Transcriber’s Note

The cover of this eBook contains an illustration from the original book. The text was added by the Transcriber and placed into the Public Domain.

THE SHIP OF CORAL

BY DR. STACPOOLE

The Crimson Azaleas
The Blue Lagoon
Garryowen
The Pools of Silence
The Drums of War
Patsy
Poems and Ballads

“Gaspard drew her towards him.”

THE
SHIP OF CORAL

BY
H. de VERE STACPOOLE

NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1911

Copyright, 1911
By DUFFIELD & COMPANY

CONTENTS

THE SHIP OF CORAL

CHAPTER I
JEAN FRANÇOIS DE NANTES JEAN FRANÇOIS—JEAN FRANÇOIS

The sea lay blue to the far horizon. Blue—Ah, blue is but a name till you have seen the sea that breaks around the Bahamas and gives anchorage to the tall ships at Port Royal; that great sheet of blue water stretching from Cape Catoche to the Windward Islands, and from Yucatan to beyond the Bahamas, studded with banks and keys and reefs, the old sea of the Buccaneers shot over with the doings of Kidd and Singleton and Horne.

On the salt white sand in the blinding dazzle of sunlight the waves were falling, clear-green, crystalline, each lovely as a jewel. The crying of the gulls, loud all the morning, had died down with high afternoon and high tide; the wind had faded as though withered by the sun. Just at the moment of high tide the sea makes a pause in its eternal labour, the great act of systole has been accomplished and, break the waves as they may, the profound languor of the ocean makes itself heard and felt.

Gaspard Cadillac, ex-stoker of the Rhone, sitting with his back against a palm tree cleaning an old tobacco pipe and absorbed in the job, felt this pause and hold-up in nature just as the gulls felt it—just as much and just as little as they.

“I have raised my horizon,” said the sea. “I have lifted fleets towards heaven, hidden reefs; I have drained the occidental shores and domed with water the Indies, I rest from my labours and I dream.”

Our man beneath the tree was a Moco. The French navy is divided into two great classes, the men from the south and the men from the north, the Moco and the Ponantaise.

Gaspard was a man from the south, a Provençal, dark, handsome in a rough way, wiry and vivid. Yves, his bosom companion, also a stoker of the Rhone and the only survivor with Gaspard of the wreck of that ill-fated ship, was a Ponantaise, a big man from Bretagne with a blond beard. Yves was over away on the other side of the little island now hunting for what he might find in the rock pools and creeks. Away out there in a right line from where Gaspard was sitting beneath the palm trees, under the blinding dazzle of sea, the Rhone was lying with her bottom ripped out, her boilers burst, her boats hanging smashed at her davits; a horrible travesty of a ship, knocked under the sea as if with the blow of a giant’s fist, a raffle of ropes, machinery, and corpses.

The gods had been very good to Gaspard and Yves, and Gaspard had, by the direction of the gods, been the salvation of Yves. The whole catastrophe had come like a clap of thunder on a moonlit sea. The “Haa-r rip” of the reef that had been waiting a million years for the Rhone, the screaming of scalding steam and scalded men, a wild bellow from the siren, the roar of the boilers opening out, and the shout of the lifting decks, all that, so thunderous and apocalyptic, so full of tragedy, and torment, and woe, filled the night for a moment for miles around, and then there was nothing but the moonlit sea.

Yves was a good swimmer, but his heart had gone out in him; he had been held down under water by the suck of the sinking ship, and he would have drowned to a certainty only for Gaspard, who was a bad swimmer but a bad drowner.

The wiry Provençal, courageous as a rat, had held Yves’ head above water till Yves felt the sea slapping him in the face and saw a great spar lifting and dripping in the moonlight; saw Gaspard seize the spar, a picture almost instantaneous, a picture that told him at once the truth and made him strike out for safety.

The set of the current had carried the spar to the islet. One might have fancied that the sea, repenting for that sin of hers, had determined to save these two last survivors of the Rhone. But the sea cared for the men as much as she cared for the spar—less, for they were lighter.

Boxes and crates had come drifting ashore, getting caught and tangled in the reef-mesh to eastward of the islet; a horrible abundance of provisions, all sorts of articles from the cargo, corpses, spars, everything yet nothing, pounding about in the desolate reef-strewn water, made the east side of the islet a place to avoid.

The two men in the few days since the wreck had salved enough food to last them for months, there was a spring of water amidst the low bay-cedar bushes that stretched from shore edge to shore edge, the islet was in a trade track, and they were certain of near rescue; all these circumstances made them easy of mind and made a holiday of the episode.

Gaspard having cleaned the pipe to his satisfaction, filled it with tobacco and lit it. Then he lay on his back with his head in the scanty shade of the palm fronds, the peak of his cap over his eyes, the smoke from his pipe curling upwards in the windless air.

Windless for a moment only. The tide had turned and with the turn of the tide a faint breathing shook the palm tops against the blue. Maybe it was the breeze carrying the voices nearer, but the crying of the gulls seemed to louden with the turning tide.

Jean François de Nantes,
Jean François, Jean François,
Jean François de Nantes,
Jean François, Jean François.

The old interminable song of the French navy immortalized by Loti sang in the ears of the Moco as he lay, blissful, forgetful, seeing pictures, dreaming dreams.

Now he was in the stokehold of the Rhone feeding furnace No. 2. He could feel the cotton waste protecting his hands from the heat of the rake; he could hear the clatter of the ash lift and the boom of the sea.

Hi! Hi! Hi! The weary, querulous call of the gulls brought up the Tamalpais, a three-master in which he had served for a voyage.

Hi! Hi! Hi! It was the very voices of the men hauling on the halyards; he could see the topsails bellying to the wind, the great sails held hard against the blue, the yards, the studding sail booms; away from years ago and across three thousand miles of sea came the voices of the men hauling in chorus, echoes from the past answering the lamentable crying of the gulls.

And now the Tamalpais went to pieces, became a curl of smoke, vanished, and he was on the wharves of Marseilles, in a bar standing before a zinc counter, a chopin of wine, and a girl.

Ah! that was it, the girl; some piece of grit had been irritating his mind for the last few minutes, something behind his laziness and happiness had been working for his discomfort; we all know that feeling when the subconscious self is grumbling or worrying over something that the conscious self has forgotten for a moment.

Anisette was the name she went by; a pale-faced, undersized girl. You would not, possibly, have looked at her twice, but had you done so you would, were you a man, certainly have looked at her a third time.

She was of the type that appeals to a man’s passions, never to his heart, and she stood at the bar of the Riga where the Swedes and Norwegians congregate, and there Yves and Gaspard had fallen in with her and she had favoured Yves.

The big, blond Yves had captured this little pirate who had sailed for years unharmed and harmful. She had scorned Gaspard, who would have given his hand for a glance from her, and she had given herself wholly to Yves.

