Beach of Dreams — 15 - Part IV, Chapters 21 and 22

TIME PASSES

It is not good to be alone.

As the weeks passed she began to lose and forget the feeling of surety in rescue and at times, now, she found herself talking out loud, putting what was in her mind into speech as though a companion were by, and sometimes she would hear a voice hallooing to her and start and cast her eyes over the desolate beach only to see the gulls.

The beach was always haunted by queer noises; the chanting sound of the waves coming in, a faint sound like the beating of a drum at very low tide, to say nothing of the booming of bitterns and the barking of brent geese and the hundred voices of the wind.

She would listen and listen, her mind wandering aimlessly, and in the great rains, when the whole sea was shut out by the downpour, the noise would lull her like opium.

The baby sea elephants lost their long black coats and put on their suits of fine yellow fur and took themselves to the nursery by the river, where all day long they played and tumbled and swam, and then she would sit and watch them like a mother watching her children.

The great battle of the bulls seemed like something far away beyond which other things were becoming vague.

Something that was not meant to be seen so close by human eyes, something that had pushed her still further from man.

It was full summer now, the season of tremendous sunsets and when the sky was clear, vast conflagrations lit themselves beyond the Lizard Point painting the islands and purpling the skies, and one evening as she sat in the western blaze watching the moving beach and listening to the playing and quarrelling of the nursery a voice said to her: "Some day all these will take to the sea and leave you.

There will be nothing here but the rocks and the sea."

It was as though the sunset had spoken.

The thought aroused her as a knock on the door arouses a sleeper.

Fighting against it her mind became more fully awake.

She said to herself: "If they go I will go too."

For a long time now she had lived without hot food or drink.

On coming here first she had cut some wood from the figure-head to make a fire, but it was damp, just damp enough to prevent it from kindling, so she had let things go as women do in the matter of food when they have not any one else to feed; she had burrowed into the cache and got at some of the tins of vegetables and on these and biscuits and tinned meat she made out, eating less and less as time went on.

It is bad to be alone, even with sea elephants to ward off fears, even with provisions enough for a year and a cave to shelter one.

She had never given in.

She had fought the future and refused to be frightened by it, she had worked for life and taken refuge in the moment, and now the moment was taking its revenge for being too much lived in.

To eat was almost too much trouble and presently the seal nursery became too long a walk and the little sea elephants at play had lost their power to interest her.

Sleep began to take the place of food and sometimes, and for no reason, she would weep like a child.

The food she ate sometimes seemed to poison her, bringing on vomiting and dysentery, and it poisoned her because her stomach failed to digest it.

She was being poisoned, poisoned by loneliness.

Had her stomach not failed her mind would have given, as it was the weakness of malnutrition saved her reason as it slowly destroyed her hold on life.

Her dreams became sometimes more vivid than reality and they always held her to the beach where she watched without terror battles between monstrous sea elephants and processions of penguins infinite in length, penguins that passed her bowing, bowing, bowing till she woke in the dark with the palms of her hands dry and burning and her lips like pumice stone and her tongue feeling hard like the tongue of a parrot, but the worst experience of all was a shock that came nearly every time she lay down at night and just before sleep took her.

It seemed like the blow of a fist, a fist that hit her everywhere, making her start and draw up her legs and cry out.

All this, perhaps, was what she had foreseen when long ago she had watched a great ship that had told her of Desolation--and something worse.

This was what no one had ever imagined in connection with Desolation.

Its power to kill with its own hand.

To gently destroy, sucking the vitality like a vampire and fanning the victim to dullness with its wings.

The sea elephants might have noticed that the female creature to whom they had grown so accustomed appeared little now, a shrinking vision that every day shortened its wanderings; that it walked differently, that it seemed more bent.

But the sea elephants knew nothing of Loneliness or its works, nor did they notice, one morning, that though the sun was shining the figure did not appear at all.

CHAPTER XXII A NEWCOMER

One morning, brilliant, with the deceptive brilliancy of Kerguelen, a big man, rough and red-bearded and carrying a bundle slung over his shoulder, stood on the rocks that formed the eastern point of the great beach; the sun was at his back and before him lay the seven mile stretch of sand and rock leading to the far-off Lizard Point.

He was over six feet in height but so strongly built that he scarcely looked his inches.

He was a sailor.

