The Beach of Dreams: A Romance

  PART III

  CHAPTER XVIII

  GOD MADE FRIENDSHIP

  The place was as populous as a town. That was the soul-satisfying factwhich she absorbed as she sat with the bundle and axe beside her. To belonely here one would have to be deaf and blind and without the sense ofsmell. Now that their attention was no longer strained by watching herthe great brutes filled the place with all sorts of sounds, grunts andgrumbles, puffs and snorts like the escape of steam from a locomotiveand now and then the flop of a great body changing position. There wasanother sound she got to know and recognize, after a while, thegrumbling and rumbling of their interiors. Infested with sea-lice theywere always scratching. Quite close to the cave mouth three great bullswere lying and every now and then one of them would turn and twist roundand scratch himself with his flippers, the nearest bull had lost an eyein some past battle and they were all scarred about the necks, and seenclose like this, in their natural state and as one of their company, themarvel of them, was beyond speaking.

  She took off the oilskin coat and laid it on the sand of the cave, tookthe things from the blanket and spread the two blankets out and foldedthem. As she moved about she saw that the bulls had turned slightly,attracted by her movements, but they shewed not the slightest sign ofmind disturbance. Then, having placed the things in order, she came outand walked down to the water's edge, making a detour now and then toavoid treading on the flippers or the tail of a monster. On comingamongst them a few minutes ago she had felt not the slightest fear, butthis walk in cold blood from the cliff to the sea edge made her hold herbreath. She felt as she had felt that first day when she sat down closeto them. Angry, and with a sudden movement, one of these creatures couldhave destroyed her as a man destroys a fly; but she held on, and wasrewarded.

  Not one of them shewed any wish to destroy her, or anger, or uneasiness.They had accepted her into their company by not attacking or ejectingher, she ran counter to none of their desires or needs and evidently herform called up no recollections of the beast Man in their dim brains.

  Then she was a female. Sex is more than a physical difference betweenone being and another, one can fancy it as one of the outstanding signsof the Wild to be read by instinct, as instinct reads the weather orseason signs, or the sea mile posts that lead the seals and seaelephants thousands of leagues to strike some particular beach as anarrow strikes the bull's eye of a target.

  The female, unless with young, is not dangerous to the male. One mayfancy that amongst the few but burningly important warnings anddirections in the book of Instinct.

  Here, at the sea edge and within a few feet of the breaking waves, shesat down on a projecting rock and tried to measure with her eye the vastherd. The whole beach from where she sat to where the flat rocks ceaseda mile and a half away on her right was spotted with them and shenoticed that here and there they were always putting out to sea andcoming ashore again.

  Making for a spot on the right, a hundred yards from her she saw onecoming ashore, swift as an arrow, steering with straight steadfast eyesand landing with the water cascading from his huge shoulders, whilst onthe left one was putting out to sea in a burst of foam.

  Then, of a sudden, all the shore edge bulls got in commotion slitheringabout, raising themselves on their flippers and blowing off steam.

  A sea elephant was coming towards the beach, moving with a speed thricethat of any of the others, his head was raised and she could see theeyes that seemed blazing with wrath or challenge.

  Then, as he came thundering on to the rocks, he lifted the echoes with aroar that resounded for miles along the beach.

  All the others had landed in silence.

  She did not know that this was a newcomer, a belated bull, held daysbehind the arrival of the others by some chance of the sea. Maybe hehad hung fishing off the South Shetlands or the Horn, or beached forrepairs after some sea fight off the Falklands; whatever had held him hewas late.

  He came swiftly up the rocks, casting his head from side to side butunchallenged. There were no females there yet to fight for and theyevidently recognized him as one of the herd and not a stranger. The herdinstinct, without which a nation would be a mob, ruled here and gave thebelated one his place, and after a while of squattering about andsniffing and blowing he settled down with quieted eyes to rest. He hadreached one of the stopping stages of his life, with the surety withwhich he would reach the last, on some desolate beach or reef of thesea.

