CHAPTER XVII

FRIENDS IN DESOLATION

She turned her face that way and stood for a moment with the faint

breeze blowing her hair. Then she came running up the beach to the

caves. In the men's cave she stood glancing rapidly about her like a

person in a burning house seeking what he may save.

She picked up the tinder box and the box of matches and put them in her

pocket. Then she began to remove everything from the cave. Making a sack

of one of the blankets, she filled it with as much as she could drag

along and brought it to the break in the cliffs where she dumped the

contents.

It took her three journeys. Then, having collected everything in a big

pile, she sat down for a moment to rest. The things would be safe here

till she could fetch them to her new home, and the weather would not

hurt them, except, maybe, the biscuits.

The thought of the biscuits troubled her, and the picture of them lying

exposed in one of the torrential rains. Then she caught sight of a cleft

in the basalt. It was dry and big enough to contain the bags and she

placed them there having taken out some of their contents.

These and a couple of tins of meat she placed in one of the blankets,

making a sack of it. Then she remembered the knife she had left lying on

the sand before the cave where the dead man lay.

She fought against the idea of returning for it. Then her will made her

go.

As she picked up the knife she glanced once again into the cave and once

again caught a glimpse of the naked foot with the toe dug into the sand;

then, placing the knife in its sheath and running like a frightened

child she reached the break, caught up the sack, the extra blanket and

the axe, which she had hidden among the bushes, and started.

It was not a heavy load, fortunately. Had it been heavy she would have

dropped it, for, once moving, she had to run. The idea that she was

deserting people who did not want to be deserted pursued her; now and

again she stopped and turned for a moment--nothing; the Lizard rocks lay

just the same and the beach and the forsaken boat, just the same, and

the jeering gulls; yet, when she turned again to go on she had to run.

Near the great skull her right bootlace, getting loose, nearly tripped

her. She sat down and tied it and then went on, walking now, but

swiftly, till, nearing the river and in full sight of her new

companions, she found herself suddenly free.

The hounds of Fear had given up the chase. The great sea elephants had

driven them away. Here was no longer loneliness.

The great beasts sunning themselves on the flat rocks seemed more

numerous and, as she crossed the river, a monster coming in from the sea

in a thunder of foam saluted the land with a roar.

She recognized, or thought she recognized, the great bull that had

followed her, he was lying, to-day, half-tilted to one side, he looked

drunk with sun and laziness and as she came amongst them and sat down,

as she had sat that day, she found that though a hundred pairs of eyes

were watching her, scarcely a burly figure moved.

They had grown used to her, perhaps, or perhaps they recognized that she

did not fear them now in the least, or that she had come for refuge and

friendship.

Then she rose up and passing amongst them as a friend amongst friends

came towards the caves in the basalt cliffs. They were smaller than the

caves to the west but they were dry and free from water drip. She chose

one and put her bundle down with the axe beside it.

PART III

CHAPTER XVIII

GOD MADE FRIENDSHIP

The place was as populous as a town. That was the soul-satisfying fact

which she absorbed as she sat with the bundle and axe beside her. To be

lonely here one would have to be deaf and blind and without the sense of

smell. Now that their attention was no longer strained by watching her

the great brutes filled the place with all sorts of sounds, grunts and

grumbles, puffs and snorts like the escape of steam from a locomotive

and now and then the flop of a great body changing position. There was

another sound she got to know and recognize, after a while, the

grumbling and rumbling of their interiors. Infested with sea-lice they

were always scratching. Quite close to the cave mouth three great bulls

were lying and every now and then one of them would turn and twist round

and scratch himself with his flippers, the nearest bull had lost an eye

in some past battle and they were all scarred about the necks, and seen

close like this, in their natural state and as one of their company, the

marvel of them, was beyond speaking.

She took off the oilskin coat and laid it on the sand of the cave, took

the things from the blanket and spread the two blankets out and folded

them. As she moved about she saw that the bulls had turned slightly,

attracted by her movements, but they shewed not the slightest sign of

mind disturbance. Then, having placed the things in order, she came out

and walked down to the water's edge, making a detour now and then to

avoid treading on the flippers or the tail of a monster. On coming

amongst them a few minutes ago she had felt not the slightest fear, but

this walk in cold blood from the cliff to the sea edge made her hold her

breath. She felt as she had felt that first day when she sat down close

to them. Angry, and with a sudden movement, one of these creatures could

have destroyed her as a man destroys a fly; but she held on, and was

rewarded.

Not one of them shewed any wish to destroy her, or anger, or uneasiness.

They had accepted her into their company by not attacking or ejecting

her, she ran counter to none of their desires or needs and evidently her

form called up no recollections of the beast Man in their dim brains.

Then she was a female. Sex is more than a physical difference between

one being and another, one can fancy it as one of the outstanding signs

of the Wild to be read by instinct, as instinct reads the weather or

season signs, or the sea mile posts that lead the seals and sea

elephants thousands of leagues to strike some particular beach as an

arrow strikes the bull's eye of a target.

The female, unless with young, is not dangerous to the male. One may

fancy that amongst the few but burningly important warnings and

directions in the book of Instinct.

Here, at the sea edge and within a few feet of the breaking waves, she

sat down on a projecting rock and tried to measure with her eye the vast

herd. The whole beach from where she sat to where the flat rocks ceased

a mile and a half away on her right was spotted with them and she

noticed that here and there they were always putting out to sea and

coming ashore again.

Making for a spot on the right, a hundred yards from her she saw one

coming ashore, swift as an arrow, steering with straight steadfast eyes

and landing with the water cascading from his huge shoulders, whilst on

the left one was putting out to sea in a burst of foam.

Then, of a sudden, all the shore edge bulls got in commotion slithering

about, raising themselves on their flippers and blowing off steam.

A sea elephant was coming towards the beach, moving with a speed thrice

that of any of the others, his head was raised and she could see the

eyes that seemed blazing with wrath or challenge.

Then, as he came thundering on to the rocks, he lifted the echoes with a

roar that resounded for miles along the beach.

All the others had landed in silence.

She did not know that this was a newcomer, a belated bull, held days

behind the arrival of the others by some chance of the sea. Maybe he

had hung fishing off the South Shetlands or the Horn, or beached for

repairs after some sea fight off the Falklands; whatever had held him he

was late.

He came swiftly up the rocks, casting his head from side to side but

unchallenged. There were no females there yet to fight for and they

evidently recognized him as one of the herd and not a stranger. The herd

instinct, without which a nation would be a mob, ruled here and gave the

belated one his place, and after a while of squattering about and

sniffing and blowing he settled down with quieted eyes to rest. He had

reached one of the stopping stages of his life, with the surety with

which he would reach the last, on some desolate beach or reef of the

sea.

The girl watched him. Not only did these new-found companions chase away

loneliness and ghostly fears, but they brought her comfort. They seemed

so sure, sure of food and life and the right to live, so undisturbed; it

was as though she felt the presence of the ghostly shepherd who looks

after the flocks of sea and land and who counts even the sparrows. She

cast her eyes towards the islands and the sea-line; some day a ship would

come and all this would be a dream of the past. She knew it. Her mind

went back over all that she had been saved from--the wreck, the

deathtraps and worst of all--La Touche. It was strange to think that a

man should be worse than the others.

If that fisherman's knife had not been included in the gear of the boat!

It was now, as she sat thinking this and watching the huge harmless

things around her, that a hatred of La Touche came into her mind, a

hatred that seemed to have been waiting to enter until her mind was at

rest. He seemed to her evil itself. He seemed to her connected with all

the disasters that had happened and part of them. He had been the

lookout on the _Gaston de Paris_, his quarrel had sent Bompard to his

death, he had nearly unhinged her mind with terror. Had he possessed the

evil eye? Then, for the first time, she recalled her premonition of

disaster, yet, how she had refused to let the yacht be put off its

course. They might now have been at New Amsterdam only for that. Yet it

was not her fault. She had refused to alter the course, not for any

selfish reason, quite the reverse, she had refused because she did not

wish to spoil the plans of her host. It was Fate, not blind Fate,

because the premonition was full sighted, it was Fate obeying some

order. And it seemed to her that she could read in the order that she

was to be saved. Why? God only knew, but so she read the facts, and she

would be saved to the end and go back to the life she knew, or had known

and die, perhaps, at last an old, old woman.

It seemed to her that this coming on to the sea elephant beach was a

stage in her great journey that had brought her definitely nearer to the

end of her loneliness. And whether all this were true knowledge or

whether it was only the fancy of the ego its effect was to give her

peace.

Then, as she sat there the strangest lonely figure on earth, she

explored the pocket of her skirt and took the things from it. La

Touche's knife, her rings knotted up in her handkerchief, the tobacco

box of Captain Slocum, the tinder-box and box of matches. Then she

opened the tobacco box and re-read the purple writing with the tag "keep

up your spirits." She could not visualize the old slab-sided whaling

captain who had scrawled that, inspired no doubt by practical knowledge

of disaster and the horrors of Kerguelen, but the message came now as an

additional comfort, it seemed to her written by a hand other than that

of man. She put the paper back in the box and, then, everything back in

her pocket.

Then, like a stroke of humour, an incident occurred to lighten the whole

beach.

A big platoon of penguins had crossed the river and marched up to the

sacred precincts of the seal beach. Turning her head to see what the

disturbance was about she sighted the penguins just at the end of their

march and three bulls fronting them. The penguins wished to pass, either

from impudence or a real desire to cross the beach, but the bulls barred

the way, heading them off, turning and twisting, snorting as if to blow

the feathered ones away.

The penguins bowed and scraped and explained, but the bulls, blind to

politeness and deaf to argument only presented their heads, then they

raised their rumps and made a half charge. The girl watched the penguins

going at the double with heads slewed round as though fearful of their

tails. Then she laughed.

The sea elephants had not only made her able to laugh, they had given

her something to laugh over. Then came the thought: why had they refused

the penguins and accepted her?

She did not know that the penguins were rival fishermen, she fancied

that the sea elephants were somehow friendly to her, divining her

friendship for them, and maybe she was right, though not perhaps in the

way she fancied, for when God made friendship He made it out of queer

and sometimes negative materials.

That night as she lay in her cave with a rolled-up blanket for pillow

and the other blanket for covering, neither Ghosts nor Loneliness came

to trouble her.

Two great bulls a few yards from the cave's mouth kept her warm and

comfortable of mind.

She could hear their puffs and grunts and the occasional wobble-wobble

of their digestive organs as they slept, dreaming maybe in their sleep,

for sometimes they tossed and moved, and once one of them gave a "woof"

as though trying to roar under the blanket of sleep.