Had he loved the woman with a pure and simple love Gaspard might have forgiven Yves, his bosom companion, for the victory; his affection for Yves was one of those brotherly loves that ennoble a man, and the Moco was capable, perhaps, of a splendid abnegation. But Yves had crossed him in his passions and the Moco was a man who could never forgive that.

Hi! Hi! Hi!

Girl and bar and Riga tavern vanished, giving place to Marseilles harbour, with the Rhone thrashing her way out. A passenger had given Yves a cigar; it was always the way; Yves had all the luck; if there was a cigar or a drink going it always fell to Yves—or a girl—yet he, Gaspard, had saved this man’s life.

Now, on board ship, at work, all these grumblings would have been there in the heart of Gaspard, but they would have been undeveloped; here, in idleness, they grew; and to visualize the awful power of woman it is enough to make your mental standpoint the apex of a vast triangle the other two angles of which are Anisette serving drinks in the tobacco-smelling bar of the Riga and the Moco beneath the palm trees warring in thought against his bosom friend Yves.

A great crab fell with a thud on the sand beside Gaspard, who sprang half erect to find himself face to face with Yves.

The Ponantaise was laughing. He had caught the crab amidst the rocks; he had two more under his arm, their claws tied together with a string; he had found a boat sail from the Rhone and a small spar, out of which he intended to make a tent; he flung the lot on the sand and then sat down beside his companion, took out his pipe, filled it, lit it, and began to smoke.

The Moco, after his exclamation of surprise, had fallen back in his old position, and the two men smoked without interchanging a word.

They would go like this for a long time without speaking a word. One might have fancied them enemies, or at least put out at one another; not at all. They were simply sharing the tremendous taciturnity of their species. All who help in the labor of the sea share in its weariness, Vasta Silentio, the motto, is written on the waves.

Hi! Hi! Hi!

The breeze had freshened a bit, giving life and energy to the calling of the gulls; the Moco, his pipe out, pushed his cap back from his eyes and sat up.

“See here,” said Yves, “you know over there where I fetched these things from—well—over there I’ve found something.”

CHAPTER II
A SECRET OF THE SEA

“Eh bien?”

The big Yves laughed in his beard and dug his naked toes into the hot white sand luxuriously. Gaspard was shod, for he had turned in all standing just before the disaster to the ship; but Yves, more particular or less tired, had kicked his shoes off.

“Eh bien?”

“Something funny, mordieu! Yes, when you see it you’ll stare.”

“Well, what is it? You keep on like an old woman; if you found anything funnier than yourself it would be queer.”

“Well, then, come and look and you will see.” Yves rose to his feet, kicked the crabs into a heap, spread the sail on the sand, and placing the crabs in the sail, made a bundle of them; having tied the bundle with a rope he placed it in the shadow of the palms.

“That will keep them safe till we come back,” said Yves, “allons.”

He led the way right across the islet to the north.

It was scarcely a quarter of a mile wide, this islet, and covered from shore edge to shore edge with thick bay-cedar bushes rising to the knees. The only trees upon it were the palms. Those seven palms gathered in the clump beneath whose shade the Moco had been lying.

The breeze, which had freshened momentarily, had now died again, and as they tramped through the dense growth the sun, now passing into the western sky, struck them on their left sides so that they could have sworn they were walking side turned to an open furnace door. But they were used to heat and neither of them grumbled, or only occasionally the Moco.

“Well, this is a nice tramp to see something funny; it seems to me the funny thing is that we should be sweating ourselves like this; if you could shew me a decent bar at the end of our journey—”

“Come on,” replied Yves; “you will not be sorry when you see it.”

The sea to the eastward of the island was heavily sown with reefs; the great reef that had destroyed the Rhone lay due south; northward there were also reefs; only to the west was the approach to the island safe.

“Here we are,” said Yves, as he tramped his way out of the bushes and on to the northern beach, the Moco following.

Yes, there were reefs here, indeed, just a dark bloom under the blue water, just a trace of snow; a pencilling of foam shewed where the murderers of the sea lay hidden, and the sea was beautiful here, more beautiful than to the south of the island, for the reefs and the shallows were continually changing in the wonderful light of the tropics to suit the hour of the day; colours chasing colours, sky blue parallels of sea and heather purple lines of reef greeting the dawn, cornflower-coloured spaces of water flashing the sky back like mirrors at noon, whilst at sunset, in those wonderful sunsets that reach to the zenith, all this stretch of sea and reef would be a field of beaten gold.

Just as the ever-changing light of day made ever-changing beauties, so did the ever-changing air, and ever-changing tide; at low tide with a strong breeze every reef would speak and you would hear a sound that once heard you would never forget, the song of a hundred tiny shores, the tune of the reefs. Sometimes in those great low tides in which we fancy the moon and the sun hauling together at the heavy blue robe of the sea, as if to make her shew her hidden armour and her scars, the reefs would be fully exposed, razor-edged, hungry, and lean. In these low tides you would see great fish betrayed by the sea and trapped in the pools, flinging themselves in the air like curved silver swords. Conversely, in the great high tides you might have sailed a battleship in fancy over the unclouded water.

Yves, leaving the beach, began to clamber along a ledge of rock that went straight out from the shore like a natural pier; Gaspard followed him, treading the seaweed under foot. There were no gulls here; the fishing ground of the gulls lay to the southeast, but so small was the island that you could still hear their voices on the air that had now become absolutely windless.

The water lay deep and clear on the left of the ledge of the rocks, but Gaspard had eyes for nothing but the slippery seaweed under foot.

These reefs are as a rule so rough, so serrated with keen-edged spines of coral, that bare-footed, as Yves was, to walk on them would be impossible; but this great ledge was comparatively smooth; it lay above high tide for the first hundred yards or so, and then, shelving slightly, lost itself at high tide beneath the water.

The tide since its turn had already fallen two feet and the hidden part of the reef was beginning to shew. It was plain to the eye that the whole reef formed the edge of an immense bath-like basin, an elliptiform lagoon, the longest diameter of which lay from north to south.

Yves led the way till they were fifty yards from the shore; then he stopped, turned, and pointed into the green clear water to the left.

The lagoon, unruffled by a breath of wind, lay lit to its heart and burning like a vast and flawless emerald, its floor of salt white sand, though invisible to the eye, was still reached by the sun rays and flung them back in a million sparkles that combined to form the water’s dazzling soul.

Twenty feet out from the reef lay what seemed at first a flat-topped, reed-grown rock; the tide was slowly uncovering it and the ribbons of seaweed growing from it waved in the aquamarine of the water as grass or land foliage waves in a gentle wind. The rock, weed-grown and emerging from the water, had for a base a column thicker than a man’s body, a column here dazzling bright and flower coloured, here dim and darkened with growing fucus; a column whose lowermost part was lost in the vagueness of the lagoon. The Moco, who had flung himself down and was leaning over the reef ledge so as to see better, gave a start. His sailor’s eye, after the first surprise, saw through the mystery of the rock growing like a hideous flower on a coloured stalk. The rock was the foretop of a ship, the column was the coral-crusted mast.