The gulls might have told that by the way he stood, and his eyes, accustomed to roving over vast spaces, swept the beach before him from end to end, took in the sea elephants moving like slugs and the seal-nursery and the river and the sands beyond and the Lizard Point crawling out to sea beyond the sands.

Then he cast his eyes inland.

He wanted to get to the west and he had to choose between seven miles of broken country or seven miles of easy beach.

The sea elephants were a bar across the beach.

He could gauge their size from where he stood, they looked formidable, but they were less so than the rocks strewing that broken country.

He had climbed over rocks and gone round rocks and nearly fallen from rocks till rocks had become in his mind enemies bitter, brutal, callous, and far more formidable than live things.

He chose the beach and came down to it, taking his way along the sea edge as a person takes his way along a pavement edge, giving possibly turbulent people the wall.

As he closed up towards the seal beach he kept his eyes fixed on the great bulls and their families, and the bulls, as he drew closer, shifted their position to watch him, beyond that they shewed no sign.

Then as he began to pass them he recognised that he had nothing to fear, the females alone, here and there, shewed any sign of disturbance, shuffling towards him with wicked eyes, rising on their flippers, but always sinking down and shuffling back as he went on.

Further along, though followed and met by a hundred pairs of eyes, even the females began to treat him with indifference.

It was as though the whole herd were under the dominion of one brain that recognized him as harmless and passed him along.

He would pause now and then to look at them with the admiration of strength for strength.

He was of their type, a bull man, rough from the sea as themselves.

Then he saw the caves and would have passed them only for something that caught his eye.

A red labelled Libby tin was lying on the dark sand close to the mouth of one of the caves, and if you wish to know how an old tomato tin or an old beef tin can shout, you must go alone to the great beach of Kerguelen and find one there--which you will not.

The sight of the tin made him start and catch in his breath.

The tin was everything he knew of ships and men focussed in a point, a knight in armour riding along the beach would have astonished him no more, would have heated his blood far less.

He struck up towards it, took it in his hand, examined it inside and out and then cast his eye at the cave before which it had lain.

He saw something in the cave, it was a woman; a woman lying on the sand with a rolled-up blanket under her head.

She was lying on her back and he saw a thin white hand, so small, so thin, so strange that he drew slightly back, glanced over his shoulder, as if to make sure that everything was all right with the world, and then glanced again, drawing closer.

Then he called out and the woman moved.

He could see her face now, white, and thin and drawn, and great eyes, terrible eyes, fixed on him.

Away out at sea, terribly near the coast of Death she saw him, a living being, as the castaway sees a ship on the far horizon.

He saw her hold out her arms to him and then, throwing his bundle aside, he was down on his knees beside her, holding the hands that sought his and with those terrible eyes holding him too.

He saw her lips moving, saw that they were dry and parched.

Then he knew.

She wanted water.

An empty baling tin was lying near her.

The sight of the river close by was in his mind, he released the hands, picked up the tin and scrambled out of the cave.

As he ran to the river heedless of sea elephants or anything else he kept crying out: "Oh, the poor woman.

Oh, the poor woman."

He seemed like a huge thing demented.

The baby sea elephants scuttered out of his way and as he came running back he spilt half the contents of the tin.

Then he was down beside her again, dipping his finger in the water and moistening her lips.

She sucked his finger as a baby sucks and the feel of that made him curse with the tears running down into his beard.

The size of the baling tin seemed horrible beyond words; he couldn't get it to her lips.

Still he went on, not knowing that it was his finger that was giving her back life; the blessed touch of a human being that had come almost too late.

He was sitting on his heels, and now, casting his great head from side to side, he saw things stacked behind her, tins and a bag and metal things that shone dimly.

Putting out his hand he caught a corner of the bag.

It was a bread bag, sure enough, and as he pulled it towards him the other things came clattering down almost hitting her, and amongst them, God-sent, a little tin spoon.

He seized it and filled it and brought the tip to her lips and she swallowed the water making movements with her throat muscles as though it were half a cupful.

He did this a dozen times and then rested, spoon in hand, watching her.

She made a couple of slight movements with her head as if nodding to him and her eyes never left him for a moment, they seemed holding on to life through him.

He offered a spoonful of water again, she moved her head slightly as though she had had enough, but her eyes never left him.

He knew.

If the whole thing had been carefully explained to him he could not have known better how she was clinging to him, as a child to a mother, as a creature to life.