She thought of dogs lying asleep; dogs dreamed and hunted in their

dreams, why should not these?

Then suddenly the rain came down as though someone had pulled the

string of a shower bath, but she knew that would not drive them away,

guessing that rain to sea elephants was no more disturbing than sun to

peaches.

Then she was chasing penguins along the beach, riding on a sea elephant

towards that absolute oblivion which is the brand of sleep they serve at

Kerguelen.

CHAPTER XIX

THE BIRDS

It rained off and on for three days, but rain in Kerguelen is not the

same as rain in England, just as rain at Windmere is not the same as

rain at Birmingham. It does not depress, especially when you are busy.

In those three days she made three journeys to the break in the cliffs

to recover the things she had left there and she made her journeys, not

to put too fine a point on it, with nothing on but the oilskin coat, the

blanket she used for a sack got hopelessly soaked and her head was

exposed to the rain owing to the fact that the sou'wester was in the

cave where the dead man lay, but she got used to it, especially as

neuralgia and colds are unknown in Kerguelen.

The loss of her only towel, the lump of cotton waste, was far worse than

the loss of the sou'wester and would have been worse still only that she

had other things to think about, especially on these journeys. They were

terrible and required all her fortitude to make them, and they were

terrible for a new reason. The birds had got at La Touche. Great

predatory birds like cormorants thronged the beach opposite the cave,

she could see them going in and out of the cave and she could hear them

quarrelling in there in the darkness.

Then, on her last journey, as she was preparing to come back, happening

to glance that way she saw a gull like a Burgomaster coming out of the

cave mouth and pulling after it something long like a rope upon which

the other gulls flung themselves. She turned and ran.

She had saved everything but one full bag of biscuits; she determined to

leave them. If worst came to the worst there was bread stuff in the

cache.

That night the memory of what she had seen haunted her sleep. It was as

though La Touche, unable to get at her in the material world was

determined to torment her in the imaginary.

She lay awake listening to the whale birds crying and the divers mewing

and quarrelling like cats, then, dropping asleep, she was awakened at

dawn by a new sound. Outside on the beach she heard a moaning like the

voice of someone in pain.

She raised herself on her elbow. It was a human voice without any manner

of doubt. It ceased, and springing to her feet she came out. But there

was no human being on the beach, nothing but the bulky forms of the

great sea bulls, and quite close to the cave a smaller form, a female

that had landed during the night and had just given birth to a baby, a

thing like a slug which she was fondling with her flippers.

Then in the strengthening light the girl could make out here and there

on the beach the forms of other females, and by noon that day there were

hundreds and hundreds, and on the next day the beach was one vast

nursery. It was the first great act in the life history of these sea

people towards which the girl's heart was going out more and more, and

as she sat that day watching the mothers and their babies, and the great

old bulls shuffling about like heavy fathers, sometimes she would smile

and sometimes, sitting and watching, her mind would wander away lost and

trying to grapple with the great mystery of which all this was only a

part.

They were so human, so warm to the heart, and yet only a few days ago

there was nothing here but the rocks and the cold and trackless sea.

Then she noticed that to-day the bulls were not sunning themselves

lazily, although the sun was out. They seemed disturbed, moving about

aimlessly, lifting themselves on their flippers and now and then raising

their short trunks.

Sometimes a female would make as if to get back to the sea but she was

always headed off by a bull.

When dusk fell it seemed that the sentries were doubled, to judge by the

noise of the flopping and moving about. The girl came to the cave

entrance and looked, and lo and behold! every bull had cleared down

towards the sea edge. She could see them stretching away into the dim

distance, a hedge of vast forms broken and moving here and there, but

always restored.

She thought that this line of defence was to keep the females back from

the water, yet there seemed more than mere precaution at the bottom of

the general disturbance that filled the beach. Then as she lay awake she

could hear now and then a distant roar and once a big bull only a few

hundred yards from the cave took it into his head to give tongue with a

blast like the first deep "woof" of a siren, then came another sound

quite close to the cave entrance, a sound like the broken lapping of

ripples, interrupted by movements and little snorts and sighs. It was a

baby seal sucking away at the teats of its mother. The pair was just

outside the cave.

CHAPTER XX

VÆ VICTIS

A Howling wind that rose at midnight carrying niagaras of rain oversea

from the mountains sank at dawn leaving a clear sky and a falling sea.

As she came out into the early morning light she could see boosts of

spray all along the rocks, but by the time she had tidied things up and

finished her breakfast these had vanished and the water was coming in,

rolling lazily, and the sounds of the breakers came sleepy and evenly

spaced as though ruled by a metronome.

The bulls no longer lined the shore, though keeping close to the water

they had broken up into groups, yet still the sense of disturbance was

there pervading the beach like an atmosphere.

The tide was just turning back from the flood, and as she stood watching

she noticed the curious fact that not a single bull was taking to the

water; ordinarily, here and there along the rocks, there was always some

monster taking a header, some vast bulk beaching in a potter of foam.

This morning there was nothing of this sort.

Picking her way between the mothers and their babies she came down to

the sea edge, choosing a broad space left vacant because of the bad

landing conditions. The rocks here were higher, forming a miniature

cliff some four or five feet in height and from this point looking

seaward something caught her eye.

Three black objects moving in a line were making a long ripple on the

swell. They were the heads of three sea elephants moving like one. Then

the line became the segment of a circle bending in shore. But the

swimmers were not going to land; they kept parallel to the rocks and a

few hundred yards out, and as they passed she could see clearly the

great heads and sometimes the massive shoulders rising and washing away

the water and the eyes, as the heads swung now and then shorewards,

wicked eyes that seemed to blaze with the light of anger or battle.

She was not alone in observing them. They had been spotted by a

trumpet-voiced sentry and instantly the whole place was in commotion.

The air split with a roar that passed along from section to section of

the beach whilst the cliffs resounded and a thousand sea-gulls rose as

if from nowhere, crying, cat-calling and making a snowstorm in the

sunlight.

On the roar and as if destroyed by it the three heads vanished.

Then, far out, they reappeared, only to dive again, leaving the sea

blank, but for a school of porpoises passing along on their quiet

business a mile away towards the east.

The girl sat watching. There was something in all this of greater import

than the appearance of three swimming sea elephants. The beach told her

that. Not a bull in all that vast herd but was in motion, either helping

to crowd the females back towards the cliffs or patrolling the rocks.

She could see them here and there rising up on their hind-quarters as

though to get a better view of the sea. They reminded her of dogs

begging for biscuits. Then, turning her eyes seaward again she saw a

black spot; it was a moving head. Then another broke the surface and

another, till in a moment, and for a mile-long stretch, hundreds of

heads appeared, all driving shorewards and then dipping and vanishing

only to reappear still closer in and closing on the beach with the

swiftness of destroyers.

Then she knew, and, springing up, turned to run; but her retreat was cut

off towards the caves by the females herded up and, before she could

collect her thoughts, the army of invasion was flinging itself from the

water, and the whole sea beach from end to end was filled with the

thunder of battle.

For days the lone bulls had been cruising at sea waiting and watching

till all the females were on shore under guard of their husbands. So it

happened every year as now, ending in a battle for the possession of

wives, a battle waged without quarter and with a fury whose sound

reached the echoes of the hills.

Safe on the little rock plateau she watched the thunderous onslaught,

frightened and then terrified and crying out.

The invaders drove in from the sea like the sweep of a curved sword.

They struck the beach first a mile away and the battle ran towards her

like fire along tinder, boomed towards her ever loudening till it broke

to right and left where the sea bulls flung themselves on the rocks and

the land bulls charged the on-comers like battering rams. Some were

hurled back, only to return again, others held their ground. Then the

real business began whilst the ground trembled and the air shook and the

rocks poured blood.

Round her, and for a mile away, they fought like rams and they fought

like dogs and they fought like tigers, and over the roaring siren sounds

of the fight the gulls flew like the fume of it, screaming and swooping

and circling in spirals, and through everything like the continuous

thud-thud of a propeller came the dunch of tons of flesh meeting tons of

flesh head on, shoulder on, or side on.

She saw bulls ripped beyond belief, with shoulders slashed as if by the

down strokes of a sword, yet still fighting as though untouched, with

rumps raised and tails up and teeth in the necks of their enemies, one

had his eye torn out, yet tremendous and victorious he was literally

punching his antagonist back into the sea.

The foam broke red and suddy; she saw that, just as she had seen the

name of the _Albatross_ in the tremendous moment of the great ship's

eclipse, and, just as the name, the red breaking foam seemed to

concentrate in itself the whole terror of the business.

Then, standing like a person helpless in a dream during the full hour

that the battle raged, she saw the females break bounds and spread over

the rocks carrying or pushing their young as if to get closer to the

fight, and then she saw the battle beginning to break. Here and there

bulls beaten and done for were taking to the sea and over all the beach

the fight had spread inwards towards the cliffs. The sea bulls were

beating the land bulls as a whole, interpenetrating them, getting closer

to the females, herding the vanquished out.

And she saw, now, as though a curtain had been raised, that the whole

great battle was between individuals.

The bulls fresh from the sea though attacking _en masse_ were under the

dominion of no enmity in common, each had come to find a rival and

having found him had no eyes for anything else. Nor having once

conquered did he pursue.

Another, and a wonderful thing, shewed up: the females had grouped

themselves as if to be taken, and now on the clearing beach could be

seen family parties, some under the dominion of their new lords and

masters, some still being fought for.

So it hung, dwindling little by little till at last only two warriors

were left like the last-blazing point of the fight.

They were the biggest of the two herds; they looked as though they had

been rolled in gore and they seemed equally furious and equally

exhausted. All their rage was in their eyes. Too beaten to bite they

could only boost one against another like two schoolboys trying to push

one another off a form.

It seemed a miserable and tame ending of their tremendous struggle and

she recognized, or thought she recognized, that the biggest of them was

the bull who had followed her that day like a dog towards the river.

This shouldering and pushing was his last effort to hold to his wife and

family. In war it is the last step that counts, could he make it? Then a

strange thing happened. The two monsters paused in their pushing,

relaxed, and seemed for a moment to forget the existence of one another.

That tremendous weariness lasted for a minute and then they woke up and

the biggest bull began to shuffle off to the sea.

His heart or his mind had failed him. The closer he got to the water's

edge the swifter he moved and the plunge of his body into the water was

the last sound of that battle.