But the mystery dispelled was as nothing to the mystery half-unveiled. To the Moco, who combined in himself the imagination of the southern man and the imagination of the sailor, this hint of a ship in the still and silent water appealed more forcibly than the full sight of a wreck on a thunderous beach.

The coral-crusted mast led the eye down till the sight found the pale, fish-like form of the ship itself.

“Boufre,” cried the Moco; “’tis as thick as a funnel.” Then he was silent as was Yves, and lying side by side on the grey dead coral of the reef, they contemplated the column of living coral that once had formed the mast of a ship.

The ship lay below unharmed as to her fore part, else the mast would not have been left standing; driven years ago by some great wave, she must have passed at one stride of the sea over the circling reef of the lagoon, to sink, the water pouring through her shattered timbers, and lie lost here forever.

Or, in those past days there may have been a break in the reef built up long ago by the restless coral. How she had found her last resting place who could say; what had been her business who could tell, but trumpets could not have proclaimed doom and death more poignantly than did the awful silence, the vagueness into which the mast sank and wavered, towards the ghostly ship.

For eight feet or so below the foretop the mast was dressed with seaweed, shewing only here and there the white of the coral crust; below that the seaweed did not grow. The eight feet indicated the rise and fall of the tide, for the lagoon, though shewing no break in its encircling reef, communicated through twenty unseen openings with the outer sea and filled and emptied to high and low water like a great cullender.

Flights of painted fishes flashed now and then through the water and vanished, the seaweeds growing from the mast shewed waving as if to a submarine wind, now like dark brown ribbons of shadow, now like a drowned woman’s hair powdered with sparkling blossoms; now a tress of vivid green would be loosened by the fingers of the outgoing tide, catch a sunbeam and shew its beauty, or a tress of amber.

As they watched and as the tide sank lower, inch by inch and foot by foot, the hidden portion of the mast jewelled with coral and sea growths stole more clearly into view, and foot by foot the seaweed portion beneath the foretop stole from the water and stood dripping, dank, and dismal in the sun, clearer and clearer like a grey cloud, fish-shaped and enormous in the green below the lost ship began to unveil herself to the sight. It was like the coming of a ghost, a thing most dim yet wonderful to be seen.

One could trace the mast, now, right down to the deck. It sprang from a coloured column from which here and there grew great sea fans that seemed made from dark lace and strewn here and there with all colours from the brilliant red of tiny starfish to the delicate peach-bloom of the flat lichen coral. So rich, so delicate, so opulent in colour, it might have been the column of some fairy palace, this old foremast of a forgotten ship.

The two men, taking comfortable positions on the reef, had lit their pipes. Hour after hour they sat smoking, interchanging a few words, but always with their eyes alive for changes in the water below. Now forgetting to smoke, they lay on their elbows looking down into the green depth where, stronger through the shallowing water, sharper, clearer, the ship began to shew her form hideous to the sight as the form of a man bloated by disease; grey, enormous, muffled with coral, tufted with what seemed fungous growths.

“Look,” said Yves, pointing down to where the fantastically high poop was humping itself into view, “saw you ever a ship built in that fashion floating on the sea? Why she is from the time of Noah—In the church at Paimpol they have a model ship like that; she was dedicated to the Virgin in the old days—”

“Let us look,” growled the Moco, speaking as if irritated by the voice of his companion; then he hung silent, his eyes fixed on the vision developing below. The tide had sunk now to within a foot of low water mark, and as the veil of water lessened so did the vision strengthen; one could make out the decks clearly, all rough with coral, and the coral banks that were once the bulwarks, a stump of mainmast was left and had become converted into a cone of coral the height of a man; trace of mizzen mast there was none.

CHAPTER III
EVENING

All this time, steadily as the tide, the sun had been sinking; he had dropped through a dazzling azure sky and he was now hanging almost in touch with the western horizon, a ball of fire in a sky of dazzling gold; momently the gold of the sunset took possession of the sky, spreading up, up, till the very zenith was reached, and down, down, till the gilding reached the eastern sky line. The world now seemed clipped in the cup of a great golden flower, and the little ripples that came sighing in round the low tide reefs showed their foam like fleeces of gold. Not a trace of cloud shewed in the golden sky, not a wave on the golden sea; in that wonderful sunset the palm tops burned like fingers of flame, and as music lights the soul of man, so did the golden and glowing atmosphere the heart of the lagoon.

The ship in the water below answered to the magic of the light; the thing that had been grey and dismal as death was in a moment transformed to a dream of colour, the brains of frost-white coral became golden lamps; starfish, sea-flowers, coraline growths, pink, crimson, indigo, pale yellow, colour and form, all lent their adornment.

Shadowless on her bed of dazzling sand she hung for a moment, burning in full sight, clear to the eye as though she were floating in air and exquisite as a jewel, then just as she had bloomed she faded out, her colour and beauty passing with the fading light, and as night swept over the sea like the shadow of a violet-wing, she vanished utterly, whilst the lagoon filled with darkness and the first stars cast their shimmer on its surface.

“Eh bien?” said Yves, as he rose to his feet and stretched himself. The Moco, who had also risen to his feet, looked around him at the world of darkness that had displaced the world of gold; he had seen many things, but nothing that had ever struck his imagination so vividly as the sight now veiled by darkness. His mind could not reason on the question or refute by logic the feeling in his heart that what he had seen was evil.

All that gaiety and colour decking the ruin of man’s work was like laughter coming from under the seas.

Yves felt nothing of this.

“Come,” said the Moco, turning towards the shore, “let’s go back.”

As they tramped their way through the brushwood they talked of the thing they had seen. Yves thought that from the height of her poop she must be very old, or it might be that it was only a very big deck-house snowed over with coral; he slapped his thigh as he walked, pleased with the idea of the snow; when a boy in Brittany he had seen things heaped with snow and bulked out in size, carts, barrels, and so forth, just as the old ship was heaped and bulked out with coral; but the simile was lost on Gaspard; you do not get snow at Montpellier to any extent; also his mind more trained by early education, and more supple by heredity, refused to draw images from gross bulk; the colours appealed to him; “mordieu,” said he, “she reminds me most of a ship of flowers I once saw drawn along in the carnival procession at Montpellier.”

“Flowers,” laughed Yves, “where would you get flowers under the sea?” The stupidity of Yves roused Gaspard’s ever-ready anger.

“From the devil, maybe—I was not talking of flowers under the sea; I was talking of what I had seen in Montpellier.”

They had reached the southern beach, where the palm trees grew, and Yves set about lighting a fire of dry brushwood; when it was burning he heaped on some wreck-wood; the ship of coral, the wreck of the Rhone, their position, all were banished from his mind by the business in hand.

