The Beach of Dreams: A Romance

  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, onthe 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 appreciatethe difference that environment made in him, and perhaps she saw himever so slightly magnified, but it seemed to her that he was big enoughto form part of the landscape, that he was one with the seven mile beachand the Lizard Point and the great islands and the sea elephants.

  Not only had she been crushed down by loneliness; size had helped. Raftseemed to reduce the size of things, so that the seven mile strand andthe vast islands and sea spaces no longer burdened her, and in somemagical way whilst he reduced the proportions of his surroundings theyincreased his potency and significance. He was in his true setting, partof 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--whatwe call, for want of a better expression, "the man himself."

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

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

  Then one day he suddenly appeared before her carrying her lostsou'wester. He had gone off down the beach in the direction of theLizard Point and he came back carrying the hat in his hand. He must havebeen into the cave where the remains of La Touche lay, but he saidnothing about that.

  It was nearly a fortnight since she had told him of how she had lost itand he must have treasured the fact up in his mind all that time.

  The weather had cleared again, after a tremendous blow from the south,and as they sat that evening in the sunset blaze before the caves, Raft,who had been staring steadfastly out to sea as if watching something,began to talk.

  "That chap Ponting told me this side of the coast is no use for ships,"said he. "They keep beyond them islands for fear of the reefs. I reckonthe old sea cows know that or there wouldn't be so many on this beach.He said there was a bay round to the westward where ships put in."

  "How far?" asked the girl.

  "A goodish bit," replied Raft. "I was making for that bay when I struckyou. I was thinking," he finished, "that when you were stronger on yourpins we might make for there."

  "Leave here?"

  "Ay," said Raft, "there's not much use sticking here."

  She said nothing for a moment, she felt disturbed.

  Since her recovery she had fallen into a state of quietude. She who hadbeen the leader of Bompard and La Touche, she who had fought and workedso determinedly for existence had now no ambition, no desire foranything but rest. The strength of this man who had given her back herlife seemed a shield against everything, just as a wall is a shieldagainst the wind; she was content to sit in its shelter and rest. Theidea of new exertions and unknown places terrified her.

  "But how are you to know the bay?" asked she, "there may be a good manybays along the coast."

  "No," said Raft, "Ponting told me there wasn't a decent anchorage butthis. He said this bay wasn't to be mistook, looks as if it was cut outwith a spade and the cliffs run high and black, there's a seal beachthat way and it's after seals the ships come. Well, there's time enoughto think of it seeing you are not fit to move yet."

  "Oh, I'll soon be all right," said she. "I'm getting stronger everyday."

  "What gets me," said Raft, "is how you fell to pieces like that, withall that stuff at your elbow and a river close by."

  "It was being alone," replied she, "I did not know it at the time, but Igot so that I did not care to eat and then at last I believe I didn'teat anything at all. I couldn't have imagined that just being alonewould make a person like that. You see I had food and water. If I hadbeen compelled to hunt about for food I expect I would have been allright, as it was I had nothing to do and was just driven in on myself."

  Raft said nothing for a moment, he was turning this over in his mind. Hecould not understand it. The idea of a person with plenty of food and agood set of teeth dying of starvation just because she was lonely seemedto him outrageous, yet he knew she was speaking the truth. It wasanother strange thing about this strange woman. She was altogetherstrange, different from any human being he had ever met and growing moredifferent every day now that she was "filling out," and getting hervoice back.

  That voice, soft and musical and refined, had disturbed the seaelephants when she first talked to them as people talk to horses anddogs, it was something they had never heard before in the language oftone, and so it was with this sea animal with a red beard. He could nottell whether he liked it or not, never asked himself the question, itwas part of her general strangeness and to be considered along with herclinging, man killing and double-tongued qualities, also with the factthat she had starved almost to death because she was alone; also withher eyes and new face, for she was growing younger looking every day andbetter looking, and her eyes, naturally lovely, were growing naturalagain.

