Oh, is it possible that we are the only people left?"
Bompard, without replying, swung his head round, then he rose and came over the thwarts. He caught La Touche by the leg.
"Gaston--rouse up--the lady is alive. It"s me. Bompard."
La Touche sat up, his hair towsled, his face creased, he seemed furious about something and pushing Bompard away stared round and round at sea and sky as if in search of someone.
"Bon Dieu," cried La Touche. "The cursed boat." He spat as though something bitter were in his mouth and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He did not seem to care a b.u.t.ton whether the lady were alive or not. He had been dreaming that he was in a tavern, just raising a gla.s.s to his mouth, and Bompard had awakened him to this.
The girl could not repeat the question to which there seemed no answer, she crawled into the stern sheets and sitting there, half bent, watched the two men. An observer perched in the sky above might have noticed the curious fact that on board the forsaken boat quarter deck and fo"c"sle still held sway, that the lady was the lady and the hands the hands, that Bompard was talking in an undertone, saying to La Touche: "Come, get alive, get alive," and that La Touche, after his first outburst, was holding himself in. They were old yachtsmen, no disaster could shake that fact.
La Touche, rising and taking his seat on a thwart and looking everywhere but in the direction of the girl, as though ashamed of something, began cutting up some tobacco in a mechanical way, whilst Bompard, on his knees, was exploring the contents of the forward locker. La Touche was a fair-haired man, younger than Bompard, a melancholy looking individual who always seemed gazing at the worst of things. He spoke now as the girl drew his attention to something far away in the east, something sketched vaguely in the sky as though a picture lay there beyond the haze.
"Ay, that"s Kerguelen," said La Touche.
Bompard, on his knees, and with a maconochie tin in his left hand, raised his head and looked.
"Ay, that"s Kerguelen," said Bompard.
"And look," said the girl, pointing towards Kerguelen. "Is not that the sail of a boat, away ever so far--or is it a gull? Now it"s gone. Look, there it is again."
Bompard looked.
"I see nothing," said he, "gull, most like--there wouldn"t be any boat from us, they"re all gone, unless it was a boat from that hooker we struck."
"Boat," said La Touche with a dismal laugh. "She got no boat away, she went down by the bows with the fellows like flies on her, this is the only boat of the lot that got away."
The girl with her hand shading her eyes was still looking.
"It"s gone, whatever it may have been," said she, "can we reach the land?"
"Why, yes, mademoiselle," said Bompard, "the wind is setting towards there and we have a sail, I am going to step the mast now when I"ve taken stock--well, we won"t starve. The tube is provisioned for a full crew for a fortnight, water too, we won"t starve, that"s a fact. La Touche, get a move on and help me with the sail."
"I"m coming," grumbled La Touche.
It seemed to the girl that the minds and the tongues and the movements of the two men were part of some slow-acting, wooden, automatic mechanism. Whether they reached the land or not seemed a matter almost of indifference to them. Accustomed to people who talked much and had much to talk about she could not understand. All this was part of the new world in which she found herself, part of the boat itself, of the mast, now stepped against the grey sky, the waves, the gulls, and that tremendous outline of mountains now more visible to the east--Kerguelen.
A world of things without thought, or all but thoughtless, things that, yet, dominated mind more profoundly than the power of mind itself.
Bompard was munching a biscuit he had taken from one of the bread bags as he worked. She noticed the bag, its texture, and the words "Traversal--Toulon" stamped on it. The maconochie tin which he had placed on a seat and a tin of beef with a Libby label held her eyes as though they were things new and extraordinary. They were. They were food. She had never seen food before, food as it really is, the barrier between life and death, food naked and stripped of all pretence.
Bompard coming aft with the sheet shipped the tiller, and, taking his seat by the girl, put the boat before the wind. La Touche, who had taken his seat on the after thwart, was engaged in opening the tin of beef.
The girl scarcely noticed him. She was experiencing a new sensation, the sensation of sailing with the wind and the run of the swell. The boat, from a dead thing tossing on the waves, had suddenly become a thing alive, buoyant, eager and full of purpose, silent, too, for the slapping and buffeting of the water against the planking had ceased. Running thus with the wind and swell there was no opposition, everything was with her.
"Well, it"s beef," said La Touche who had managed to open the Libby tin, "it might be worse."
He dug out a piece with his knife and presented it to the girl with a biscuit, then he helped Bompard and himself, then he scrambled forward, leaving his beef and biscuit on the thwart, and reappeared with a pannikin of water; it was handed to the lady first.
The food seemed to loose their tongues. It was as though the caste difference had been broken by the act of eating together.