Not a corpse lay on the beach, nothing but the victorious lords and

their ladies, and the lords seemed to pay as little attention to their

ghastly wounds as they did to their old or newly got wives, who, now

that peace was restored, were busy suckling their young.

A queer people, humorous and terrifying, making the girl feel that she

had placed her hand on something likeable, almost lovable, that had yet,

of a sudden, nearly frightened her to death.

She sat recovering herself and helped by the regiment of penguins who

marched up to the seal beach and, knowing better than to attempt to

cross it, stood bowing to the world in general and talking one to the

other perhaps on the horrors of war.

PART IV

CHAPTER XXI

TIME PASSES

It is not good to be alone. As the weeks passed she began to lose and

forget the feeling of surety in rescue and at times, now, she found

herself talking out loud, putting what was in her mind into speech as

though a companion were by, and sometimes she would hear a voice

hallooing to her and start and cast her eyes over the desolate beach

only to see the gulls.

The beach was always haunted by queer noises; the chanting sound of the

waves coming in, a faint sound like the beating of a drum at very low

tide, to say nothing of the booming of bitterns and the barking of brent

geese and the hundred voices of the wind. She would listen and listen,

her mind wandering aimlessly, and in the great rains, when the whole sea

was shut out by the downpour, the noise would lull her like opium.

The baby sea elephants lost their long black coats and put on their

suits of fine yellow fur and took themselves to the nursery by the

river, where all day long they played and tumbled and swam, and then she

would sit and watch them like a mother watching her children.

The great battle of the bulls seemed like something far away beyond

which other things were becoming vague. Something that was not meant to

be seen so close by human eyes, something that had pushed her still

further from man.

It was full summer now, the season of tremendous sunsets and when the

sky was clear, vast conflagrations lit themselves beyond the Lizard

Point painting the islands and purpling the skies, and one evening as

she sat in the western blaze watching the moving beach and listening to

the playing and quarrelling of the nursery a voice said to her:

"Some day all these will take to the sea and leave you. There will be

nothing here but the rocks and the sea."

It was as though the sunset had spoken.

The thought aroused her as a knock on the door arouses a sleeper.

Fighting against it her mind became more fully awake. She said to

herself: "If they go I will go too."

For a long time now she had lived without hot food or drink. On coming

here first she had cut some wood from the figure-head to make a fire,

but it was damp, just damp enough to prevent it from kindling, so she

had let things go as women do in the matter of food when they have not

any one else to feed; she had burrowed into the cache and got at some of

the tins of vegetables and on these and biscuits and tinned meat she

made out, eating less and less as time went on.

It is bad to be alone, even with sea elephants to ward off fears, even

with provisions enough for a year and a cave to shelter one.

She had never given in. She had fought the future and refused to be

frightened by it, she had worked for life and taken refuge in the

moment, and now the moment was taking its revenge for being too much

lived in.

To eat was almost too much trouble and presently the seal nursery became

too long a walk and the little sea elephants at play had lost their

power to interest her. Sleep began to take the place of food and

sometimes, and for no reason, she would weep like a child.

The food she ate sometimes seemed to poison her, bringing on vomiting

and dysentery, and it poisoned her because her stomach failed to digest

it.

She was being poisoned, poisoned by loneliness. Had her stomach not

failed her mind would have given, as it was the weakness of malnutrition

saved her reason as it slowly destroyed her hold on life.

Her dreams became sometimes more vivid than reality and they always held

her to the beach where she watched without terror battles between

monstrous sea elephants and processions of penguins infinite in length,

penguins that passed her bowing, bowing, bowing till she woke in the

dark with the palms of her hands dry and burning and her lips like

pumice stone and her tongue feeling hard like the tongue of a parrot,

but the worst experience of all was a shock that came nearly every time

she lay down at night and just before sleep took her.

It seemed like the blow of a fist, a fist that hit her everywhere,

making her start and draw up her legs and cry out.

All this, perhaps, was what she had foreseen when long ago she had

watched a great ship that had told her of Desolation--and something

worse.

This was what no one had ever imagined in connection with Desolation.

Its power to kill with its own hand. To gently destroy, sucking the

vitality like a vampire and fanning the victim to dullness with its

wings.

The sea elephants might have noticed that the female creature to whom

they had grown so accustomed appeared little now, a shrinking vision

that every day shortened its wanderings; that it walked differently,

that it seemed more bent. But the sea elephants knew nothing of

Loneliness or its works, nor did they notice, one morning, that though

the sun was shining the figure did not appear at all.

CHAPTER XXII

A NEWCOMER

One morning, brilliant, with the deceptive brilliancy of Kerguelen, a

big man, rough and red-bearded and carrying a bundle slung over his

shoulder, stood on the rocks that formed the eastern point of the great

beach; the sun was at his back and before him lay the seven mile stretch

of sand and rock leading to the far-off Lizard Point.

He was over six feet in height but so strongly built that he scarcely

looked his inches. He was a sailor. The gulls might have told that by

the way he stood, and his eyes, accustomed to roving over vast spaces,

swept the beach before him from end to end, took in the sea elephants

moving like slugs and the seal-nursery and the river and the sands

beyond and the Lizard Point crawling out to sea beyond the sands.

Then he cast his eyes inland.

He wanted to get to the west and he had to choose between seven miles of

broken country or seven miles of easy beach.

The sea elephants were a bar across the beach. He could gauge their size

from where he stood, they looked formidable, but they were less so than

the rocks strewing that broken country. He had climbed over rocks and

gone round rocks and nearly fallen from rocks till rocks had become in

his mind enemies bitter, brutal, callous, and far more formidable than

live things. He chose the beach and came down to it, taking his way

along the sea edge as a person takes his way along a pavement edge,

giving possibly turbulent people the wall.

As he closed up towards the seal beach he kept his eyes fixed on the

great bulls and their families, and the bulls, as he drew closer,

shifted their position to watch him, beyond that they shewed no sign.

Then as he began to pass them he recognised that he had nothing to fear,

the females alone, here and there, shewed any sign of disturbance,

shuffling towards him with wicked eyes, rising on their flippers, but

always sinking down and shuffling back as he went on.

Further along, though followed and met by a hundred pairs of eyes, even

the females began to treat him with indifference. It was as though the

whole herd were under the dominion of one brain that recognized him as

harmless and passed him along. He would pause now and then to look at

them with the admiration of strength for strength. He was of their type,

a bull man, rough from the sea as themselves.

Then he saw the caves and would have passed them only for something that

caught his eye. A red labelled Libby tin was lying on the dark sand

close to the mouth of one of the caves, and if you wish to know how an

old tomato tin or an old beef tin can shout, you must go alone to the

great beach of Kerguelen and find one there--which you will not.

The sight of the tin made him start and catch in his breath. The tin was

everything he knew of ships and men focussed in a point, a knight in

armour riding along the beach would have astonished him no more, would

have heated his blood far less.

He struck up towards it, took it in his hand, examined it inside and out

and then cast his eye at the cave before which it had lain. He saw

something in the cave, it was a woman; a woman lying on the sand with a

rolled-up blanket under her head. She was lying on her back and he saw a

thin white hand, so small, so thin, so strange that he drew slightly

back, glanced over his shoulder, as if to make sure that everything was

all right with the world, and then glanced again, drawing closer.

Then he called out and the woman moved. He could see her face now,

white, and thin and drawn, and great eyes, terrible eyes, fixed on him.

Away out at sea, terribly near the coast of Death she saw him, a living

being, as the castaway sees a ship on the far horizon.

He saw her hold out her arms to him and then, throwing his bundle aside,

he was down on his knees beside her, holding the hands that sought his

and with those terrible eyes holding him too.

He saw her lips moving, saw that they were dry and parched. Then he

knew. She wanted water.

An empty baling tin was lying near her. The sight of the river close by

was in his mind, he released the hands, picked up the tin and scrambled

out of the cave. As he ran to the river heedless of sea elephants or

anything else he kept crying out: "Oh, the poor woman. Oh, the poor

woman." He seemed like a huge thing demented. The baby sea elephants

scuttered out of his way and as he came running back he spilt half the

contents of the tin. Then he was down beside her again, dipping his

finger in the water and moistening her lips.

She sucked his finger as a baby sucks and the feel of that made him

curse with the tears running down into his beard. The size of the baling

tin seemed horrible beyond words; he couldn't get it to her lips. Still

he went on, not knowing that it was his finger that was giving her back

life; the blessed touch of a human being that had come almost too late.

He was sitting on his heels, and now, casting his great head from side

to side, he saw things stacked behind her, tins and a bag and metal

things that shone dimly. Putting out his hand he caught a corner of the

bag. It was a bread bag, sure enough, and as he pulled it towards him

the other things came clattering down almost hitting her, and amongst

them, God-sent, a little tin spoon.

He seized it and filled it and brought the tip to her lips and she

swallowed the water making movements with her throat muscles as though

it were half a cupful. He did this a dozen times and then rested, spoon

in hand, watching her. She made a couple of slight movements with her

head as if nodding to him and her eyes never left him for a moment, they

seemed holding on to life through him. He offered a spoonful of water

again, she moved her head slightly as though she had had enough, but her

eyes never left him.

He knew. If the whole thing had been carefully explained to him he could

not have known better how she was clinging to him, as a child to a

mother, as a creature to life. And all the time his rough mind in a

tumble of confusion and trouble was trying to think how she came like

this, with a bread bag close to her and a river within reach.

A tin cup had come down with the other things, it gave him an idea, and

getting a biscuit out of the bag he broke it up, put the pieces in the

cup with some water and let them soak. It took a long time and all the

while, now and then, he kept talking to her.

"There. Y'aren't so bad after all--keep up till I get you something

more. There's no use in troubling--you'll be on your pins soon."

He would pause to swear at the biscuit for not softening quicker,

helping it to crumble with his mighty thumb thrust in the cup. To "get

food into her" was his main idea, it didn't matter about thumbs. He was

not without experience of starvation and thirst and what they can do to

people, and, as he worked away talking to her, pictures from the past

came to him of people he had seen like this, nearly "done in" by the

sea.

Then he began to feed her with the noxious pap. He managed to get six

spoonfuls "into her" and then he saw she would stand no more; still,

that was something, and as he brooded on his heels watching her he saw

that she was making a struggle to keep it down, and he knew that if she

brought it up she was done for. And all the time she kept holding him

with her eyes as though he were helping her in the struggle.

He was. The sight of him gave her just the strength necessary to tide

over the danger point; then she lay still and the food, such as it was,

began to do its work.