When supper was finished they sat each with his back against a palm tree. The work of the day was over. They had rigged up a rough sort of tent with the boat sail and some broken spars, but the warm night held them in the open.

The red light of the fire lit the white sand to within a few yards of the sea edge, where the waves were falling gently, rhythmically, drowsily, Haassh—Haassh—Haassh—a chill and dreamy sound. Above, the sky solid with stars, voiceless, windless, seemed a thing more alive and active than the sea. From the slight elevation where they sat a ghostly white streak on the starlit sea to the southward indicated the reef that had slain the Rhone; only at low tide and half way between flood and ebb tide did the snow of the surf indicate the position of the murderer.

“She had a lot of gold in her for Havana,” said Yves, breaking silence and nodding in the direction of the reef; “seems a pity that it should be lying there under the sea and no one to spend it.”

“See here,” said Gaspard, “it’s strange I was thinking of that hooker lying in the lagoon over there.”

“Yes?”

“I was thinking, maybe, there is stuff worth looking for a’board her if one could get at it.”

Yves laughed.

“Yes, if you could get at it—if you could get at it—and she built over with coral a foot thick; and if you could break through it what would you find? dead men’s bones. It’s like your flowers under the sea.” He tapped the dottle out of his pipe, rose, stretched, and turned toward the little tent, whilst Gaspard without a word continued smoking; he could have struck Yves.

The son of a tradesman in Montpellier, he possessed still some rudiments of the education he had received before that fatal day when, driven by the instinct of wandering and the hatred of restraint, he had run away to sea. Yves, the son of long generations of sailors, had gone to sea as a duckling goes to the pond. Gaspard had been taken there by his imagination. He knew himself superior to the lumbering Yves whose fingers were like fish-hooks, who had the manners of a bear and the walk of a walrus, yet Yves was always proving himself (by chance, no doubt) the better and the luckier man.

He turned in under the shelter of the tent where Yves was already snoring, and he slept and dreamt of the docks of Marseilles, of Anisette, and of Yves.

CHAPTER IV
SPANISH GOLD

From the salt-white sand of the beach to eastward, and some two hundred yards from the palm-clump a ridge of coral rocks ran out into the sea like a natural pier. The water lay deep off these rocks and the fishing would have been good had the ship-wrecked ones possessed lines and hooks.

Gaspard, next day, late in the afternoon was standing at the end of this coral pier, the sea of an incredible blue, sailless, forlorn, came glassing shoreward in long gentle lines of swell, slobbering and sighing by the rocks and breaking sadly on the sands.

When the sea comes in like this in long spaced undulations a voice steals through her voice, the something tragic, the quid obscurum that hides in nature and speaks through the elements and the passions is heard. The sea has a hundred voices, Gaiety, Triumph, Strength, Sadness, Regret, the wave speaks them all. But stand on a day like this on a desolate island in the tropics and listen to the voice that steals from all that splendour of light and gaiety of colour, the violent heaving wastes of water, the triumphant sun, the sky of living blue, through all these, from all these you will hear a voice, it is borne by the languid voice of the sea.

It is the voice of Loneliness.

Loneliness—Fate, Death, Tragedy—all these are dwarfed before her, to escape from whom the very atoms of matter cling together, animals join in herds, men in communities. She who says to man “I walk by you from the cradle to the grave, with me you go forth from the world alone, because of me you work out your fate alone, by the shores and desolate plains of the north I shew my face, by the tropic sea men hear my voice. I am she who makes Death terrible. I am she who makes Love beautiful. Love my only enemy.”

Gaspard, standing on the reef, heard the voice, his eyes were fixed on the green water in the shadow of the rocks, an albicore like a flashing sword had passed a moment ago, now there was nothing to be seen but the crystalline vagueness through which here and there floated a scrap of fucus. Just in that second, held between the sound of the sea and the mesmeric crystal of the water his mind heard Loneliness speak. Just in that moment was borne in on him dimly, and without awakening true comprehension, the tragic fact of human isolation, the fact that each man is on a desert island set round by the sea of life, and that there alone he must work out his fate, unless from some island in the distance Love should bring him help.

The fact came to him as a sensation rather than a thought, the grave harmonics of the sea had whispered to him this eternal truth, the fact which is the master fact of life.

Suddenly, from behind, as he stood there gazing into the depths came a voice that made him turn. Yves far away amidst the low bushes was beckoning and calling to him, capering, gesticulating, flinging his arms about. Yves seemed to have gone mad, and Gaspard, making along the rocks, ran across the sand, and through the bushes towards him.

Over the bushes the air was shaking with the heat, Yves was much farther off than he had seemed from the rocks; he was almost at the centre of the islet, and now as Gaspard made his way through the bushes he saw that his companion held something in his hand.

“Hurry up, lazy bones,” cried Yves, “and see what I have found.” He waved the thing in the air, it was a belt with a brass buckle and a pouch attached to it. He was laughing, one might have fancied that he had fallen on some great, good fortune.

He had.

“Look,” cried Yves. He opened the pouch, it was filled with big pieces of gold; they had been wrapped in oilskin, he had flung the oilskin away and he stood with his two great hands outspread clasping the pouch and the treasure bursting from it.

Gaspard at the sight gave a cry that rang across the islet and was answered by the ever-wheeling gulls.

“Gold!” cried Gaspard, seizing a piece from the hand of Yves. He examined it, bit it, glanced at it again. He seemed dazed and had the look of a man who, long a prisoner in darkness, had been suddenly brought face to face with a powerful light. The piece of gold was Spanish, a piece of eight, heavy, and stamped with the stately effigies of a vanished king.

“Look!” cried Yves, taking the coin back from the hand of Gaspard and replacing it in the pouch with the others. “Look!” As he buckled the pouch he pointed with his foot at something amidst the bushes. Just here the bushes were thinner than elsewhere and here the ground was raised in a little mound. Amidst the bushes, white and desolate, lay some bones. They were strewn hither and thither. One might have fancied that here once lay a skeleton, the embers of a man that some wind had blown upon and scattered. A skeleton, in fact, had once lain here, on or amongst the bushes, but so long ago that the bushes dying and growing again had cast the fragments apart. The skeleton of a man; the skull which Gaspard had picked up and was now holding in his hand told that.

It was a strange skull, small and deformed, hideously broad across the cheek-bones; the bones of the thigh easily distinguished by even the untrained eyes of the sailors were unequal in length, the shorter of them had been injured or broken, for it shewed the thickening where callus had formed.

“Pah!” cried Gaspard, flinging the skull down. “He must have been a beauty whoever he was—and look.” He picked up an old pistol-barrel, eaten away by rust, the trigger plate thin as a leaf and crumbling like a withered leaf to the touch lay near. Many, many years of exposure it must have taken to eat the metal away like that. Yves glanced at the thing without interest. “Come,” said he, and turning, he led the way to the southern beach. Here under the palm trees he sat down, opened the pouch, and rattled the gold pieces on the sand between his outspread legs.