  As he looked at her now sitting in the sunset this return of beautystruck him as it almost might have struck the sea elephants. It pleasedhim. Had he put his thoughts into words he would have said that she wasfilling out and getting more pleasant looking. At her very best he wouldnever have tacked the word beauty on to her; a buxom, rotund, beady-eyedyoung female would have made the word beauty spring to his lips--Cleode Bromsart, never. But she was getting more pleasant looking and hereyes were getting over their "stiffness"--which was something, and hefelt pleased.

  Presently, alone in his cave, he would bring his fist down on his thighwith a bang and chuckle over her contrarieties, reviewing her againstthat terrific picture he had seen in the cave when he had gone to fetchthe sou'wester; the picture of a man who had been torn to pieces byBurgomasters and cormorants. It had been necessary to wash thesou'wester for a long time in sea water before bringing it back.

  She had done that chap in proper; the work of the gulls and the work ofthe girl were hardly dissociated in his mind--there was the Result. Justas though a baby had smashed a rock with its fist. Hence the chuckles,heightened by her clinging ways, her fragility, her musical voice, herstarvation due to loneliness, her double tongue, her unaccountabletricks of manner.

  And she, as she sat in the sunset not knowing his thoughts, had youasked her how she felt about him would have answered with steadfast eyesthat she loved him. Meaning that she loved him as she had learned tolove the sea-elephants, or as she would have loved a great carthorsethat had stood between her and danger, or a huge dog. She scarcelythought of him as a man--just as a great benign thing, human, but nearerto the heart than any human being life had brought her in contact withtill now.

  Her almost passionate gratitude had little to do with this measure ofhim; any kindly man might have done what he had done. It was perhaps thefeeling of his great strength, of his possible fierceness that gave thetouch of benignity to him.

  "Weren't you afraid of them sea cows?" said he at last, "you must havecome clean through them to get to that cave."

  "No," she replied, "I didn't mind them, quite the reverse. I came herebecause of them."

  "Because of them!"

  "Yes. They were company."

  "Meaning--"

  "Friends."

  "Y'mean to say--friends did you call them? Well, I don't know, there'sno accountin'."

  He hung in irons. So she had been keeping company with the sea cows--andshe talked of them as "friends."

  Now Raft, for all his limitless power of compassion
for a female indistress would have slaughtered those same "sea-cows" to the last bull,and without a shred of compunction or compassion, had he possessedkettles to boil down the blubber and a vessel to carry the oil. He hadalready done in two of the babies for food when she was not looking. Theidea of talking about them as friends tickled his mind in a new place.Then, as he glanced at the great bulls taking headers in the sunsetlight and snorting in from the sea and squatting over the beach, he cameas near as anything to bursting into a roar of laughter.

  Then he suddenly remembered supper and went off to prepare it.

  The girl, left to herself, smiled. He had given her back that power and,like the sea elephants when they repulsed the penguins, he had given hersomething to smile over. She saw that he could not understand her in theleast in a lot of little things, whilst she understood him through andthrough--or so she thought. She had thought the same about the seaelephants till the great battle, and--she had never seen Raft withmurder in his eyes making the elements of beef tea.

  He had made a stew for supper out of mussels, canned vegetables, sealmeat and a piece of rabbit and when supper was over she went to bed inthe bed he had made for her, for he had stripped the cache of all itswearing apparel and the remaining blankets, reserving the blankets forher use.

  Then as she lay awake before dropping off to sleep she heard a suddenburst of noise from the night outside. It sounded as though one of thebulls had suddenly perceived a joke and were giving vent to hisfeelings.

  She knew what it was, and she guessed the joke, and then, lying there inthe dark, she began to laugh softly to herself with laughter that seemedto ease her mind of some old incubus clinging to it--less laughter thana sort of inverted form of crying and ending up almost in the latterwith a few sniffs.

  Then she fell asleep and dreamed that Raft had turned into somethingthat seemed like a sea lion. She had never seen a sea lion, but thisdream--one looked something like a lion and something like a seaelephant and something like Raft--with a touch of a carthorse. It hadflippers, then it had wings, and the setting was the Place de laConcorde which bordered quite naturally the great beach of Kerguelen.