  The girl watched him. Not only did these new-found companions chase awayloneliness and ghostly fears, but they brought her comfort. They seemedso sure, sure of food and life and the right to live, so undisturbed; itwas as though she felt the presence of the ghostly shepherd who looksafter the flocks of sea and land and who counts even the sparrows. Shecast her eyes towards the islands and the sea-line; some day a ship wouldcome and all this would be a dream of the past. She knew it. Her mindwent back over all that she had been saved from--the wreck, thedeathtraps and worst of all--La Touche. It was strange to think that aman should be worse than the others.

  If that fisherman's knife had not been included in the gear of the boat!

  It was now, as she sat thinking this and watching the huge harmlessthings around her, that a hatred of La Touche came into her mind, ahatred that seemed to have been waiting to enter until her mind was atrest. He seemed to her evil itself. He seemed to her connected with allthe disasters that had happened and part of them. He had been thelookout on the _Gaston de Paris_, his quarrel had sent Bompard to hisdeath, he had nearly unhinged her mind with terror. Had he possessed theevil eye? Then, for the first time, she recalled her premonition ofdisaster, yet, how she had refused to let the yacht be put off itscourse. They might now have been at New Amsterdam only for that. Yet itwas not her fault. She had refused to alter the course, not for anyselfish reason, quite the reverse, she had refused because she did notwish to spoil the plans of her host. It was Fate, not blind Fate,because the premonition was full sighted, it was Fate obeying someorder. And it seemed to her that she could read in the order that shewas to be saved. Why? God only knew, but so she read the facts, and shewould be saved to the end and go back to the life she knew, or had knownand die, perhaps, at last an old, old woman.

  It seemed to her that this coming on to the sea elephant beach was astage in her great journey that had brought her definitely nearer to theend of her loneliness. And whether all this were true knowledge orwhether it was only the fancy of the ego its effect was to give herpeace.

  Then, as she sat there the strangest lonely figure on earth, sheexplored the pocket of her skirt and took the things from it. LaTouche's knife, her rings knotted up in her handkerchief, the tobaccobox of Captain Slocum, the tinder-box and box of matches. Then sheopened the tobacco box and re-read the purple writing with the tag "keepup your spirits." She could not visualize the old slab-sided whalingcaptain who had scrawled that, inspired no doubt by practical knowledgeof disaster and the horrors of Kerguelen, but the message came now as anadditional comfort, it seemed to her written by a hand other than thatof man. She put the paper back in the box and, then, everything back inher pocket.

  Then, like a stroke of humour, an incident occurred to lighten the wholebeach.

  A big platoon of penguins had crossed the river and marched up to thesacred precincts of the seal beach. Turning her head to see what thedisturbance was about she sighted the penguins just at the end of theirmarch and three bulls fronting them. The penguins wished to pass, eitherfrom impudence or a real desire to cross the beach, but the bulls barredthe way, heading them off, turning and twisting, snorting as if to blowthe feathered ones away.

  The penguins bowed and scraped and explained, but the bulls, blind topoliteness and deaf to argument only presented their heads, then theyraised their rumps and made a half charge. The girl watched the penguinsgoing at the double with heads slewed round as though fearful of theirtails. Then she laughed.

  The sea elephants had not only made her able to laugh, they had giv
enher something to laugh over. Then came the thought: why had they refusedthe penguins and accepted her?

  She did not know that the penguins were rival fishermen, she fanciedthat the sea elephants were somehow friendly to her, divining herfriendship for them, and maybe she was right, though not perhaps in theway she fancied, for when God made friendship He made it out of queerand sometimes negative materials.

  That night as she lay in her cave with a rolled-up blanket for pillowand the other blanket for covering, neither Ghosts nor Loneliness cameto trouble her.

  Two great bulls a few yards from the cave's mouth kept her warm andcomfortable of mind.

  She could hear their puffs and grunts and the occasional wobble-wobbleof their digestive organs as they slept, dreaming maybe in their sleep,for sometimes they tossed and moved, and once one of them gave a "woof"as though trying to roar under the blanket of sleep.

  She thought of dogs lying asleep; dogs dreamed and hunted in theirdreams, why should not these?

  Then suddenly the rain came down as though someone had pulled thestring of a shower bath, but she knew that would not drive them away,guessing that rain to sea elephants was no more disturbing than sun topeaches.

  Then she was chasing penguins along the beach, riding on a sea elephanttowards that absolute oblivion which is the brand of sleep they serve atKerguelen.