Gaspard, who had followed him without a word, stood, without a word, looking on.

Yves counted the pieces; there were twenty-one of them and he was disappointed; there had seemed more. He began to recount them. He had scarcely done so when Gaspard broke silence.

“Look here,” said Gaspard, “half of that falls to my share; half of that belongs to me by all rights.”

Yves stopped his counting and looked up. It was the tone of Gaspard’s voice rather than his words, perhaps, that caused the expression upon his broad, sun-burnt face. A heavy, unfriendly expression, such as the face of a croupier might wear when some punter disputes the game.

“Yours?” said Yves, “and who found them?”

“That’s neither here nor there,” said the Moco, “you found them, it is true, but it was only a question of luck. I might have found them just as easily, and if I had I would have gone shares.”

Yves knew this to be a fact. Gaspard was the soul of generosity. Generosity was not predominant in the soul of Yves. He was a good-hearted man, but the Breton peasant was uppermost in his nature; he had made this great haul of golden fish entirely with his own hand, and now he was called upon by a man more generous than himself to share it.

He said nothing for a moment, but went on counting the pieces; then, as if addressing them, “Yes, it’s easy to talk of luck—but would I have found them if I had been lying lazy on the beach, or staring into the sea like some people? No, I was hunting for dead brushwood, doing something for my living, and I found them.”

“Then keep them,” cried Gaspard, and turning on his heel he walked down to the sea edge. He walked for a bit along the sand, then, with his arms folded, he stood looking at the sea.

His mind had left the subject of the money and was clinging to the true grievance he had against Yves. The poisonous source of hatred. Anisette.

But the grievance of the money was there as well, and all at once by some alchemy of Satan the hundred grudges petty and large that he had against his companion joined together and formed the figure of a monstrous Yves, a creature he hated, and who, so the devil whispered, hated him.

The sun was now near its setting, and as Gaspard stood there with arms folded looking at the sea, the eternal crying of the gulls took on a new meaning; they were saying a new word:

“Yves,—Yves,—Yves.”

It seemed as though the very gulls were mocking him.

“Yves,—Yves,—Yves.”

He turned and strode up the sand to where Yves was sitting beneath the palm trees.

The sun was sinking now over Tampico way in a sky of living gold, the western sea, leaping to meet him, flashed his splendour to the very shores of the islet; each flake of foam seemed a flake of primrose light and the sands stretched like sands of gold by the shores of the golden sea.

Gaspard came right up to Yves, the splendour of the sunset on his face, his hands clenched in his pockets, his lips dry.

“All the same,” said Gaspard, as though he were continuing a conversation, “you are a thief, and a son of a thief—more fool I to chum with a dog of a Ponantaise.”

Yves rose up; he was a slow man to wrath, but terrible when roused. The belt and the pouch containing the money were lying at his feet; he kicked them aside as he faced the Moco.

“You say—”

“I say what I have said.”

“After the fashion of the monkeys,” replied Yves, “that say what they have said all day long—drop that!”

The Moco had whipped the knife from the sheath in his belt. Both men wore knives, but the Ponantaise had not drawn his. He stood with his arms folded across his immense chest, literally as though he were nursing his wrath.

“It is well known,” said Yves, his eye on the knife, “that a Moco and a woman can only fight with their claws and tongue.”

Gaspard dropped the knife; then he stooped and picked it up as if to replace it in his belt; he seemed half mad with rage and not to know what he was doing.

That was the moment of his life; the next he might have replaced the knife in its sheath and all would have been well, had not Yves, whose anger had suddenly passed from his control, spat at the Moco a word.

A word of one syllable, one of those dead rats of language that these men fling at one another in jest, but when spoken in anger are worse than a blow.

The Moco flung himself back as though a snake had struck at him, then the knife in his hand flashed through the air and Yves was on his back on the sand kicking and coughing and whistling at the sky.

The knife had just touched the jugular vein in his neck; the air rushing into the vein made the whistling noise, but Gaspard knew nothing of this. He strode up to the body of his companion with fists clenched, prepared for battle, and certain that his antagonist would spring to his feet and face him.

Then he saw that Yves was dying. Dying of nothing, apparently, for the knife was on the sand almost unstained and the stricken man shewed no wound to speak of, just a scratch on the neck from which the black blood oozed in froth.

Had Gaspard raised his eyes to the west he would have seen that the great sun was now cut in half by the sea, dying in a scene of splendour indescribable, but he saw nothing, nothing, but the face of Yves.

For a moment he stood, the last fiery rays of the sun casting his shadow far away along the sand. Then he was kneeling by the body, shaking it by the arm, calling upon it to wake up—to come to life!

CHAPTER V
AMIDST THE BUSHES

After the first outburst of raving, impetuous grief, the grief of a child rather than the grief of a man, Gaspard rose up from where he had cast himself down by Yves. The sun had long passed from the sky and the star-smitten sea came in smoothly, rhythmically, breaking in foam on the starlit sands, and there on the sand lay Yves, listening to what the sea was saying.

His great right fist, clenched, was lying on his breast; one might have fancied that the meaning of it all and the mystery of that sky so filled with fire and passionate life, and those wastes of the ever-fretting sea, had been revealed to him in one stupendous moment, that he had struck himself on the breast in the stupefaction of wonder that he was gazing and listening, motionless before the revelation forevermore.

Yves from a common man had become at once and at a stroke a part of the immensity and the wonder of the night, the reachless stars and the fathomless sea; and, for a moment, Gaspard, standing before the body of the man he had slain, saw death as the prehistoric man saw it before language had robbed thought of its freshness and power. For a moment only, and then the stars became the stars again, and the sea the sea, and the dead body of Yves the body of a man he had slain in anger.

And now that his southern nature had spent itself in a wild outburst of grief just as a child spends itself in an outburst of weeping, thought came back.

Well, then?—whose fault was it?

The knife was flung with no intent to kill,—what right had he to die of a scratch like that?—and then the vile word—that was the last of a long series of injuries. And bit by bit his mind went back counting up the score of these “injuries,” right back to the tobacco-smelling bar of the Riga and to Anisette as he had last seen her, with her little grimy hand resting on the great hairy paw of Yves. That remembrance like a hideous lamp lit up all his grievances, enlarging them two-fold. No, he was not to blame; he had not meant to kill, and if he had, Dieu de Dieu, look at the provocation!

