The Beach of Dreams: A Romance

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE BIRDS

  It rained off and on for three days, but rain in Kerguelen is not thesame as rain in England, just as rain at Windmere is not the same asrain at Birmingham. It does not depress, especially when you are busy.In those three days she made three journeys to the break in the cliffsto recover the things she had left there and she made her journeys, notto put too fine a point on it, with nothing on but the oilskin coat, theblanket she used for a sack got hopelessly soaked and her head wasexposed to the rain owing to the fact that the sou'wester was in thecave where the dead man lay, but she got used to it, especially asneuralgia and colds are unknown in Kerguelen.

  The loss of her only towel, the lump of cotton waste, was far worse thanthe loss of the sou'wester and would have been worse still only that shehad other things to think about, especially on these journeys. They wereterrible and required all her fortitude to make them, and they wereterrible for a new reason. The birds had got at La Touche. Greatpredatory birds like cormorants thronged the beach opposite the cave,she could see them going in and out of the cave and she could hear themquarrelling in there in the darkness.

  Then, on her last journey, as she was preparing to come back, happeningto glance that way she saw a gull like a Burgomaster coming out of thecave mouth and pulling after it something long like a rope upon whichthe other gulls flung themselves. She turned and ran.

  She had saved everything but one full bag of biscuits; she determined toleave them. If worst came to the worst there was bread stuff in thecache.

  That night the memory of what she had seen haunted her sleep. It was asthough La Touche, unable to get at her in the material world wasdetermined to torment her in the imaginary.

  She lay awake listening to the whale birds crying and the divers mewingand quarrelling like cats, then, dropping asleep, she was awakened atdawn by a new sound. Outside on the beach she heard a moaning like thevoice of someone in pain.

  She raised herself on her elbow. It was a human voice without any mannerof doubt. It ceased, and springing to her feet she came out. But therewas no human being on the beach, nothing but the bulky forms of thegreat sea bulls, and quite close to the cave a smaller form, a femalethat had landed during the night and had just given birth to a baby, athing like a slug which she was fondling with her flippers.

  Then in the strengthening light the girl could make out here and thereon the beach the forms of other females, and by noon that day there werehundreds and hundreds, and on the next day the beach was one vastnursery. It was the first great act in the life history of these seapeople towards which the girl's heart was going out more and more, andas she sat that day watching the mothers and their babies, and the greatold bulls shuffling about like heavy fathers, sometimes she would smileand sometimes, sitting and watching, her mind would wander away lost andtrying to grapple with the great mystery of which all this was only apart.

  They were so human, so warm to the heart, and yet only a few days agothere was nothing here but the rocks and the cold and trackless sea.Then she noticed that to-day the bulls were not sunning themselveslazily, although the sun was out. They seemed disturbed, moving aboutaimlessly, lifting themselves on their flippers and now and then raisingtheir short trunks.

  Sometimes a female would make as if to get back to the sea but she wasalways headed off by a bull.

  When dusk fell it seemed that the sentries were doubled, to judge by thenoise of the flopping and moving about. The girl came to the caveentrance and looked, and lo and behold! every bull had cleared downtowards the sea edge. She could see them stretching away into the dimdistance, a hedge of vast forms broken and moving here and there, butalways restored.

  She thought that this line of defence was to keep the females back fromthe water, yet there seemed more than mere precaution at the bottom ofthe general disturbance that filled the beach. Then as she lay awake shecould hear now and then a distant roar and once a big bull only a fewhundred yards from the cave took it into his head to give tongue with ablast like the first deep "woof" of a siren, then came another soundquite close to the cave entrance, a sound like the broken lapping ofripples, interrupted by movements and little snorts and sighs. It was ababy seal sucking away at the teats of its mother. The pair was justoutside the cave.