PART II
CHAPTER VIII
THE AWAKENING
The great beach of Kerguelen shews above tide mark long stretches whereno sand is, only rock. Basalt planed and smoothed by the seas ofcountless ages, level as a ball-room floor and broken by rifts and potholes, between tide marks these pot holes serve as traps for all sortsof sea creatures. Once the waves must have beaten right up to the lowand broken basalt cliffs full of caves floored with sand, but volcanicaction raising the beach has pushed the tide mark out leaving a shorevarying in width from half a mile to a few hundred yards.
This is the breeding place of the sea elephant. Half way between thelizard point and the point further to the east a river comes downdisembarging through three months; on the banks of this river is theseal nursery where in summer the young sea elephants tumble and play andtake their swimming lessons, whilst the mothers lie on rocks and thefathers fish and hunt and fight in battles, the roaring of whichresounds for miles. Here the penguins drill and hold councils and lawcourts and marry and get divorced and hold political meetings, here therabbits play and the terns foregather, and here the winds that blowfrom everywhere but the east, hunt and yell and pile in winter a twentyfoot sea that breaks in seven miles of thunder under seven miles ofspray thick as the smoke of battle.
Duck and teal haunt the place and gulls of nearly every known kind snowit and flick it with movement. Yet above the thunder of the waves andthe cries of the birds and the shouting of the winds when they blow,there hangs a silence--the silence of the remote and prehistoric. Theliving world of men seems cut off from here by far away doors andforever.
After supper they had explored the cave mouths in the cliff opposite towhere the boat had beached. There were three caves just here. One wasimpracticable owing to water dripping from the roof, but the other two,floored with hard sand, were good enough for shelter. The men had stowedthe provisions and themselves in the western mast giving the girl theother and the boat sail for a pillow.
It was old Bompard who thought of the latter. La Touche seemed to haveno thought for any one or anything but himself. He grumbled all the timeduring supper, grumbled at the fact that there was no stuff to make afire with, that they had nothing warm to drink, that some time soontheir tobacco must run out. It seemed to Cleo as she lay with her headon the hard sailcloth and her body on the hard sand, covered with theoilskin coat which she had taken off to use as a blanket, that throughthe 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 waschloroformed. Chloroformed by the air of Kerguelen. The air that fillsthe lungs with life, keeps a man going all day with an energy andbuoyancy unknown elsewhere and then fells him with sleep.
She awoke when the whale birds had ceased crying, just after dawn, awokefresh and new and full of life. She felt none of that troubled surprisewhich comes when the mind has to adjust itself to the new situation onawakening for the first time after a great disaster. It was as thoughher mind had already adjusted itself and discounted everything.
She rose up and leaving the oilskin coat and sou'wester on the floor ofthe cave came out on to the beach.
The fine weather still held and the day was strong, now lighting thebeach, the sea, and the distant islands through a sky of high, greyeastward drifting clouds. The boat lay where it had been pulled up, thetide now coming in and legions of birds were flitting and blowing aboutand stalking on the sands as far as eye could reach.
She came to the cave where the men were. Bompard and La Touche lying ontheir backs might have been dead but for the sound of their snoring.Bompard was lying with his wrist across his eyes, La Touche with bothhands beside him, clenched. The tins of beef and the bread bags shewedvaguely in the gloom behind them.
She stood for a moment watching them and then, turning, she came down tothe boat lying high and dry on the sand. She was trying to realize, thaton the morning of the day before yesterday at this hour she had beenlying in her bunk on board the _Gaston de Paris_, to realize this andalso the fact that her present position seemed scarcely strange.
She ought, so she told herself, to be astonished at what had happenedand to be bewailing her fate, yet, looking back now over yesterday andthe day before, everything seemed part of a level and logical sequence,almost like the events of a stormy day on board ship. The tragedy of thedestruction of the _Gaston_ only partly experienced could not be fullyfelt.
Standing by the boat she tried to realize it and failed, tried to graspwhat she knew to be the horror and pity of it, and failed. She wasneither hard nor insensible, she simply could not grasp it.
And her position here with two rough men, very little food and littlechance of escape, how she would have pitied herself a few days ago couldshe have foreseen! Yet here, with the firm sands under her feet and thewind blowing in her face, reality, instead of hurting her as it had donein the boat on awakening yesterday morning, soothed her and reassuredher. Everything seemed firm again and the fear that the ugly coast hadraised in her mind had vanished.
She came along the beach looking at the gulls, turned over hugestar-fish and picked up kelp ribbons to examine them. Half a mile or sofrom the cave she was about to turn back when her eye caught a strangeappearance on the sea, hundreds and hundreds of moving points drawing into the shore, white and black points like a shoal of fish only halfsubmerged. It was a fleet of swimming birds.
She sat down on the sand to watch as they took the shore with a rushthrough the foam. Then, safely beached, the fleet became an army ofpenguins. She had seen pictures of penguins so she knew what they wereand she had read Anatole France's "Penquin Island"--these, then, werethe real things and she watched them fascinated as one who seesstoryland taking visible and concrete form.
The penguins formed line, broke into companies, drilled a bit and thenbegan to move up the beach.
The figure of the girl did not seem to disturb them in the least.
One company passed to the left, one to the right, whilst thatimmediately fronting her halted a few feet away and saluted her, bowinglike little old-fashioned men in black swallow-tail coats and immaculateshirt fronts, little old-fashioned men with sharp quizzical eyes,polished, humorous, polite and entirely friendly.
The company on the right wheeled to examine her as did the company onthe left, so that she found herself almost in a hollow square. Wherevershe turned there were birds bowing to her or things in the semblance ofbirds, absolutely fearless, so close that she could have touched themhad she carried a walking-stick.
She rose up to allow them to pass and they went on like mechanicalthings wound up and released, forming line again and seeming to forgether.
She remembered the guillemots and their rudeness and the way they hadstormed and jeered at the boat--did all that mean more than thepoliteness and friendliness of the penguins? If she were lying deadwould not the guillemots pass her without enmity and the penguinswithout friendliness, as indifferent to her fate as the wave of the seaon the blowing wind?
They would--as indifferent as the great islands standing out there inthe distance, mauve and slate grey against the morning. As she came backalong the beach her mind was battling with a problem that had suddenlyrisen. She had neither brush nor comb nor glass. Her hair was beautifuland she loved it. Her face was beautiful but she did not love it, it washerself, she could not view it from an independent standpoint, but shecould view her hair almost as impartially as a dress and she loved itwith the strange passion that women have for things of texture.
The hair of Cleo de Bromsart had been waited upon like a divinity bymany a priestess in the form of a maid. It had been dressed andshampooed and treated by artists and adepts, the hours of brushing aloneif put together would have made a terrific total. The result wasperfection, and even now, after all she had gone through, it shewedscarcely disarrangement, lustrous and beautiful, dressed with artfulsimplicity in the Greek style and outlining the perfect curves of herhead.
The wind was blow
ing now in gusto from the sea, but she scarcely noticedit as she walked, facing the problem that shipwreck had put before her,a problem the first of a long queue ranging from soap to a change ofgarments.
She was fighting it and at the same time battling with the strengtheningwind when suddenly something sprang on her with the yell of a tiger andflung her on the sand, pinning her there.