Part 8 (1/2)
It was old Bompard who thought of the latter. La Touche seemed to have no thought for any one or anything but himself. He grumbled all the time during supper, grumbled at the fact that there was no stuff to make a fire with, that they had nothing warm to drink, that some time soon their tobacco must run out. It seemed to Cleo as she lay with her head on the hard sailcloth and her body on the hard sand, covered with the oilskin coat which she had taken off to use as a blanket, that through the league long rumble of the surf she could hear him grumbling still.
She did not care. Hard though the floor was she did not mind, she was chloroformed. Chloroformed by the air of Kerguelen. The air that fills the lungs with life, keeps a man going all day with an energy and buoyancy unknown elsewhere and then fells him with sleep.
She awoke when the whale birds had ceased crying, just after dawn, awoke fresh and new and full of life. She felt none of that troubled surprise which comes when the mind has to adjust itself to the new situation on awakening for the first time after a great disaster. It was as though her mind had already adjusted itself and discounted everything.
She rose up and leaving the oilskin coat and sou'wester on the floor of the cave came out on to the beach.
The fine weather still held and the day was strong, now lighting the beach, the sea, and the distant islands through a sky of high, grey eastward drifting clouds. The boat lay where it had been pulled up, the tide now coming in and legions of birds were flitting and blowing about and stalking on the sands as far as eye could reach.
She came to the cave where the men were. Bompard and La Touche lying on their backs might have been dead but for the sound of their snoring.
Bompard was lying with his wrist across his eyes, La Touche with both hands beside him, clenched. The tins of beef and the bread bags shewed vaguely in the gloom behind them.
She stood for a moment watching them and then, turning, she came down to the boat lying high and dry on the sand. She was trying to realize, that on the morning of the day before yesterday at this hour she had been lying in her bunk on board the _Gaston de Paris_, to realize this and also the fact that her present position seemed scarcely strange.
She ought, so she told herself, to be astonished at what had happened and to be bewailing her fate, yet, looking back now over yesterday and the day before, everything seemed part of a level and logical sequence, almost like the events of a stormy day on board s.h.i.+p. The tragedy of the destruction of the _Gaston_ only partly experienced could not be fully felt.
Standing by the boat she tried to realize it and failed, tried to grasp what she knew to be the horror and pity of it, and failed. She was neither hard nor insensible, she simply could not grasp it.
And her position here with two rough men, very little food and little chance of escape, how she would have pitied herself a few days ago could she have foreseen! Yet here, with the firm sands under her feet and the wind blowing in her face, reality, instead of hurting her as it had done in the boat on awakening yesterday morning, soothed her and rea.s.sured her. Everything seemed firm again and the fear that the ugly coast had raised in her mind had vanished.
She came along the beach looking at the gulls, turned over huge star-fish and picked up kelp ribbons to examine them. Half a mile or so from the cave she was about to turn back when her eye caught a strange appearance on the sea, hundreds and hundreds of moving points drawing in to the sh.o.r.e, white and black points like a shoal of fish only half submerged. It was a fleet of swimming birds.
She sat down on the sand to watch as they took the sh.o.r.e with a rush through the foam. Then, safely beached, the fleet became an army of penguins. She had seen pictures of penguins so she knew what they were and she had read Anatole France's ”Penquin Island”--these, then, were the real things and she watched them fascinated as one who sees storyland taking visible and concrete form.
The penguins formed line, broke into companies, drilled a bit and then began to move up the beach.
The figure of the girl did not seem to disturb them in the least.
One company pa.s.sed to the left, one to the right, whilst that immediately fronting her halted a few feet away and saluted her, bowing like little old-fas.h.i.+oned men in black swallow-tail coats and immaculate s.h.i.+rt fronts, little old-fas.h.i.+oned men with sharp quizzical eyes, polished, humorous, polite and entirely friendly.
The company on the right wheeled to examine her as did the company on the left, so that she found herself almost in a hollow square. Wherever she turned there were birds bowing to her or things in the semblance of birds, absolutely fearless, so close that she could have touched them had she carried a walking-stick.
She rose up to allow them to pa.s.s and they went on like mechanical things wound up and released, forming line again and seeming to forget her.
She remembered the guillemots and their rudeness and the way they had stormed and jeered at the boat--did all that mean more than the politeness and friendliness of the penguins? If she were lying dead would not the guillemots pa.s.s her without enmity and the penguins without friendliness, as indifferent to her fate as the wave of the sea on the blowing wind?
They would--as indifferent as the great islands standing out there in the distance, mauve and slate grey against the morning. As she came back along the beach her mind was battling with a problem that had suddenly risen. She had neither brush nor comb nor gla.s.s. Her hair was beautiful and she loved it. Her face was beautiful but she did not love it, it was herself, she could not view it from an independent standpoint, but she could view her hair almost as impartially as a dress and she loved it with the strange pa.s.sion that women have for things of texture.
The hair of Cleo de Bromsart had been waited upon like a divinity by many a priestess in the form of a maid. It had been dressed and shampooed and treated by artists and adepts, the hours of brus.h.i.+ng alone if put together would have made a terrific total. The result was perfection, and even now, after all she had gone through, it shewed scarcely disarrangement, l.u.s.trous and beautiful, dressed with artful simplicity in the Greek style and outlining the perfect curves of her head.
The wind was blowing now in gusto from the sea, but she scarcely noticed it as she walked, facing the problem that s.h.i.+pwreck had put before her, a problem the first of a long queue ranging from soap to a change of garments.
She was fighting it and at the same time battling with the strengthening wind when suddenly something sprang on her with the yell of a tiger and flung her on the sand, pinning her there.
CHAPTER IX
THE WOOLEY