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--Cleo 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 pa.s.sionate grat.i.tude 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 compa.s.sion for a female in distress would have slaughtered those same "sea-cows" to the last bull, and without a shred of compunction or compa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sing 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 Harb.u.t.t, about the Rich People; and as to s.e.x, 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.