"Are there any other things in the locker?" asked the girl.
"Oh, Mon Dieu, yes," replied the old fellow. "There"s a lot of truck, but it"s no use to us."
"Let"s go and see," said Cleo. She rose up and came down the beach followed by the others. The wind from the mountains died away but the sea torment remained and, though the tide was beginning to ebb, the spray of the waves almost reached the boat.
It had been listed to one side by the Wooley but was undamaged and the forward locker was still open as it had been left by the careless Bompard.
It was one of the boats used for fishing and deep sea work, hence the contents of the locker.
The steel head of a two p.r.o.nged fish spear, a fisherman"s knife in its sheath with belt, a paternoster, invaluable for the fathoms of fishing line attached, a small American axe with the head vaselined, a canvas housewife with sail-needles, a few darning needles and some pack thread, and a number of odds and ends including some extra heavy lead sinkers.
Bompard looked on apathetically and La Touche stood with his hands in his pockets as the girl fished the things out one by one, placing them, some on the sands and some on the thwarts of the boat.
The things seemed to have no interest for the men. Accustomed all their lives to being looked after as far as shelter and food were concerned they seemed absolutely helpless in front of new conditions. Men are like that, especially men of the people, and when you read of Crusoes and their wonderful doings on desert islands you read Romance.
The quick, trained mind of the girl seemed to see clearly where they could scarcely see at all, she had imagination and she was a woman--that is to say a being more gifted than man, with prevision in affairs purely material.
Bompard did not see any use in the axe and said so. The girl, with her hand resting on the gunnel of the boat, stood like a housekeeper trying to explain to a mere male creature the use of some household implement.
"We will want a fire and an axe will chop wood," said she.
"Ay, and where are you to get the wood?" asked La Touche. "There"s not a tree on this blasted place, nor the sign of one."
"Well, we"ll have to look--there may be trees inland--there"s sure to be bushes of some sort--anyhow we will take these things up to the cave, they will be safer there."
The baling tin of the boat caught her eye, she included it amongst her prizes.
This baling tin, like a psychological instrument, exhibited the mind of Bompard as though that said mind had been scooped out and placed in it.
To him it was a baling tin; here there were no boats to be baled out--where was the use of it?
To the woman it was a possible pot to boil things in if they could get a fire and things to boil.
She explained and Bompard saw the light. La Touche saw it, too, but promptly pointed out that they had no fire and nothing to boil. He seemed to find an odious satisfaction in the fact, a satisfaction which Bompard faintly reflected, and for a moment the girl seemed to glimpse in the two men a lethargy of mind almost unthinkable. A lethargy and laziness, mulish, and kicking at anything that disturbed it, that actually fought against betterment because betterment meant exercise of intellect and action.
She felt angry with them, just as a grown person feels angry with lazy children, and putting the belt with the knife round her waist and picking up some of her treasures she ordered the others to follow with the rest.
When they had been placed in the cave with the provisions, Bompard, after his great labours, cut himself some tobacco and La Touche lit his pipe. Then they sat down at their cave opening to smoke and rest themselves whilst the girl, who could not keep still, went back to the boat to explore the other lockers and see if by chance anything else of a useful nature might be found. The two men seated smoking at the cave mouth watched her as she went. She felt their eyes upon her and guessed that they were discussing her, but she did not mind.
The ceaseless activity of old Madame de Warens seemed to have descended on her through the air of Kerguelen. The will that Prince Selm had divined in her had been aroused; the surroundings seemed to call her to action from every side; the past and the future seemed phantoms before the tremendous and insistent present. Fate could perhaps have broken her spirit only in one way, by casting her upon the sordid. If she had been socially shipwrecked and thrown onto a Paris slum she might have gone under. Here where everything was clean, where the air was life, where nothing was sordid, she swam; here she was miraculously filled with a new energy and an extraordinary new interest as though she were peeping at things for the very first time.
The forward locker was now empty, she hunted in the others and discovered two more Maconochie tins that Bompard had overlooked, some cotton waste, a roll of thick copper wire and a bradawl.
She collected the lot and brought them up to the cave before which her companions were seated.
She handed them to La Touche, who, without getting up, leaned back and pushed them as far into the cave as he could reach, then he resumed his pipe whilst Cleo standing and shading her eyes looked away up and down the beach as though measuring its possibilities.
"I found a lot of things down there this morning before the tide was high," said she. "There were star-fish, big ones like what I have seen on the beach at Bordighera; the Italian people eat them. I"m sure there must be lots of food to be found here on the beach. Then there is a big break in the cliffs lower down that seems to lead inland. I think the best thing we can do is to start now and hunt about and see what we can find. You two can go inland, and I will go along the beach. It"s absolutely necessary to find any sort of food, and wood to make a fire."
The smokers were disposed to argue.