He stood for a moment, his chin resting in his hand, his eyes on the body before him; then he turned and, walking down to the sea-edge, dipped his hands and washed his face in the foam. As he turned up the beach again towards the trees, wiping his streaming face with the sleeve of his coat, he felt as though all the occurrences of the last few hours had happened years ago, so remote did they seem for the moment. The sight of the body lying there so still in the starlight brought him to a pause. Grief rushed back on him, driving all little and evil things from his mind. He stood looking at his handiwork. It had been an accident; he had not meant to kill; he did not even remember flinging the knife. The act had been automatic and committed in blind rage—all the same, he had killed Yves.

Then, loathing the business which had to be done, he seized the body of his dead companion by the shoulders and began to drag it towards the bushes.

* * * * *

As he stepped from the bushes, his task accomplished, he cast his eyes over the beach. It lay white in the starlight, and there was nothing now to tell of tragedy but the knife lying there just as it had fallen after its murderous work. He picked it up, dug it in the sand, and replaced it in its sheath. The belt with the pouch of money lay under the trees; he picked it up automatically and, carrying it in his hand, turned to the little tent.

As he walked towards the tent two heavy hands seemed pressing down on his shoulders; unutterable weariness had suddenly fallen upon him, robbing him of mind and almost of movement, so that when he reached the tent he was staggering like a drunken man.

He crept under the shelter of the tent, and with the belt and the money beside him fell into a profound and dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER VI
ALONE

When he awoke it was full day and the sands beyond the tent opening lay white and blazing in the sunlight down to the blue, lazy sea.

He remembered everything at once. It would almost have seemed that his mind behind the veil of sleep had been reasoning the matter out, for he had awakened saying to himself out loud, and as if he were continuing a conversation, “Yes—and what is more, I saved his life.” He crawled from the tent and stood erect beneath the palms. The morning, warm, sweet, and sunlit, lay around him; the sapphire sky and flashing sea; snow-white gulls and snow-white sands. A hot, gentle wind was stirring the palm fronds. He collected some dry brushwood for the fire, lit it, and piled on some wood from the wreck. When it was alight, flickering a hundred red tongues at the sun and staining the blue air with smoke, Gaspard was brought to his first pause. Of what use was the fire? He was no good as a cook. Yves had been the cook; he had cooked crabs, tinned meat, and what-not, using an old tin for a billy; he was born for that sort of work and could do anything practical he turned his hand to.

Yves had always done the cooking whilst Gaspard had looked on. This fact struck Gaspard for the first time now. It was as though the dead Yves was still proclaiming his superiority. Yves had salved most of the stores, Yves had hunted for dead brushwood, Yves had found crabs, Yves had found the spring of water, Yves had found the boat sail, Yves had built the tent, Yves had found the ship of coral in the lagoon, Yves had found the gold. Yves had done everything since their landing, and he, Gaspard, had done nothing but smoke and dream.

Far from being a waster, he had, still, left everything to the big blond man so full of energy and resource and the joy of life; the southern laziness had held possession of him. All the same, Yves had proved himself the better man and was proving the fact now, voiceless and dead amidst the bushes as he was.

Gaspard kicked the fire to pieces and flung sand on the embers; then he breakfasted on some ship’s biscuit and some tinned meat, lit his pipe and strolled down to the sea-edge.

It was eight o’clock and the gasping warm wind came in over the morning sea, the lazy, deep blue sea, so infinite, so beautiful, so desolate.

He stood, and, shading his eyes, he swept the horizon—not a trace of sail or smoke could he see. The sky, of a burning emerald just above the sea-line, swept up into the burning blue, and from sea and sky, like the breath from a great blue mouth, came the warm wind. It felt like a woman’s hot fingers playing with his hair, like a woman’s warm arm cast round his neck.

From the southeast with the wind, now loud, now low, came the crying of the gulls. Though he had heard them since awakening, he had not noticed them till now; he turned his eyes to where they were wheeling and flying spirit-white in the blue.

It was at this moment that Loneliness seized his heart. The fact of his utter isolation had not stood before him full square till just now. The gulls were explaining it to him.

“You are alone!—alone!—alone! Hi!—Hi!—Hi!—you there on the sands alone!—alone!—alone!—we have nothing to do with you—we are nothing to you—alone there on the sands—all day long and night and day, and night and day, who will you speak to—what will you do? You there on the sands alone!—alone!—alone!”

He drew his sleeve across his brow to wipe away the sweat that had suddenly started tingling through his skin; then he cast his eyes again over the sailless blue of the sea and, turning, came back to the tent. When he reached it the terror left him, fell from him suddenly like a dropped cloak. He cursed himself for his stupidity and, though his pipe was not half exhausted, he tapped the tobacco out, re-filled and lit it. It was something to do. Then, to drive the thought of Yves away, he fell to imagining what sort of a ship would take him off the island, and then he stretched his hand into the tent and pulled out the belt and pouch of money. On the brass buckle of the belt, all green with verdigris, there was something scratched. He cleaned the brass with sand—it was something to do—and made out what seemed the initials “S. S.” He pondered on these for a while and then, opening the pouch, he turned the contents on to the sand.

Though he knew the number of coins, he counted them again and again—it was something to do. Then he began to spend them in fancy, the remembrance of the tragedy of yesterday always standing like a ghost behind his thoughts and trying to obtrude itself.

This occupation lasted him an hour, and he was brought back from it suddenly by a tug at his heart. It was still morning; the awful day had scarcely progressed; the mantle of Loneliness had fallen on him again; the gulls were still crying, calling, wheeling, rising, falling, fishing mechanically and seeming part of a tireless mechanism fretting the speechless blue of the sky.

He put the coins back in the pouch and flung belt and pouch into the tent; then he rose to his feet and made towards the bushes.

On the sand still lay a mark as though a heavy sack had been dragged along it towards the bushes.

He avoided the pointing of the sinister path and struck across the islet, crushing the brushwood under foot. He had no object other than to get away from the place where he was, to keep in motion—to be doing something. The heat lay heavy over the bay cedars, the air was shaking blanket-fashion under the fiery rays of the sun, the bushes were dense, yet in a trice it seemed to him he had reached the northern beach. The islet seemed to have led him across it to explain its smallness, and as he stepped on to the beach a new sensation caught him in its grip. The sensation of being ringed in, enclosed in a small circle from which there is no escape.

Yet there were no bars, and around him on every hand stretched infinity.

He came along the reef forming the edge of the lagoon; the tide was beginning to flood and the foretop of the ship was standing stark and dry from the water; the ship herself was clearly to be seen, in this light even more clearly than in the sunset glow. But the picture was far less beautiful.

Grey and dead she seemed, lying there in the diamond-clear emerald of the water, but the lagoon this morning was gay with fish, parrot-fish, gropers, flights of coloured arrows, sapphire, ruby and emerald-tinted ghosts.

The swell of the incoming tide came slobbering over the reef; shutting one’s eyes one might have fancied a giant shuddering and catching his breath and sobbing to himself.