One may say that the stomach thinks; every mood of the mind can touch it

and it can influence every mood of the mind.

Then the terrible fixed eyes began to grow more human, then to close

slightly. She was still far at sea, but no longer adrift; like a little

boat taken in tow she was heading now back for the shore. She fell

asleep holding his thumb.

The bits of wood she had chipped from the figure-head were lying in a

little heap near the cave mouth and the axe lay beside them. He noted

them as he sat motionless as a carved figure till the grip on his thumb

relaxed, and the dry claw-like hand, now growing moist and human, gave

up its hold.

Then, crawling out, stealthily and side-ways like a crab, he seized the

axe and, rising up outside, axe in hand, stood looking in at the woman.

He stood watching her, making sure that she was well asleep, then he

turned towards the seal nursery swinging the axe. There he murdered a

little girl sea elephant after a short, sharp chase over the rocks.

Then, close to the caves and with his sailor's knife, he stripped her of

fur and blubber. He placed the blubber on one side, cut up the meat and

retaining the heart and kidneys wrapped the head and the remainders in

the pelt and dumped them in a crack in the rocks.

Having done this he went to the river and washed his hands free of the

blood and grease.

In his bundle there was a box with half a dozen matches, they would have

been gone long ago only that long ago his tobacco had given out. They

were useful now.

He knelt down and undid the bundle. There was in it beside the match-box

a shirt rolled up, two sailors' knives, two tobacco boxes, a couple of

huge biscuits, a piece of sail cloth and a pair of men's boots, one

might have fancied from the knives and tobacco boxes that he was the

only survivor of a party of three cast on the coast and that he had kept

these things as relics. That was the fact.

When he had secured the matches his next thought was of the firewood and

the baling tin. There was a saucepan away at the back of the cave under

the other things but he could not see it. He could see the tin but he

dreaded going in to get it lest he should wake the woman and she should

clutch his thumb again.

That was a bad experience and he told himself that if she had not

relaxed her hold he would have been sitting there still tied hand and

foot and not daring to move--strength in the clutch of weakness, to whom

God has given a power greater that that of strength.

He crawled in and secured the tin without wakening her and as much

firewood as he wanted. It was fairly dry and with the help of the

blubber he soon had it burning between two big stones, then he put the

tin on, half filled with water, and dropped in the seal meat cut fine.

He was making soup for himself as well as for her. He had been without

hot food for ages and the smell of the stuff as it began to cook made

him sometimes forget her entirely.

Predatory gulls had found the pelt and the head in the rock crevice and

their quarrelling filled the beach. He turned his head sometimes to look

at them as he sat squatting like a gipsy before the little fire, tilting

the tin by the handle and stirring the contents with his knife. He was a

man of resource for, before filling the tin with fresh water, he had

dipped it in the sea so as to get some salt into the mess.

Then when the stuff was cooked, having no spoon, he had to wait until it

cooled a bit before tasting it. He went to the cave mouth to have a

look at the woman. The quarrelling of the great gulls had evidently

awakened her, for her eyes were open, and as his figure cut the light at

the cave entrance her head moved. He ran back for the precious tin and,

carrying it carefully, and half carried away by the entrancing smell of

it, knelt down beside her, then picking up the spoon began to feed her

before feeding himself.

CHAPTER XXIII

RAFT

It took him three days to bring her back safe to life. It poured with

rain during those three days but he managed to light little fires in one

of the caves with seal blubber and routing out the things in her cave he

found everything she had so carefully salved, the cups and plates, the

tin of coffee, half empty now--everything, even to the tobacco the men

had taken from the cache, he found Bompard's tinder-box and the Swedish

match box belonging to La Touche. He had given the woman life and she

had given him tobacco and sometimes, sitting in the adjoining cave and

smoking between nursing times, he would bring his big fist down on his

thigh, just that.

Here was a woman starving to death and dying of thirst with food enough

for a ship's company at her elbow. And the tobacco! Where was the

explanation? She was able to speak a little now. She had spoken at first

in French, which he could not understand, then she spoke in English as

good as his; another mystery. A woman all gone to pieces that spoke two

tongues and was different somehow from any woman he had ever known.

Then the things she had said: "Who are you? I am not dreaming this? Are

you really, really, truly--Oh, _don't_ leave me." Crazy talk like that.

And it was always "Oh, don't leave me." Then he would lay his pipe down

carefully on the sand of the cave and pass through the sheeting rain to

have a look at her. Sometimes she would have dozed off and he could get

back to his pipe, sometimes she was awake and then he would have to sit

down beside her and hold her hand and stroke it or play with her fingers

just as one plays with the fingers of a child. At these moments he was

transformed, he was no longer a man, he was a mother, and the hand that

could break down the resistance of a bellying sail was the hand of a

child. He no longer thought of her as the "poor woman," an infant is

sexless, so did she seem, or so would she have seemed had he thought of

the matter. He didn't. As a matter of fact thought was not his strong

suit in the game of life. He was a man from the world of Things. That

was why, perhaps, he made such a good sick nurse. He did not fuss, nor

talk, his touch was firm, firm as his determination to "get food into

her" and his hand, big as a ham, was delicate because it was the hand of

a perfect steersman. It was used to handling women in the form of three

thousand ton ships, coaxing them, humouring them--up to a point.

He fed her now from one of the tin cups. Every two hours of the day,

unless she was asleep, half a cupful of food went into her whether she

liked it or not; "hot stuff," for though the firewood was done he found

that the blubber alone was the best fuel in the world.

On the second day she was able to raise herself up, and once when he

came in he found that she had been moving about the cave and that she

had rearranged the blanket that did for a pillow.

Then on the morning when the blessed sun shone she was able to come out

and sit on a patch of sand with one of the blankets for a rug.

She looked old and worn, but no longer terrible, and as she sat with her

thin hands folded in her lap watching the great sea bulls and the cows,

as if contemplating them for the first time, the man who had helped her

out and placed her there was at a loss--she was a sight to inspire pity

in a savage. He took his seat beside her on a piece of rock and rolling

some tobacco in his hand stuffed his pipe.

"You're all right now," said he.

She nodded her head and smiled.

"Yes," she said, "this is good."

"Lucky I came along," he said, "wouldn't have seen you only an old tin

hit my eye."

He put the pipe in his pocket, got up, went to the cave where he did the

cooking and came back with a cup half full of coffee and half a biscuit.

"Dip it in," said he.

She did as she was bid. It was the first time he had given her coffee

and the stimulant brought a flush to her cheeks and cheered her heart

so that she began to talk.

"There are more biscuits in a place down the beach," she said, "and down

there," she nodded to the left, "there are a lot of things hidden under

a heap of stones. It's beyond the river on the left."

Then the empty cup began to shake in her hand and he took it from her.

"You're not over strong yet," said he, "but you'll be better in a bit

with this sun. Y'aren't afraid of the sea cows, are you?"

She shook her head.

"Thought you wouldn't be," said he, "there's no harm in them. Well, I'll

be moving about. I'll go and have a look down the beach and see what's

to be found."

He hung for a moment with the cup in his hand shading his eyes and

looking seaward, then he turned towards the cave to put the cup back.

"What is your name?" she said, suddenly, bringing him to a halt.

"Raft," said he.

"Raft," she repeated the name several times in a low voice as if

committing it to memory or turning it over in her mind.

"How long might you have been here?" he asked, standing in a doubtful

manner, as though debating in his mind the wisdom of allowing her to

strain her strength answering questions.

"I don't know," said she, "a long while. I was wrecked with two men from

a yacht. The _Gaston de Paris_. We came here in a boat. They are both

dead."

At the name _Gaston de Paris_ Raft nodded his head. Already a suspicion

that she might be one of the yacht's crowd had come into his mind, so

the news came scarcely as a surprise.

"It was us you hit," said he, "I'm one of the chaps from the old

hooker."

"The _Albatross_?"

"That's her."

She said nothing for a moment, looking away over at the islands. She

could see the name, still, written as if on the night. Then she

remembered the boat sail she had seen when adrift with Bompard and La

Touche.

"There were four of us got off," said he, "we struck them islands over

there and put in but there was nothing but rocks in that part. Next day

we put out, but got blown down the coast; we got smashed landing; all

but a chap named Ponting and me went under, but one chap's body was hove

up and we stripped him. I've got his boots and his knife in that bundle

over there in the cave, and Ponting's. We saved a bag of bread."

He took his seat again on the rock and, placing the cup beside him, took

the pipe from his pocket, but he did not light it. He held it, rubbing

the bowl reflectively. He seemed to have come to an end of his story.

"Did the other man die?" she asked.

"He went getting gulls' eggs one day," said Raft, "and slipped over the

cliff. They're big, the cliffs, down there. I found him all broke up on

the rocks. He didn't live more than a minute when I got to him and I had

to leave him; the tide was coming up."

"Poor man," said she.

He rose up and, taking the cup, stood for a moment again looking

seaward.

"Well, I'll be off down the beach," said he, "you won't be frightened to

be here by yourself?"

"No," she replied, "but don't go very far."

"I'll keep in sight," said Raft.

He put the cup in the cave and off he went whilst she sat watching him;

everything, life itself, seemed centred in him. A terrible feeling came

over her at moments that he might vanish, that, looking away for a

moment and turning again she might find him gone and nothing but the

beach and the gulls.

Beyond the river he turned and saw her watching him and waved his hand

as if to reassure her. She waved in reply and then sat watching till he

reached the figure-head and stood to examine it.

He seemed very small from here. She saw him standing and looking inland,

he had seen the cache, no doubt, and he would want to go to it; if he

did that he would disappear from sight. But he did not go to it, he kept

on always in view, exploring the rocks and the sands and stopping now

and then as if to look back.

It seemed to her that he could read her mind and feel her terror of

being left alone. Then her mind went back over the last few days.

She had been very near death. She had drunk the last of the water in the

tin and had been too feeble to go for more. What had brought her to that

pass? It seemed to her that the rocks, the sea and the sky had slowly

sucked her vitality away from her till at last she could not eat, could

not walk, could not think. All that time her mind had never thought of

loneliness, the thing that was killing her had veiled itself by numbing

her brain and weakening her body. But near death her mind had cleared

and the great grief of desolation stood before her. Then God-sent, a

form had pushed the grief aside and a hand had taken her lonely hand and

a finger had moistened her lips. But it was the knowledge that the hand

was a real hand that gave her the first lead back to life.

