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 Pa.s.sES
It is not good to be alone. As the weeks pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ces, 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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, G.o.d-sent, a little tin spoon.