Gaspard stood for a long time watching the moving life of the lagoon, absorbed, as a child might be before the contents of an aquarium. He had forgotten Loneliness for a moment, but she had not forgotten him. As he stood with his eyes fixed on a large fish, sapphire and mist-grey, that had developed like a spirit and was now hanging motionless with moving gills above the ship, casting a vague shadow upon the coral-crusted deck; as he stood watching it, the breeze strengthened, stirring his hair, and on the breeze a voice hailed him, far away and weary.

“Hi! Hi! Hi!—you there on the reef. Hi! Hi! Hi!—you there alone!—alone!—alone!—see how the wind takes us, wheeling, fishing, forever—alone—alone—alone.”

He turned his face to where, across the islet, far away in the blue, the gulls’ white wings were winking and beckoning to him; their voices, thinned by distance, had a desolation rendered even more desolate by the gorgeour of the burning blue sky, the triumphant sunlight, the licking of the warm weak wind.

There is no desolation so terrible as the desolation that lies in summer warmth and blue skies. Here life ought to have been superabundant, but here there was no life or moving thing save the wind and the gulls and the waves.

“God!” said the Moco. He thrust his clenched fist in his pocket and, turning from the lagoon, made his way along the rocks to the shore.

He returned to the south of the islet, not through the bushes, but along the eastern sea-edge where the reefs were like rows of teeth and the rock edges like razors. Here it was that most of the wreckage of the Rhone had come ashore, and here there was still wreckage enough, in all truth. Here was something to do.

In a moment he was up to his knees in water. The Rhone, when the explosion of the boilers rent her asunder, had cast wreckage enough upon the water, but even still, as she lay beneath the surface, sinking more and more completely to ruin, things were breaking loose from her and rising as bubbles rise from a submerged body, and drifting ashore with the tide. Hencoops, boxes, spars, barrels, were pounding about in the surf. Heavy spars were here, all chawn and frayed by the reefs; the coral teeth had left their marks on everything; there was nothing worth salving, yet Gaspard worked like a dock labourer, hauling upon spars, heaving at barrels, forgetting Loneliness in the exertion of manual labour.

But she was there, and her voice forever speaking, subtle, like a music interpenetrating all things from the sound of the wave to the silence of the sky, made itself heard again.

As the power of friction brings a machine to a pause, so did this voice, which was a part of the sunlight, a part of the silence, a part of the blueness of sea and sky, bring Gaspard to a stand.

He wiped his brow and looked at the heap of things he had collected. He remembered how Yves had laboured at the same job, and now, for the first time since the tragedy, as he stood looking at the heap of spars and wreckwood, a feeling of pity came to his heart for the man lying there dead amidst the bay-cedar bushes.

The outburst of grief to which he had given way on the evening before was, to speak truth, an outpouring of his southern nature; anger suddenly checked and flung back by Death, inverted and bursting forth furiously at the sight of the irreparable result of his anger.

But this feeling of pity for Yves came from the depths of his soul, for it was born of pity for himself.

It was fatal for this feeling to enter his heart just now, for the heart, softening towards the dead, opened the door for superstition to enter.

He thought of the tent over there beneath the palms and how pleasant it would be if, on his return, he were to find Yves sitting by the tent. Then, with a chill of horror, came the idea—how awful it would be if on his return he were to find Yves sitting by the tent! His imaginative mind played with this idea for a moment and then cast it hurriedly away. He laughed out loud to reassure himself, and the steady wash of the sea made answer and the distant gulls. Then, leaving the salvage bleaching in the burning sunlight, he came towards the southern beach.

No; there was nobody by the tent, but the wind was playing with a loose corner of the sail-cloth, flapping it about. The tent seemed beckoning to him as he came towards it across the white, blazing sands. Everything—every sound, every gesture of animate or inanimate nature, was beginning to have a deep and extraordinary significance for Gaspard. The silence, the sunlight, and the blueness had first conspired to shew him his loneliness; the gulls had insisted on it, gloated over it, explained it; but now, since over there by the wreckwood the pity for Yves and his fate had entered into his heart, the gulls, the silence, the sunlight, and the blueness were speaking a language less assured. “Are you alone? Hi! you there on the sands, what’s that beckoning to you? Hi! Hi! The wind flaps the tent? Ha! ha! Hi!”—and then silence for a moment, and then, weak, weary, querulous, from the circling white spirits away there in the smoky blue of midday—“Yves—Yves—Yves.”

The very poetry of Loneliness, Distance, Blueness, Regret—fatal regret.

Gaspard fastened up the flap, and the wind, as if vexed at being robbed of its plaything, shook the palm fronds, and then some of the finest of the sand on the beach gathered itself up into a little sand devil and danced away on the wind. An unseen hand seemed moving everywhere fitfully, now here, now there, touching the sand, touching the trees, touching the bay-cedar bushes. Gaspard, as he lay with his head in the shade of the tent resting after his exertion, listened to the faint patter of the palm fronds and the whisper of the sand; sometimes the sail-cloth of the tent would lift a bit to the wind.

It was only the wind, yet it moved like a living thing. Sometimes he imagined a hand lifting the tent-cloth back and a voice saying, “Hullo! what are you doing here?” He imagined Yves as the possessor of the voice, and he drove the imagination from his mind.

Never for a moment did he feel fear of the body lying away there amidst the bushes; not for the worth of the Rhone would he have gone through the bushes to look at it and see how it was faring at the hands of corruption, yet he felt no fear of it; on the contrary, it was the thing he dwelt on when he wished to allay fear. For fear, faint and indefinable, was taking hold upon him now. He had no compunction about the part he had played in the death of Yves. The thing was an accident, so he told himself; all the same, men who die suddenly and violently have a habit of haunting the place where they die.

You can run from a haunted house, but you cannot run from a haunted island. This dread of no escape was what formed the true basis of his fear, a thing on which to build terrible and fantastic edifices. He lit a pipe and, smoking it, he fell asleep, awakening in an hour or so refreshed and fearless. Sleep seemed to have wiped away Loneliness, superstition, and all their attendant evils. He felt hungry, and getting some tinned meat and biscuit from the store of provisions which lay close to the trees he dined after a fashion, and then lit a pipe.

It was now half-past three, the gulls had ceased crying and afternoon lay on the island like a hot, heavy hand. So still seemed everything that one might have fancied the islet wrapped in idyllic peace; but it was the peace that broods over fermentation. The air over the sands was shaking in waves and a faint hum of insect life came from the bushes. A torrid and tremendous pyramid of light stood upon nature, crushing her to silence yet unable to stifle her faint fret and murmur.

At four o’clock Gaspard was standing at the end of the little pier of coral reef just at the place where he had been standing yesterday, when Yves’ voice had called him to see the treasure. There were no fish visible in the water to-day, nothing floated there but an occasional scrap of seaweed. The clear water, bright as a diamond and green as an emerald, held the gaze with the fascination that lies in a globe of crystal. Out here at the end of the projecting spur of reef, with the sea on either side, one felt as though one were standing on the deck of a boat.