Then the last three days. The feeling of extreme helplessness and

sickness and the knowledge that she was watched over and cared for and

thought for--there was no word to express what all that meant. It turned

the great rough figure to a spirit, great and tender and benign.

He was coming along back now carrying something he had picked up amongst

the rocks. It was a crab.

A great satisfactory two pound crab bound up in kelp ribbon so craftily

that it could neither bite nor escape. He put it on the sand for her to

look at before taking it off to boil.

The sun was hot and as he stood whilst she admired his prize: "Don't you

feel the sun to your head?" asked he.

"No," she replied, "I like it. I had a hat--a sou'wester but it's in a

cave away down the beach. There's a dead man there."

"A dead man?" said Raft.

"Yes. I killed him."

"Killed him?"

"It was partly accident. He was one of the sailors. He was a bad man.

The other sailor got lost and never came back and I was left alone with

this man. He nearly frightened me to death."

"Swab," said Raft.

"Then one night he crawled into my cave in the dark and I struck out

with the knife and it killed him--he's lying there now. I didn't mean to

kill him, but he frightened me."

"Swab," said Raft, two tones deeper. Then he laughed as if to himself.

"Well, that's a go," said he. He took a pull at his beard as he

contemplated this slayer of men seated on her blankets at his feet. She

glanced up and saw that he was laughing and a wan smile came around her

eyes, it seemed to him like a glimmer of sunshine from inside of her.

Then bending down he pulled up the blanket that had slipped from her

left shoulder and settled it in its place.

"I'll tell you all about it some time," said she, "when I feel

stronger."

"Ay, ay," said Raft. Then he went off with the crab to boil it.

As he attended to this business in the cave, half-sitting, half-kneeling

before the little fire, he chuckled to himself now and then, and now and

then he would bring his great hand down on his thigh with a slap.

The idea of her killing a man seemed to him the height of humour. He

didn't put much store on men's lives in general, and none at all on the

life of an unknown swab who deserved his gruel. Then he was of the type

that admires a fighting thing much more than a peaceful and placid

thing, and he felt the pleasure of a man who has rescued a seemingly

weak and inoffensive creature only to find that it has pluck and teeth

of its own.

She had gone up a lot in his estimation. Besides, her feebleness and

forlorn condition had wounded him in a great soft part of his nature

where the hurt felt queer. This new knowledge somehow eased the hurt. He

could think of her now apart from her condition and think more kindly of

her, for the strange fact remains that the very weakness and forlornness

that had wakened his boundless compassion had antagonized him. When he

had found the crab the idea had come to him that here was some different

sort of food to "put into her;" he was thinking that same thought now

but with more enthusiasm. Yes, she had gone up a lot in his estimation.

CHAPTER XXIV

A DREAM

This same Raft whom the fo'c'sle could subdue to the surroundings,

making him as faithful a part of the picture as the kerosene lamp, on

the beach stood immense both in size and significance.

It was as though the fo'c'sle had the power to dwindle him, the beach,

to expand him.

The girl had never seen him in the fo'c'sle so she could not appreciate

the difference that environment made in him, and perhaps she saw him

ever so slightly magnified, but it seemed to her that he was big enough

to form part of the landscape, that he was one with the seven mile beach

and the Lizard Point and the great islands and the sea elephants.

Not only had she been crushed down by loneliness; size had helped. Raft

seemed to reduce the size of things, so that the seven mile strand and

the vast islands and sea spaces no longer burdened her, and in some

magical way whilst he reduced the proportions of his surroundings they

increased his potency and significance. He was in his true setting, part

of a vast picture without a frame.

It was not alone his physical dimensions. Bompard had been a big man,

but Bompard could not fill that beach. No, it was something else--what

we call, for want of a better expression, "the man himself."

Then there was another thing about him, he found food of all sorts where

Bompard and La Touche had found nothing; he brought in crabs and

cray-fish and penguins eggs, he brought down rabbits with stones. That

was his great art. A stone in the hand of Raft was a terrible missile

and his aim was deadly.

At the end of a week the girl was able to accompany him along the beach

to the cache where he unearthed some stores and came upon the harpoon

which he carried back with them.

Then one day he suddenly appeared before her carrying her lost

sou'wester. He had gone off down the beach in the direction of the

Lizard Point and he came back carrying the hat in his hand. He must have

been into the cave where the remains of La Touche lay, but he said

nothing about that.

It was nearly a fortnight since she had told him of how she had lost it

and he must have treasured the fact up in his mind all that time.

The weather had cleared again, after a tremendous blow from the south,

and as they sat that evening in the sunset blaze before the caves, Raft,

who had been staring steadfastly out to sea as if watching something,

began to talk.

"That chap Ponting told me this side of the coast is no use for ships,"

said he. "They keep beyond them islands for fear of the reefs. I reckon

the old sea cows know that or there wouldn't be so many on this beach.

He said there was a bay round to the westward where ships put in."

"How far?" asked the girl.

"A goodish bit," replied Raft. "I was making for that bay when I struck

you. I was thinking," he finished, "that when you were stronger on your

pins we might make for there."

"Leave here?"

"Ay," said Raft, "there's not much use sticking here."

She said nothing for a moment, she felt disturbed.

Since her recovery she had fallen into a state of quietude. She who had

been the leader of Bompard and La Touche, she who had fought and worked

so determinedly for existence had now no ambition, no desire for

anything but rest. The strength of this man who had given her back her

life seemed a shield against everything, just as a wall is a shield

against the wind; she was content to sit in its shelter and rest. The

idea of new exertions and unknown places terrified her.

"But how are you to know the bay?" asked she, "there may be a good many

bays along the coast."

"No," said Raft, "Ponting told me there wasn't a decent anchorage but

this. He said this bay wasn't to be mistook, looks as if it was cut out

with a spade and the cliffs run high and black, there's a seal beach

that way and it's after seals the ships come. Well, there's time enough

to think of it seeing you are not fit to move yet."

"Oh, I'll soon be all right," said she. "I'm getting stronger every

day."

"What gets me," said Raft, "is how you fell to pieces like that, with

all that stuff at your elbow and a river close by."

"It was being alone," replied she, "I did not know it at the time, but I

got so that I did not care to eat and then at last I believe I didn't

eat anything at all. I couldn't have imagined that just being alone

would make a person like that. You see I had food and water. If I had

been compelled to hunt about for food I expect I would have been all

right, as it was I had nothing to do and was just driven in on myself."

Raft said nothing for a moment, he was turning this over in his mind. He

could not understand it. The idea of a person with plenty of food and a

good set of teeth dying of starvation just because she was lonely seemed

to him outrageous, yet he knew she was speaking the truth. It was

another strange thing about this strange woman. She was altogether

strange, different from any human being he had ever met and growing more

different every day now that she was "filling out," and getting her

voice back.

That voice, soft and musical and refined, had disturbed the sea

elephants when she first talked to them as people talk to horses and

dogs, it was something they had never heard before in the language of

tone, and so it was with this sea animal with a red beard. He could not

tell whether he liked it or not, never asked himself the question, it

was part of her general strangeness and to be considered along with her

clinging, man killing and double-tongued qualities, also with the fact

that she had starved almost to death because she was alone; also with

her eyes and new face, for she was growing younger looking every day and

better looking, and her eyes, naturally lovely, were growing natural

again.

As he looked at her now sitting in the sunset this return of beauty

struck him as it almost might have struck the sea elephants. It pleased

him. Had he put his thoughts into words he would have said that she was

filling out and getting more pleasant looking. At her very best he would

never have tacked the word beauty on to her; a buxom, rotund, beady-eyed

young female would have made the word beauty spring to his lips--Cléo

de Bromsart, never. But she was getting more pleasant looking and her

eyes were getting over their "stiffness"--which was something, and he

felt pleased.

Presently, alone in his cave, he would bring his fist down on his thigh

with a bang and chuckle over her contrarieties, reviewing her against

that terrific picture he had seen in the cave when he had gone to fetch

the sou'wester; the picture of a man who had been torn to pieces by

Burgomasters and cormorants. It had been necessary to wash the

sou'wester for a long time in sea water before bringing it back.

She had done that chap in proper; the work of the gulls and the work of

the girl were hardly dissociated in his mind--there was the Result. Just

as though a baby had smashed a rock with its fist. Hence the chuckles,

heightened by her clinging ways, her fragility, her musical voice, her

starvation due to loneliness, her double tongue, her unaccountable

tricks of manner.

And she, as she sat in the sunset not knowing his thoughts, had you

asked her how she felt about him would have answered with steadfast eyes

that she loved him. Meaning that she loved him as she had learned to

love the sea-elephants, or as she would have loved a great carthorse

that had stood between her and danger, or a huge dog. She scarcely

thought of him as a man--just as a great benign thing, human, but nearer

to the heart than any human being life had brought her in contact with

till now.

Her almost passionate gratitude had little to do with this measure of

him; any kindly man might have done what he had done. It was perhaps the

feeling of his great strength, of his possible fierceness that gave the

touch of benignity to him.

"Weren't you afraid of them sea cows?" said he at last, "you must have

come clean through them to get to that cave."

"No," she replied, "I didn't mind them, quite the reverse. I came here

because of them."

"Because of them!"

"Yes. They were company."

"Meaning--"

"Friends."

"Y'mean to say--friends did you call them? Well, I don't know, there's

no accountin'."

He hung in irons. So she had been keeping company with the sea cows--and

she talked of them as "friends."

Now Raft, for all his limitless power of compassion for a female in

distress would have slaughtered those same "sea-cows" to the last bull,

and without a shred of compunction or compassion, had he possessed

kettles to boil down the blubber and a vessel to carry the oil. He had

already done in two of the babies for food when she was not looking. The

idea of talking about them as friends tickled his mind in a new place.

Then, as he glanced at the great bulls taking headers in the sunset

light and snorting in from the sea and squatting over the beach, he came

as near as anything to bursting into a roar of laughter.

Then he suddenly remembered supper and went off to prepare it.

The girl, left to herself, smiled. He had given her back that power and,

like the sea elephants when they repulsed the penguins, he had given her

something to smile over. She saw that he could not understand her in the

least in a lot of little things, whilst she understood him through and

through--or so she thought. She had thought the same about the sea

elephants till the great battle, and--she had never seen Raft with

murder in his eyes making the elements of beef tea.

He had made a stew for supper out of mussels, canned vegetables, seal

meat and a piece of rabbit and when supper was over she went to bed in

the bed he had made for her, for he had stripped the cache of all its

wearing apparel and the remaining blankets, reserving the blankets for

her use.

