a crawling cat. Yet her right hand as though endowed with a
volition of its own was tightening its grasp upon the hilt of the knife.
She had no longer reasoning power. Reasoning power and energy seemed
now in the possession of the knife.
Then something touched her left boot and at the touch her hand struck
out into the darkness, blindly and furiously, driving the knife home to
the hilt in something that fell with a choking sound across her feet.
She forced her feet from the thing that had suddenly fallen on them,
rose, sprang across it and passed through the cave entrance with the
surety of a person moving in broad daylight.
Then the pouring rain on her face brought her to her full senses and
recognition of what had happened.
The knife was still in her hand and her hand was sticky and damp.
She said to herself: "That is his blood." The thought that perhaps she
had killed him did not occur to her. The fear of him was still so
intense, that it made him alive, alive somewhere in the surrounding
darkness, and waiting to seize her. Then she began to steal off towards
the sound of the sea. Twice as she went she stopped and turned, ready to
strike again, then when the water was washing round her feet she came up
the beach a few paces and crouched down.
The sea was at her back and the haunting dread of being followed
vanished.
It was now that she asked herself the question: "Have I killed him?"
Meaning:--"Have I freed myself of him,"--hoping this was so.
The terror behind her having vanished she was now brave. It seemed to
her that the sound of the sea had become sharper; then she realized that
the sound of the rain had ceased. Her mind seemed working in a dual
manner and she had not fully recognized the cessation of the rain till
the sound of the sea clinched the fact.
Through the clear night now came the melancholy crying of the whale
birds, and through the broken clouds a ray of the moon shewed a faint
light in which the cliffs began to stand out.
The incoming tide washed round her so that she had to move, it seemed
determined to drive her up to the caves. She could see now the whole
beach desolate of life and before her, vaguely sketched in the cliff
wall, the cave openings.
She came along the sea edge till she reached the break in the cliffs,
then, looking behind her again to make sure, she took refuge in the
bushes.
For the last few yards before reaching them she seemed wading through
tides of nothingness. In the shelter of the bushes she forgot
everything.