And all the time his rough mind in a tumble of confusion and trouble was trying to think how she came like this, with a bread bag close to her and a river within reach.

A tin cup had come down with the other things, it gave him an idea, and getting a biscuit out of the bag he broke it up, put the pieces in the cup with some water and let them soak.

It took a long time and all the while, now and then, he kept talking to her.

"There.

Y'aren't so bad after all--keep up till I get you something more.

There's no use in troubling--you'll be on your pins soon."

He would pause to swear at the biscuit for not softening quicker, helping it to crumble with his mighty thumb thrust in the cup.

To "get food into her" was his main idea, it didn't matter about thumbs.

He was not without experience of starvation and thirst and what they can do to people, and, as he worked away talking to her, pictures from the past came to him of people he had seen like this, nearly "done in" by the sea.

Then he began to feed her with the noxious pap.

He managed to get six spoonfuls "into her" and then he saw she would stand no more; still, that was something, and as he brooded on his heels watching her he saw that she was making a struggle to keep it down, and he knew that if she brought it up she was done for.

And all the time she kept holding him with her eyes as though he were helping her in the struggle.

He was.

The sight of him gave her just the strength necessary to tide over the danger point; then she lay still and the food, such as it was, began to do its work.

One may say that the stomach thinks; every mood of the mind can touch it and it can influence every mood of the mind.

Then the terrible fixed eyes began to grow more human, then to close slightly.

She was still far at sea, but no longer adrift; like a little boat taken in tow she was heading now back for the shore.

She fell asleep holding his thumb.

The bits of wood she had chipped from the figure-head were lying in a little heap near the cave mouth and the axe lay beside them.

He noted them as he sat motionless as a carved figure till the grip on his thumb relaxed, and the dry claw-like hand, now growing moist and human, gave up its hold.

Then, crawling out, stealthily and side-ways like a crab, he seized the axe and, rising up outside, axe in hand, stood looking in at the woman.

He stood watching her, making sure that she was well asleep, then he turned towards the seal nursery swinging the axe.

There he murdered a little girl sea elephant after a short, sharp chase over the rocks.

Then, close to the caves and with his sailor's knife, he stripped her of fur and blubber.

He placed the blubber on one side, cut up the meat and retaining the heart and kidneys wrapped the head and the remainders in the pelt and dumped them in a crack in the rocks.

Having done this he went to the river and washed his hands free of the blood and grease.

In his bundle there was a box with half a dozen matches, they would have been gone long ago only that long ago his tobacco had given out.

They were useful now.

He knelt down and undid the bundle.

There was in it beside the match-box a shirt rolled up, two sailors' knives, two tobacco boxes, a couple of huge biscuits, a piece of sail cloth and a pair of men's boots, one might have fancied from the knives and tobacco boxes that he was the only survivor of a party of three cast on the coast and that he had kept these things as relics.

That was the fact.

When he had secured the matches his next thought was of the firewood and the baling tin.

There was a saucepan away at the back of the cave under the other things but he could not see it.

He could see the tin but he dreaded going in to get it lest he should wake the woman and she should clutch his thumb again.

That was a bad experience and he told himself that if she had not relaxed her hold he would have been sitting there still tied hand and foot and not daring to move--strength in the clutch of weakness, to whom God has given a power greater that that of strength.

He crawled in and secured the tin without wakening her and as much firewood as he wanted.

It was fairly dry and with the help of the blubber he soon had it burning between two big stones, then he put the tin on, half filled with water, and dropped in the seal meat cut fine.

He was making soup for himself as well as for her.

He had been without hot food for ages and the smell of the stuff as it began to cook made him sometimes forget her entirely.

Predatory gulls had found the pelt and the head in the rock crevice and their quarrelling filled the beach.

He turned his head sometimes to look at them as he sat squatting like a gipsy before the little fire, tilting the tin by the handle and stirring the contents with his knife.

He was a man of resource for, before filling the tin with fresh water, he had dipped it in the sea so as to get some salt into the mess.

Then when the stuff was cooked, having no spoon, he had to wait until it cooled a bit before tasting it.

He went to the cave mouth to have a look at the woman.

The quarrelling of the great gulls had evidently awakened her, for her eyes were open, and as his figure cut the light at the cave entrance her head moved.

He ran back for the precious tin and, carrying it carefully, and half carried away by the entrancing smell of it, knelt down beside her, then picking up the spoon began to feed her before feeding himself.