Then as she lay awake before dropping off to sleep she heard a sudden

burst of noise from the night outside. It sounded as though one of the

bulls had suddenly perceived a joke and were giving vent to his

feelings.

She knew what it was, and she guessed the joke, and then, lying there in

the dark, she began to laugh softly to herself with laughter that seemed

to ease her mind of some old incubus clinging to it--less laughter than

a sort of inverted form of crying and ending up almost in the latter

with a few sniffs.

Then she fell asleep and dreamed that Raft had turned into something

that seemed like a sea lion. She had never seen a sea lion, but this

dream--one looked something like a lion and something like a sea

elephant and something like Raft--with a touch of a carthorse. It had

flippers, then it had wings, and the setting was the Place de la

Concorde which bordered quite naturally the great beach of Kerguelen.

CHAPTER XXV

STORIES ON THE BEACH

For a week after that day not a word was said about their departure for

that problematical bay to the westward where ships put in, or where they

might put in should they find themselves in the region of Kerguelen. The

idea seemed to the girl like one of those nightmare ideas, those

terrific tasks which fever or indigestion sets to one in dreams.

It blew during that week as it had never blown before; blew from the

north and the south and the west Atlantic oceans of rain driving

seawards from the hills and passing off towards the islands, followed by

breaks of clear weather and blue sparkling skies filled with the tearing

screaming wind.

They talked a good deal during these days and at odd times, and the girl

began to get some true glimpses of the mind of her companion, a mind

that had never grown up, yet had in no wise deteriorated from remaining

ungrown. Raft, who had been round the world a dozen times and more, knew

less of the world than a modern child. Fights and roaring drunks and the

smoke haze of bar rooms, wharf Messalinas and sailors' lodging houses

had done him no harm at all. His innocence was vast and indestructible

as his ignorance.

Bompard and La Touche were old men of the world compared to Raft; they

were of different stuff, and being yachtsmen they had been long rubbed

against the ways of high civilization.

To the girl, born and bred amongst all the intricacies of modern life

and thought, and with a sense of mind-values as delicate as a jeweller's

scales, Raft was a revelation.

She tried to sound his past. He had no past beyond the _Albatross_. He

could tell all about the _Albatross_ and his shipmates and the Old Man

and so forth, but beyond that lay only a ship called the _Pathfinder_,

and beyond that a muddle of ships and ports, a forest of masts

stretching to a grey time an infinite distance away, the time of his

childhood. He had no professed religion and he could neither read nor

write.

Yet he had remembered her sou'wester, this man without a memory and he

was always astonishing her by remembering little things she had said or

things she had wished for.

Of social distinction, beyond the division of afterguard from fo'c'sle,

he seemed to possess little idea, save for a vague echo, caught from the

man Harbutt, about the Rich People; and as to sex, beyond a queer

instinctive delicacy and a tenderness due to her weakness and the memory

of how he had found her, she might just as well have been a man, or a

child like himself.

Another thing that struck her forcibly was the sense of his good humour.

His mind seemed to possess an equable warm temperature, a temperature

that it seemed impossible to lower or raise. She could not fancy him

getting angry about anything. Had she seen him as in the past during one

of his rare sprees, fighting the crowd and tossing men about like

ninepins, she would have said: 'This is not the same man'--and maybe she

would have been right.

"Where did you come from," said he one day to her as they sat rain-bound

watching the gulls dashing about over the crests of the incoming seas.

"I came from Paris--you have never been to Paris?"

No, he had never been to Paris. He knew of the place, it was in France.

Then she thought that she would interest him by trying to describe it.

She spoke of the busy streets and the great Boulevards, then she tried

to describe the people and what they were doing and then, as she talked,

it was just as though Kerguelen had become the big end of a telescope

and the doings of civilisation, as exemplified by Paris, a panorama seen

at the little end.

What _were_ they all doing, those crowds that she could visualize so

plainly?--deputies, lawyers, military men, shop-keepers, pleasure

seekers--towards what end were they going?

Then, with a strange little shock, it came to her that they were going,

as a mass, nowhere except from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn; that they

were exactly like the crowd of sea gulls, each individual rotating in

its own little orbit, and that the wonderful coloured and spangled crust

called Civilization was nothing more than the excretion of individual

ambitions, desires and energies.

Then, when she had finished her talk about the wonderful city of Paris,

she found that Raft, comfortably propped against the cave wall, was

asleep.

One of the disconcerting things about this huge creature was his

capacity for sleep. He would drop asleep like a dog at the shortest

notice and lie with his face in the crook of his arm like a dead man.

She would watch him sometimes for half an hour together as he lay like

this, and at first the vague fear used to come to her that he had been

stricken by some malady in the form of sleeping sickness that made him

act like this. She did not know that he had kept awake all those nights

he had looked after her and that the same brain that could sleep and

sleep and sleep could put sleep entirely away, just as the great body

that lolled about like the sea elephants, could, like the sea-elephants,

become a thing, tireless, and capable of infinite endurance.

Then again, he would smoke in silence for ages as though oblivious of

her existence. She had observed the same thing in Bompard and La Touche

who would sit cheek by jowl without a word, as though they had

quarrelled. This trait pleased her, and she fell in with it

unconsciously as though his mind had moulded hers and were teaching it

the taciturnity of the sea.

One day, during a brief spell of calm when they were seated in the sun,

dinner over and nothing to do, she tried the effect of literature upon

him. She told him the story of Jack and the Bean Stalk and was delighted

to find him interested when he had got his bearings and knew that a

"giant" was a man fifty feet high; the cutting open of the giant--it

occurred in her version--pleased him immensely. Then when she had

finished she was alarmed to find, from words dropped by him, that he

considered the story to be true, or at least to be taken seriously. She

did not disillusion him; to do so she would have had to tell him that

she had lied. That was the funny part of the thing. He would have said

to himself "what made her lie to me about that chap?" By no possible

means could he have imagined a person sitting down to invent in cold

blood for the amusement of others a yarn about what never happened; no,

it would have struck him as one of those lying personal yarns heard in

the fo'c'sle sometimes and likely to produce a boot aimed at the

teller's head. He had seen men reading books in the fo'c'sle

occasionally and old newspapers, but of literature, fictional or

otherwise, he had no more idea than the bull sea elephants of astronomy.

This she intuitively felt and so held her tongue. But she had interested

him, and she went on, producing from her memory the story of the Forty

Thieves.

Now he had accepted the bean stalk explanation, for he had never to his

knowledge seen a bean stalk, but the jars in the Forty Thieves he

revolted at, for a jar to him was a demijohn, or a thing of that size. A

man could not get into that.

However, on explanation, he passed the jars, and the boiling oil repaid

him. He seemed to delight in torture and blood.

"Where did you get that yarn from?" asked he.

"Out of a book," said she.

"Got any more?" he asked.

"Plenty," she replied casting round in her mind, and wondering how it

happens that children's stories run so frequently to blood and ferocity.

She remembered Anatole France's story of the juggler who juggled before

the shrine of Our Lady, having no better offering to make to her, and

Raft sat spellbound, after having made out that Our Lady was the Virgin

Mary, the patron of Catholic shipmates. She told it so well and so

simply, with unobtrusive foot notes as to monasteries and their

contents, that he could not but see the point, the poor man having

nothing to offer but his stock in trade of tricks, offered it.

Well, what of that? It was the best he had, and, if she could see the

other chaps doing things for her, she could see him. The story, whose

whole point lies in the supposed non-existence of the virgin as a

discerning being, ought to cast its gentle ridicule not on the ignorant

juggler but on the more learned brethren of the monastery. To Raft they

were all in the same boat, and as to whether she could see them or not

he didn't know.

The story fell flat, horribly flat, told to the absolutely simple

hearted, and to the Teller, after explanations were over, it seemed that

the Listener had in some way cut open modern genius and exposed a little

tricky mechanism working on a view point of chilled steel.

That Raft, in fact, was so big in a formless way that he was much above

the story.

She remedied her blunder on the next storytelling occasion with Blue

Beard.

Then the weather broke fair and the islands drew away and the clouds

rose high and the white terns, always flitting like dragon-flies amidst

the other birds, rose like the clouds, they always flew higher in fine

weather, and with the smooth seas a new thing shewed like a sign: the

little sea elephants were no longer confining themselves to the river

and near shore. Some of them were taking boldly to the sea. Their small

heads could be seen sometimes quite a long way out.

This fact gave the girl food for thought. The summer was getting on.

It almost seemed that Ponting was right, that no ships would venture

into that sea between the islands and the shore, and that their only

hope of rescue lay in that bay away to the west, heaven knew how far.

Then an idea came to her. Two ships had already been here for certain:

the wreck and the ship of Captain Slocum, then there was the cache, some

ship must have left that.

She told Raft what was in her mind but got little consolation from him.

He opined that the wreck wouldn't have been a wreck if she had kept

clear of this dangerous water, that the cache might have been left by

people who had landed somewhere else, and as for Captain Slocum's ship

she might have been a whaler. Whalers according to Raft were always off

the beaten track and poking their noses into places where honest deep

sea ships would not dare to go.

"Well, then," said she, "how about that bay you spoke of?"

"Oh, that place," said Raft.

"Yes."

He hung silent for a moment as if revolving the question in his mind.

"But you were set against it," said he at last.

"Yes, I know, but I am stronger now, and it seems useless staying here

till perhaps the winter comes."

She paused and looked towards the islands. She hated the idea of that

journey which she pictured over rocks and across plains, where? In

search of a place that might not exist, and where, if it did exist, no

ship might perhaps be found. An almost hopeless journey involving

unknown hardships.

"You ain't strong enough," suddenly said Raft.

It was as though he had touched some spring in her character that set

the machinery of determination working.

"I am strong enough," she replied. Then after a moment's pause something

in her began speaking, something that seemed allied to conscience,

rather than thought, something that spoke almost against her will.

"We ought to go, we ought not to lose any chance. It seems almost

hopeless, but it is the right thing to do. To stay here is not fighting,

and in this place one has to fight if one wants to live or to get away.

I feel that. To sit here with one's hands folded is wicked."

"Well, I believe in making a fight," said the other, "question is, will

we be any the better."

"There's always the chance."

"Ay, there's always a chance."

Then an idea came to her.

"How about the boat?" she asked.

"That old boat along the beach?"

"Yes, suppose we took her and rowed down the coast."

"There aren't no oars in her."

"There are oars. I hid them amongst the bushes and I can find them

again."

Raft considered the proposition for a moment, then he shook his head and

tapped the dottle out of his pipe.