Yes, it was quite true, one must look round, but there was grub enough for a month and there was plenty of time before them. Then La Touche began to argue about star-fish. He had never heard of people eating star-fish. If they were to be condemned to eat stuff like that it would be better to quit. One might have fancied from his tone that it was Cleo"s fault that such a suggestion should be made.
Cleo listened patiently and Bompard sat evidently approving. It was almost as though the two were in league against her, just as children get in league against an adult who insists on unpleasant duties or uncongenial food.
But a will was at work stronger than theirs and presently, tapping out their pipes, they rose up. La Touche, at her direction, placed the new found Maconochie tins, the cotton waste, the bradawl and wire with the rest of the stores, far back in the cave, and then, following her, they lumbered along down the beach in the direction of the cliff break like two schoolboys after a governess.
The cliff break was a narrow gully piercing the basalt and bending upon itself; here they parted, the men striking up the gulley and the girl continuing her way along the beach.
"And be sure to look out for some wood," she cried after them, "any sort of wood."
"Ay, ay," said Bompard, "we"ll be on the look out right enough."
Then they vanished and she pursued her way alone, picking up things as she went, turning over sh.e.l.ls and thinking of her companions.
The wind had fanned up again to a strong breeze but the sound of the surf had fallen with the receding tide and the stretch of wet sand below high tide mark was strewn with huge kelp ribbons, ma.s.ses of seaweed, sh.e.l.ls, all empty, cuttle fish bones and the star-fish despised of La Touche.
Then she came upon something that gave her a grue, it seemed at first like a white rock, it was a skull. The skull of some enormous creature half-bedded in the sand just above the tide mark, possibly cast up in some storm. She thought it might be the skull of a whale and as she stood looking at it, suddenly, the desolation around came in upon her with the fact that she was absolutely alone.
Suppose the men lost their way--suppose that they never came back? The thought clutched her heart like a hand. To be here, alone, absolutely alone, forever!
For a moment panic seized her and the wild impulse came upon her to turn and run back to the cave. Then she mastered herself, fighting down the surging in her throat, and continuing her way steadily and with renewed strength. She had not cast the thought away, she had mastered it and as she went she contemplated it as a victor contemplates the dead body of an a.s.sailant.
Then she saw the penguins, she had not noticed them before, they were drawn up in long lines at the base of the cliff and the sight of them destroyed the desolation just as the skull had crystallized it around her.
A great pow-wow was going on amongst the penguins. Three birds, separate from the others, were standing, two facing one another bowing and discussing something, the third standing by, putting in a word now and then and now and then coming right between the disputants.
She watched them for awhile and then went on. She had no time to waste.
The thought of coming back empty handed after all her talk to the men pursued her. She was looking for food and had found none--nothing but the star-fish.
The gulls evidently found plenty of food. But for a human being there seemed nothing, and as she went on and on the thought of what would happen when those tins in the cave were empty came at her just as the terror of finding herself alone had come, and this thought was not to be combated by an effort of will simply because it was born of Reason.
Her clear and practical mind saw starvation, over-leaped the slender food barrier that held hunger only a month away from them and wandered in a wilderness where nothing was.
She had reached the rock surface now that stretched away level and smooth, broken by cracks and pot holes and strewn here and there with weed. The cliffs had fallen away, giving a view of the broken country and the mountains with their snow-covered tops, immense, wrapped in distance under the dull grey day, remote, yet clearly defined in that air, crystal clear as the air of Iceland.
It was like looking at Silence herself, silence set off and explained by the beach noises, the sound of the surf, the calling of the terns, the mewing of the great white gulls.
She saw Kerguelen as it is, as it was, as it ever will be. Standing there alone she saw it for the first time in all its utter nakedness. If no food were to be found on the busy beach, what food could be found in that carved, silent, cruel land where not a single tree shewed in all the miles of desolation?
A stealthy sc.r.a.ping sound behind her made her wheel round.
Up from a rock pond which she had pa.s.sed without examining had risen a crab, its body was not bigger than the two fists of a man put together, yet it moved standing high up like a spider on slender stilts that if stretched out would have measured four feet or more. She watched it with dilated eyes as it scrambled and hurried along, vanishing at last like a spectre in some cleft of the rock. There was something of a skeleton about it as well as something of a spider, it was like a caricature of food drawn by Famine. It made the whole beach hideous for a moment and it made the food hunter almost afraid to go on. She crushed the fear and went on, reaching a place where the rocks ceased and a broad level of sand stretched to where the rocks began again and further on the river ran down.
Where the sand met the further rocks a huge conical stone stood with a gull roosting on its top, and just as a person fixes on some object as the limit of his walk she determined to go as far as this stone and then turn back.
As she drew close to it the gull flapped its wings and flew away and she saw that the thing was not a stone but the figure-head of a ship, the form of a woman with ample b.r.e.a.s.t.s, broken and scarred by years of weather and stained with the droppings of gulls. The arms were gone, but the great face remained almost in its entirety staring away across the sands and the sea.