Part 21 (2/2)

”Yes. I killed him.”

”Killed him?”

”It was partly accident. He was one of the sailors. He was a bad man.

The other sailor got lost and never came back and I was left alone with this man. He nearly frightened me to death.”

”Swab,” said Raft.

”Then one night he crawled into my cave in the dark and I struck out with the knife and it killed him--he's lying there now. I didn't mean to kill him, but he frightened me.”

”Swab,” said Raft, two tones deeper. Then he laughed as if to himself.

”Well, that's a go,” said he. He took a pull at his beard as he contemplated this slayer of men seated on her blankets at his feet. She glanced up and saw that he was laughing and a wan smile came around her eyes, it seemed to him like a glimmer of suns.h.i.+ne from inside of her.

Then bending down he pulled up the blanket that had slipped from her left shoulder and settled it in its place.

”I'll tell you all about it some time,” said she, ”when I feel stronger.”

”Ay, ay,” said Raft. Then he went off with the crab to boil it.

As he attended to this business in the cave, half-sitting, half-kneeling before the little fire, he chuckled to himself now and then, and now and then he would bring his great hand down on his thigh with a slap.

The idea of her killing a man seemed to him the height of humour. He didn't put much store on men's lives in general, and none at all on the life of an unknown swab who deserved his gruel. Then he was of the type that admires a fighting thing much more than a peaceful and placid thing, and he felt the pleasure of a man who has rescued a seemingly weak and inoffensive creature only to find that it has pluck and teeth of its own.

She had gone up a lot in his estimation. Besides, her feebleness and forlorn condition had wounded him in a great soft part of his nature where the hurt felt queer. This new knowledge somehow eased the hurt. He could think of her now apart from her condition and think more kindly of her, for the strange fact remains that the very weakness and forlornness that had wakened his boundless compa.s.sion had antagonized him. When he had found the crab the idea had come to him that here was some different sort of food to ”put into her;” he was thinking that same thought now but with more enthusiasm. Yes, she had gone up a lot in his estimation.

CHAPTER XXIV

A DREAM

This same Raft whom the fo'c'sle could subdue to the surroundings, making him as faithful a part of the picture as the kerosene lamp, on the beach stood immense both in size and significance.

It was as though the fo'c'sle had the power to dwindle him, the beach, to expand him.

The girl had never seen him in the fo'c'sle so she could not appreciate the difference that environment made in him, and perhaps she saw him ever so slightly magnified, but it seemed to her that he was big enough to form part of the landscape, that he was one with the seven mile beach and the Lizard Point and the great islands and the sea elephants.

Not only had she been crushed down by loneliness; size had helped. Raft seemed to reduce the size of things, so that the seven mile strand and the vast islands and sea s.p.a.ces no longer burdened her, and in some magical way whilst he reduced the proportions of his surroundings they increased his potency and significance. He was in his true setting, part of a vast picture without a frame.

It was not alone his physical dimensions. Bompard had been a big man, but Bompard could not fill that beach. No, it was something else--what we call, for want of a better expression, ”the man himself.”

Then there was another thing about him, he found food of all sorts where Bompard and La Touche had found nothing; he brought in crabs and cray-fish and penguins eggs, he brought down rabbits with stones. That was his great art. A stone in the hand of Raft was a terrible missile and his aim was deadly.

At the end of a week the girl was able to accompany him along the beach to the cache where he unearthed some stores and came upon the harpoon which he carried back with them.

Then one day he suddenly appeared before her carrying her lost sou'wester. He had gone off down the beach in the direction of the Lizard Point and he came back carrying the hat in his hand. He must have been into the cave where the remains of La Touche lay, but he said nothing about that.

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