"Not with them winds that get you here," said he, "they let out when

you're least expecting it and we'd be on to the rocks and done for. I'm

not saying if we had a boat crew we mightn't try, but we're

under-handed. No, we'll have to hoof it if we go."

"Hoof it--what is that?" asked she.

"Walk it," replied Raft, "and I'm thinking it's beyond you, you aren't

fit for travelling rough, like me."

"Aren't I?--I suppose I don't look strong, but I am, of course I'm not

as strong as you, but I can keep on once I begin, and I have been

through a good deal ever since that night we were wrecked, I don't think

any journey we could make would be worse than that. And I was not

prepared for all that as I am now for anything that may happen. Think of

it, we had all been sitting at dinner, it was only a little while after

dinner and I had my evening frock on."

"Your evening which?"

"Dress. They were all rich people on board the yacht and they put on

different clothes always for dinner. It seems stupid--well, I was down

below and I suddenly felt that I must get on deck, so I put on these

clothes and my oilskin and sou'wester, then, as I was coming upstairs

the collision happened. I got on deck and it was quite dark until the

electric light was put on, then I saw the stern of your ship with the

name on it."

She paused with a little shudder and seemed visualizing the terrible

picture again.

"Heave ahead," said Raft interestedly.

"Then I was thrown into a boat and forgot everything until I woke in the

early morning alone with those two men. It was all just like that. I

wasn't prepared for hardship as I am now, and I hadn't a companion like

you. Those two men were no use."

"How's that?" asked he.

"Well, they were always grumbling."

"Swabs."

"I didn't mind that so much, but they were no use, they wouldn't do

things. I had to make them go and hunt for firewood, they might just as

well have had no hands. Bompard, the oldest one wasn't so bad--"

"It was the other chap you done in," said Raft. "Well, I reckon you've

been through it. Rum thing I saw you first when I was handling a topsail

in that blow. The weather broke and I was holdin' on to the yard when I

sighted you away to starboard with the sun on you. Old Ponting was close

to me and he yelled out he'd seen you before and give you your name, the

_Gaston de Paree_."

"And we sighted you," said she, "I was down below when the steward came

with a message that there was a ship in sight, I came up and there you

were with the sun on you and the storm clouds behind, and do you know

you frightened me."

"How so?" asked Raft.

"I don't know. I felt there was going to be a disaster of some sort--it

was almost like a warning."

"Well, there's no saying," said Raft. "I've known a chap warned he was

going to be drowned, and drowned he was sure enough. I was down below

asleep and shot out of my bunk by the smash; then I was on the main

deck, the chaps all round shouting for boats, and if you ask me how I

got off I couldn't tell you. One minute a big light was blazing, then it

was black as thunder. My mind seemed to go when the black came on, I'd

no more thought than a blind puppy. Something saved me. That's all I

know."

"God saved you," said the girl.

"Well, maybe He did," said Raft; "but what made Him let all the other

chaps drown?"

"I don't know," she replied, "but He saved you just as He saved me. I

know He looks after things. Look at those sea elephants and the gulls;

He leads them about by instinct."

"What's that?" asked Raft.

"Instinct," said she, suddenly formulating the idea, "is God's mind, it

tells the birds and elephants where to get food and where to go and how

to avoid danger; you and I have minds of our own, but our minds are

nothing to the minds of the birds and animals. They are never wrong.

Look out there at those porpoises."

"Them black fish," said Raft, shading his eyes.

"Yes, well, look at the way they are going along, they are on a journey,

going somewhere, led by instinct, and I think when human beings find

themselves having to fight for life they fall back on instinct, the

mind of God comes to help them. Look at me. I believe I found that cache

led by instinct and I would never have pulled through only instinct told

me I would, somehow. God's mind told me."

"Well, there's no saying," said Raft.

"I don't want to leave here," she went on, "but I feel we ought to go.

The chances seem small, even if we find that bay; still, I feel we ought

to go."

"I'm feelin' the same way myself," said Raft.

"Then we will go and the sooner we start the better."

"I'm thinking of them porpoises," said Raft.

"What about them?"

"Well, there's a saying they hug the shore pretty close if bad weather

is coming. It's fine to-day, but I've a feeling there's going to be

another blow soon and maybe we'd better wait till it's over--maybe it's

instinc'," he finished, looking round shyly.

The girl laughed. "If you feel like that," said she, "we had certainly

better wait. Maybe the porpoises were sent to tell us."

"There's no saying," replied he. They were seated on the rocks just

where she had watched the great battle and far and near the "sea cows"

were sunning themselves on the rocks whilst beyond the seal beach the

penguins were drilling in long lines. Scarcely a breath of wind stirred

and the sea lay calm like a sheet of dim blue glass to where the islands

sat beneath the sky of summer.

But the islands had drawn closer since morning and the birds seemed

busier than usual and more clamorous. To the eastward where the cliffs

rose higher, guillemots had their home on the ledges of basalt and the

wheezy bagpipe-like cry of them came in bursts every now and then as

though they were angry about something, whilst the cry of the razorbills

and the "get-away, get-away" of the kittiwakes had a sharper note. The

puffins alone were calm, swimming in coveys on the glassy water and

leaving long ripples in their wake.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE GREAT WIND

The sun sank, broadened out and banded with mist beyond the Lizard

Point, and before his upper limb had been swallowed by the rocks the

business began with a blow from the hills.

Most winds come in gusts and pauses, this wind from the Infernal Regions

came at first steady and warm, never ceasing, steadily growing like the

thrust of an infinite sword driven with a rapidly increasing momentum

and a murmur like the voice of Speed herself.

Raft and the girl saw that the sea elephants were herding up into the

shelter of the cliffs and that the gulls had vanished as though they had

never been.

And still the wind increased, its voice now a long monotonous cry,

steadily sharpening, yet deepening, stern as the Voice of Wrath.

"It's blowing up," said Raft, "and there's more coming."

Then over the cliff and undershot by the last rays of sunset came the

clouds chased and harried by the wind, tearing before and torn by the

teeth of the gale.

Raft and the girl stood watching till pebbles and rocks the size of

coconuts began to fall on the beach blown over the cliff edge, till the

sea, flat and milk-white, seemed to bend under the stress, till it would

seem that the very islands would be blown away.

The girl felt light-headed and giddy as though the rush above had

rarefied the air under the cliffs. Not a drop of rain fell, the wind

held the sky and the whole world. It seemed loosed from some mysterious

keeping never to be recaptured until it had blown the sea away and

flattened the earth.

And still it increased.

Raft, taking the girl by the arm, drew her back into the cave; she was

trembling. It seemed to her that this was no storm, that something had

gone wrong with the scheme of things, that this Voice steadily being

keyed up was the voice of some string keeping everything together,

stretched to its utmost and sure to snap.

Then it snapped.

The whole of Kerguelen seemed to burst like a bomb-shell with a blaze of

light shewing islands and sea.

Then again it seemed to burst with a light struggling through a deluge.

The boom of the rain on the sea came between the thunder crashes whilst

a giant on the hills seemed to stand steadily working a flashlight, a

light so intense that now and again through broken walls of rain the

islands could be seen like far white ghosts wreathed in mist.

They sat down on the floor of the cave and the man put his arm about the

girl as if to protect her; then something came sniffing at them, it was

a little sea elephant that had got astray and scared by the work outside

had crept in for shelter and company. The girl rested her hand on it and

it lay still.

It seemed to her now that she could hear the gods of the storm as they

battled, hear their cries and breathing and trampling, whilst every

moment a thousand foot giant in full armour would come crashing to

earth, knee, shoulder and helmet hitting the rocks in succession.

"It's a big blow," came Raft's voice, "no call to be scared."

He was holding her to him like a child whilst she held to her the little

sea elephant, and so they remained, the three of them until the big

blow, failing to tear Kerguelen from its foundations, began to pause

like a spent madman.

The flashlight man on the hills began to work his apparatus more slowly

and now the thunder seemed doing its vast work away out at sea and all

sounds became gradually merged in the enormous, continuous sound of the

rain.

The little sea elephant seemed suddenly to take fright at the strange

company it found itself in and went tumbling and sniffing out to find

its mates, whilst through the night came the occasional "woof" of a bull

as if giving praise that the worst was over.

"The old sea cows know it's done," said Raft, "now you'd better get

under your blankets,--you aren't afraid to be alone?"

"I'm not afraid a bit now," said she. She patted his hand as a child

might and he crawled out and she heard him swearing at the rain as he

made for his hole in the cliff.

She remembered the porpoises and fell to thinking of what would have

happened had she and Raft started on their expedition yesterday or the

day before. That wind, which sent rocks flying on to the beach, would

have blown them away.

She said this next morning as they stood watching the sea. The sea was

worth watching. The due-south wind had stirred the heart of the ocean

from west of Enderby land, and, like a trumpeter, was leading a vast

flood that split on Heard Island only to re-form and burst on the

southern shores of Kerguelen.

They could hear the vague far-off roar of it all those leagues away

beyond the mountains, mixed with the cry of the wind still blowing a

full gale, and beyond the shelter of the land they could see the islands

getting it, bombarded by the waves and up to their shoulders in

sea-smoke and foam.

Then as they stood, suddenly and like a thing shot dead, the wind

ceased, and in the silence the roar of the beaches far and near arose

like a fume of sound. Then, as suddenly, the wind came shouting out of

the west, piling up a cross sea that leapt like the water in a boiling

pot.

"I'm thinking when this blow is over we may have a spell of fine

weather," said Raft, "and it will be just as well for us to be making

our plans and getting things ready so's we won't be behind hand when the

fine spell comes."

"I think so too," said she, "we will have to take food with us--how

much?"

"Enough for a month," said he, "who knows, we may have to come back, and

there's not much to be had elsewhere." Then he fell into thought for a

moment, "maybe stuff for a fortnight will be enough for there's birds

and rabbits to be got, and gulls' eggs. Them old penguins let you screw

their necks as if it come natural to them, we don't want to take too big

a load."

Then they found themselves at a loss, it was quite easy to arrange to

take a fortnight's food, but how much did that mean?

They determined to use two blankets for sacks and then made a rough

calculation, based on imagination, and collected together tins of meat

and vegetables and the remaining biscuits, the result was a burden that

two people might have carried but not very far.

"We've overshot it," said Raft.

"We'll never be able to carry all that," said the girl, "or if we did we

would have to go so slowly that the journey would be much longer--it

cuts both ways."

They reduced the load by nearly a half.