"I"d never thought to set tooth in a biscuit again when that smash came last night," said Bompard addressing no one in particular.
"I wasn"t thinking of biscuits," said La Touche, "I was bowled over in the alley-way. You see, I was running, so it took me harder. What set me running I don"t know, my legs took care of themselves--I was just leaning like this, see, on the look out and between two blinks there was the hooker crossing our course or making that way. She"ll clear us, maybe, said I to myself, then the engines went full speed and I knew we were done. Then I cleared aft, running, with no thought in my mind but to get out of the way, dark, too, but I didn"t barge against nothing, till the smash came, and I went truck over keel in the alley-way."
"I was coming up the cabin stairs," said Cleo, "and something seemed to knock me down. Then when I got on deck the light was put on and I saw a great ship on the right hand side; she seemed sinking, but I read her name, she was quite close. Then the light went out and someone caught me and threw me--I don"t know where, but it must have been into this boat."
"That was it," said Bompard, talking and eating at the same time, "us two was in the boat."
"I thought it was La.r.s.en," cut in La Touche. "La.r.s.en helped me to get the canvas off her, that was when the electric was on--what became of La.r.s.en?"
"Lord knows," said Bompard. "I scrambled into her just as the light was shut off, then the chaps on deck chucked the lady in. Next thing we were fending her off from the ship. I was shouting to the chaps on deck to jump and we"d pick them up, we"d got the oars out then. I tell you I was fuddled up for I"d got it in my head that the hooker was to port of us though I"d seen her with my own eyes to starboard. I was thinking we"d be taken down with the suck of her and I was bent on getting ahead of her."
"I didn"t hear you shouting to the fellows on deck," said La Touche, "but I heard you shouting to me to row. Then when we"d got her away a bit the _Gaston_ blew up."
"Blew up," said the girl.
"The boilers," said Bompard, "they lifted the decks off her. She must have gone like a stone."
"So you think no one at all escaped but us?"
Neither of the men replied for a moment, then La Touche said: "There wasn"t another boat could have got away."
The sun was well risen now, the clouds were high and breaking and the far away land shewed up, vast in the distance, with a white line of snow-covered peaks against the sky, desolate as when Kerguelen first sighted them.
Cleo with her eyes fixed across the leagues of tumbling tourmaline tinted sea almost forgot the others. That was the place where the wind was bearing them to, a place where there was nothing. Neither hotels nor houses nor huts, nor men nor women, a place where no landing-stage would receive them, no voice welcome them. Her throat worked for a second convulsively as she battled with the quite new things that the far off mountains were telling her.
It was now and not till now that she recognised fully what Fate had done to her. It was now and not till now that she saw Time before her as a thing from which all the known features had been deleted.
"Mademoiselle"s bath is quite ready."
"Mademoiselle, the first gong has sounded."
Oh, the day--the day with its hundred phases and divisions, the breakfast hour, the luncheon hour, the hour that brought afternoon tea, the dresses that went with each phase, the emotions and interests, and changing forms of being, the day which made a person change to its light and the person of ten o"clock in the morning quite different from the person of noon--this thing which we talk of as the day appeared before her now as what it really is, life itself, as civilized men know life, a thing outside ourselves yet of ourselves and without which the circling of the sun is as the circling of a pointer on a blank dial--. This thing was gone.
La Touche had got more forward and was smoking and, though the wind was with them, a faint scent of tobacco smoke came on the spill of the wind from the sail. Bompard was chewing, spitting occasionally to starboard and wiping his mouth with the back of his bronzed tattooed hand.
The vague scent of the tobacco threaded up all sorts of things in the girl"s mind: Madame de Warens, the streets of Paris, the deck of the yacht. She remembered the piece of embroidery work she had been engaged on last night, and then a sc.r.a.p of conversation she had overheard between the doctor and the artist towards the end of dinner, they were talking of the pa.s.seistes and futurists, of the work of Pablo Pica.s.so, of Sunyer, of Boccioni and Durio, arguing with extraordinary pa.s.sion about the work of these people.
"There"s weather or something over there," said La Touche who had slipped down and was seated on the bottom boards with his back to a thwart; he nodded his head towards Kerguelen.
Around one of the highest peaks a lead-coloured cloud had wrapped itself turban-wise, and even as they looked the cloud turban increased in volume and height, mournful and monstrous as some djin-born vision of the Arabian story-tellers.
"That"s snow," said Bompard, "and by the twist of it it"s in a whirlwind."
"Bon Dieu, what a place," said La Touche.
"You may say that," said Bompard, "but that"s nothing, it"s when we come to make a landing we"ll find what we are against."
"Oh, we"ve got so far we"ll finish it," said La Touche.