"There's one thing," said he, "there's no call to take water with us,

there's holes full of water everywhere, seems to me in this place."

Then he turned to look at the weather.

The wind was less and the clouds were thinning and the air had the feel

of a break coming. Then, just before sunset the clouds parted in the west

and the sun went down in a sky red as blood.

"We'll start tomorrow," said Raft.

PART V

CHAPTER XXVII

THE CORRIDOR

The next morning broke grey and fair.

When the girl came out she found that Raft had collected the things to

be taken in one bundle tied up in a blanket. He had also set out

breakfast. The remainder of the stores he had stacked at the back of the

cave where he slept.

These stores, with what was still in the cache, would be useful if they

had to come back to the beach.

"But what am I to carry?" asked she.

"Oh, there's no call for you to trouble," answered he, "you've got your

oilskins. I reckon that'll be enough for you to bother with. Them things

in the bundle is no weight for a man."

She tried to argue the question. It seemed to her impossible that any

single person could carry that load for long, but she might just as well

have argued with the gentle wind blowing now shorewards from the

islands. He lifted the bundle with one great hand to demonstrate its

lightness; he was also going to take the harpoon as a sort of walking

stick.

It seemed to her that she had never realized his strength before, nor

his placid determination that seemed more like an elemental force than

the will of a man.

She gave in and sat down to the meal, biscuits and the remains of a

stew, and as she ate she watched the great sea bulls and the cows and

the young ones that now were able to land, boosting through the foam

like their elders, and as she watched she wondered whether she would

ever see these things again, there, against the setting of the sea and

the great islands.

She had put on her boots for the journey and a pair of men's soft

woollen socks from the store in the cache. They were small men's socks

and the wool was so fine and soft that the size did not trouble her. In

her pocket she still carried the few odds and ends including the tobacco

box in which she had placed her rings. She wore the sou'wester, and the

oilskin lay beside her folded and ready to be carried on her arm.

Then, when the meal was finished, Raft washed the plates and stored them

in the cave. He stood looking at the stored things for a moment as if to

make sure they would be all right, then he kicked an old tin away into a

cleft of the rocks as though to tidy the place, then he took up the

harpoon and slung the bundle on his shoulder.

The girl rose and looked around her. This place where she had suffered

and nearly died was still warm with memories, and the sea creatures were

like friends, she had grown to love them just as people love trees or

familiar inanimate things.

To associate the idea of home with that desolate beach, those moving

monsters, those caves, would seem absurd. Well, it was like leaving

home, and as she stood looking around her a tightness came in her throat

and her eyes grew misty. But Raft was moving now and she followed him,

glancing back now and then until they crossed the river where she looked

back for the last time. The river was almost deserted now by the young

sea elephants, except at its mouth. A few little girl seals lay about,

delicate or unadventurous creatures whose lives would doubtless be short

in a world that is only for the strong. These little girl seals had

attracted her attention before, they had almost the ways of fine ladies.

It was as though some germ of civilization in the herd had become

concentrated in them and she had wondered whether they would ever pull

through the rough and tumble of life, recognising vaguely that nature is

opposed to civilization at heart. They seemed allied to herself and

their future seemed as doubtful as her own here where nothing helped,

where everything opposed.

She caressed them with her eyes for the last time; then as she turned

and followed Raft she forgot them. Her brave mind, that nothing could

daunt but loneliness, faced the great adventure ahead not only undaunted

but uplifted. The way was terrific, the chances were small, so small, so

remote, that they could scarcely be called chances, and the penalty of

failure was return and a winter here when the beach would be deserted by

all but the gulls. The very desperation of the business made it great,

and from the greatness came the uplift.

They passed the figure-head with its sphinx-like face staring over the

sea, and the great skull half sanded over by the recent blow. Then they

drew near the caves and the boat.

The boat had been blown over on its other side by the wind and lay with

one gunnel deep buried in the sand and its keel presented to the cliffs;

she glanced only once at the caves, deserted now by the birds who had no

doubt picked the last fragments of the dead man.

Then they climbed the Lizard rocks and at the highest point sat down to

rest for a moment.

Raft, with the bundle beside him and the harpoon held between his knees,

swung his head from the great beach on his right to the broken country

on his left.

He said nothing, not wishing perhaps to dishearten his companion. It was

she who spoke.

"That's the plain I told you of," said she, "we mustn't cross it, you

can see from here some of the dangerous patches, those yellow ones, but

there are others just as bad that you can't tell till you are trapped in

them. I would have gone down, only a bird flying overhead dropped a fish

on the ground right in front of me and the fish disappeared."

"We'd better get along the sea-shore rocks, seems to me," said Raft,

"the tide's going out, all them rocks between tide marks is pretty

flat."

"Suppose the tide comes in," said she, "and we can't get up the cliffs?"

"Oh, we'll have lots of time to make a good way before it comes back,"

replied he, "and we've got to trust a bit to chance, we've got to strike

bold. I reckon we'd better trust to instinc'." He laughed in his beard.

"The same sort of instinc' that made that bird drop the fish to give you

soundin's of that mud hole."

"Providence," said she, "yes--you are right."

"I believe in strikin' bold," said he, almost as though he were talking

to himself. "It's like fighting with a chap, the fellow that does the

hittin' without bothering about bein' hit. He's the chap. Well, if

you're restored, we'll be gettin' along."

He heaved up and led the way, striking right down to the sea and pausing

now and then to help her. Once he lifted her as though she were a

feather from one rock to the other. Then, all of a sudden they came to a

ten foot drop. There was no getting round that drop, it was a basalt

step that circled the whole Lizard Point on its seaward side. It did not

disconcert Raft. He threw the harpoon down, then he lowered himself,

clutching the edge and let himself fall. Following his directions she

threw him the bundle. It would have felled an ordinary landsman, but he

caught it, placed it beside him and then ordered her to jump, just as

she stood, without lowering herself.

"Jump with your arms up," said he, laughing, "no call to lower yourself.

I'll catch you."

It was like an order to commit suicide. It seemed to her impossible, she

thought that he only spoke in fun, then she knew that he was in earnest,

that he was ordering her. But it was impossible--absolutely. Then she

jumped with arms raised, jumped into two great hands that clipped her

round the waist and brought her, feet to ground, with scarcely a jar.

"I didn't think you'd have done it," said he. "You ain't wanting in

pluck."

"I knew it would be all right if you told me," said she, "but I didn't

want to do it until the very last moment."

After that she would have jumped over a cliff if he had told her. It

seemed to her that he was invincible--infallible.

A climb of a couple of minutes brought them down to the tide mark rocks,

the tide was a quarter out and the sea comparatively calm and the rocks

flat-topped like those of the seal beach and free from seaweed except

where, here and there, were piled masses of giant kelp torn up from its

deep sea attachments and cast here by the waves. It lay in ridges that

had to be climbed over sometimes and seemed entirely confined to the

Lizard Point and the rocks beyond, for when they reached where the

cliffs began it ceased to occur.

Where the cliffs began they first experienced the true meaning of a

journey along that coast.

She had seen these cliffs from the boat, but that view, though

forbidding enough, had told her little of the reality.

They rose from two to four hundred feet in height, these cliffs, and

looking up was like looking up a wall of polished ebony.

Here and there they were streaked with long lines of white where the

guillemots in their thousands sat on ledges, and here and there they

were faced by seaward rocks standing out in the water and carved by the

waves into all sorts of fantastic shapes, but waves and rocks and sea

and sky, all these were nothing, here the cliffs were everything,

dominating the mind and soul, sinister, and tinging every sound from the

wave echoes to the gull voices with tragedy.

And high tide mark was the cliff base in fine weather, in foul, the

waves would lash and dash and beat fifty feet up, there was not a

guillemot ledge lower than eighty feet, puffins, razorbills and

kittiwakes, who always build above the guillemots did not seem to come

here at all, keeping to the seaward rocks and the coast line where the

cliffs drew further away from the sea.

With the sea so close on the right and the cliffs on the left the girl

felt like a mouse in a trap designed for an elephant. Alone she would

never have dared this road, even with Raft leading her she felt timid

and oppressed. The place did not seem to affect Raft. Plodding ahead as

indifferently as though he were on some civilized country road, he

talked to her now and then over his shoulder, calling attention to queer

shaped crabs or dead kelp fish, and ever as they went their road grew

broader as the tide drew out.

It was now about an hour and a half after high water, that is to say,

quarter ebb; in a little more than ten hours it would be high water

again, before that they must find a way from the beach or be drowned.

Raft knew this and the girl knew it too. It seemed almost impossible

that, with so much time before them, they could not find a break in the

cliffs towards safe ground, yet the cliffs seemed to stretch endlessly

before them and their pace was slow, not more than three miles an hour.

They rested sometimes for a moment watching the out-going sea and the

gulls; unused to exercise the girl was tired, and the man knew it. Alone

he could have travelled swiftly and without resting, but he said

nothing, and though he knew the necessity of speed, it was he who made

the halts for the sake of his companion. Three hours after noon he took

some food out of the bundle and made her eat. They had already drunk

from a little torrent rushing out of a crack in the cliff wall, but even

so the food seemed dry and she could scarcely swallow it. Anxiety had

her in its grip, the cliffs stretching on and on interminably seemed

like misfortune itself made visible.

Said Raft: "The tide's near the turn and them cliffs don't shew no sign

of a cut in them, but then there's only two miles or so to be seen from

here. Round that bend there's no knowing, they may break away beyond

there. What I'm thinkin' is this. We've time to get back along the road

we've come by before it's high water again."

"Go back?"

"We've time to do it; if we keep on our course it will take us maybe

near an hour to get to that shoulder and from there we won't have much

time to get back before high water again. We've cut it too fine and if

the tide comes back and catches us before we get to a break we're done."

She looked forward then she looked back. They were in a veritable

corridor. The sea formed the right hand wall of this corridor, the

cliffs varying from two hundred to three hundred feet high formed the

left hand wall, cliffs black as ebony, polished by sea washing,

unclimbable and tremendous as a dream of Dante.

She saw their full position. There was time to get back from where they

stood, but if they went on to the cape of cliff before them there would

be no time to get back, they would have to go on, and the unseen cliffs

beyond that cape might stretch for twenty miles unclimbable as here.

Yet the idea of going back was horrible, heartbreaking.

She saw that Raft was between two moods. Then she said to him.

"If you were alone would you go back or go on?"

"Me?" said Raft. He paused for a moment as if in thought--"Oh, I reckon

I'd go on."

"Then we will go on."

"I was thinkin' of you," said he.