It was pleasant out here with the sea coming in gently around the rocks, leaving scarcely a trace of foam, scarcely a trace of sound; the islet was singing to the little waves, but the reef only gurgled, slobbered slightly when a higher ridge of swell lapped the more exposed portions, and sighed as the water sinking exposed the weeds, the clinging shells, and the coralline growths.

Gaspard, standing, looking into the green depths, mesmerized by their crystal clearness and thinking of nothing, was suddenly brought to consciousness by the feeling that someone was standing close behind him. He wheeled round. Nothing. The reef, the islet, sea and sky were destitute of life, yet distinctly he had felt as though someone were standing behind him, almost in touch with him, almost breathing upon his neck; and he felt that if he had turned more sharply he would have caught sight of the viewless one; and the reef, the islet, sea and sky, had for a moment a simpering look, as though they had succeeded in the trick of snatching the Unseen One away before he could be glimpsed.

The absurdity of this idea destroyed it almost as soon as it was born. He shook the sensation off with a little shiver and, casting his eyes over the sea-line again as if in search for a ship, he began to walk along the reef back to the shore.

He was stepping from the reef on to the sand, when upon the sand he saw something that brought his breathing to a stop. The imprint of a naked foot.

It was a foot-mark left by Yves, and there was nothing supernatural about it at all; it had been left on the previous day, and it was still sharp and clear, for a ledge of the reef had protected it from the wind and the blowing sand; but to Gaspard it was more terrible than the naked face of Death.

He walked away from the terrible thing with his hand clutching at his heart, his eyes cast from side to side, not daring to look back. He did not know where he was going, but his feet led him to the palm clump.

Here he sat down with his back to a tree bole. The terror was behind him and the tree seemed to fend it off. The tree was a living thing; all at once it had stepped out of the semi-inanimate world where trees dwell and flowers, and had become a living personality. In his supreme terror he could have turned and embraced it, but he was afraid for a moment to move from his position, just as a man is afraid to move who, attacked by enemies, has his back to a wall.

Such terror does not last in its entirety for more than a brief space of time. Reason came to his assistance. He remembered that Yves had been by the reef end on the day before. The foot-mark was a real thing. No ghost could have left it.

He was telling himself this when,

“Hi! Hi! Hi!”

Loud, shrill, heart-snatching came a hail right from behind him. It was the voice of Yves, and springing to his feet with a scream, Gaspard, clinging to the tree-bole, looked.

A great black man-o’-war bird with bright eyes and coral-red beak was passing over the islet and hailing it as it passed.

Tremendous, definite, and strong against the blue, yet more soundless in flight than an arrow, it passed overhead without a motion of the wings.

As it passed it hailed the island once again, and once again from far out at sea, motionless, but fast dwindling till it became a faint speck and was lost in the blue to southward.

Gaspard, breathing freely again, watched the great bird losing itself in nothingness, lifting veil after veil of sky, and horizon after horizon of sea, bound for some port of call in the Windwards or beyond.

The shock had been better than medicine to him, shewing him his own superstition and the stupidity of his alarm. The island seemed suddenly freed from the haunting presence; he began to doubt himself. If a bird could make a fool of him like that, he must be a fool indeed.

A year seemed to have passed since sunrise and the sun was now dropping to the sea, bringing to its end that vast blue day so filled with loneliness and the terrors of the unknown.

CHAPTER VII
THE BOAT

Most of us have never known the day as it is and the night as it is. Protected from the wind and the sunlight by walls and houses, by artificial light from the darkness, by words from the truth, we have created an artificial world in the midst of the true world. In the wind, in the sunlight, in the sea, there are voices speaking a language long forgotten; lost when thought, becoming vocal, set up a language of its own and a tower of Babel in the world of dreams. Even still, when alone in the solitudes, on the moors, on the mountains, by the sea, through all the claptrap of language and thought come the voices; the true, eternal voices that were before we were and will be when we are not.

Voices of which all art, in marble, in tone, or in words, is but the pathetic imitation, an echo dulled and muffled and debased. In this lies the eternal despair of art.

To the mind of the commonest man, if he be imaginative, the language of the eternal things is louder far than to the mind of the most cultivated man if he be only imitative.

Gaspard’s mind was of the imaginative order. Up to this, in the forecastle or stokehold, on board ship or on shore, he had been held apart by his fellows or protected by the common things from the eternal truths. Loneliness in her extremest form had brought him in touch with them; or at least within whispering distance.

The great blue day, dying now, had searched his heart and mind; it was as though the old gods of nature had landed on the island and stood around him viewless and perplexing him with whispers. Fear, Air, Distance, Light, and Sea had spoken to him in turn and in chorus; Loneliness had echoed what they said.

There was something more in the wind and the sun and the sky and the sea than he had known of up to this; the drinking-bar, the forecastle, the sailors’ lodging-house, those black holes had hidden him from this knowledge; a debased language in which the word “sea” stood for wharves and ships, stokeholds and furnaces, decks and glimpses of ocean had paralysed his thought and numbed it. Twelve hours of loneliness and fear, face to face with nature, had loosened the old false labels from the truths of things and, without a glimpse of the real truths, a dim recognition of the falsities unsettled his mind.

The damning mesmerism of language had suspended itself partly for a moment in this partly unsophisticated mind, and as he sat watching the sun sink in the western sea, the word “sunset” or the word “sea” never occurred to him. He was thinking without language, lost in contemplation, like an animal viewing from a distance a new and curious but undisturbing phenomenon.

And the sight was tremendous as ten million cubic leagues of golden air could make it. Fire, Light, and Distance were there at this marriage of sun and ocean; colour, size, limit, all were banished from the infinite, indefinite universe of gold through which the golden sun was sinking to the golden sea.

The sun had almost reached the sea-line and for a moment Ocean and Sun hung apart, the splendour of the sea answering the splendour of the sky. For a moment time seemed to cease and silence supreme, everlasting, golden, and beautiful, held the West in her keeping.

A moment—and then, flashing, palpitating, leaping like a woman under a burning kiss, the great sea flung her arms up to her lover.

Destroying him utterly and almost in a moment, washing him away, melting him as though he who had been fire had become wax and the wax had been cast into a cauldron of boiling gold. Then, as if millions of infinitely tenuous golden veils were being stripped away with the rapidity of thought, bluer and bluer, darker and darker, appeared the night behind them.

A hand seemed sprinkling and spraying the sky with stars.

One could scarcely say, “It is night,” before night had taken possession of the world and the night-wind was blowing in the palms.

Gaspard, rising, stretched himself and then crept under the shelter of the tent; the opiate of the sea air and his weariness brought sleep at once, profound, dreamless sleep which lasted till just before dawn.

He was awakened by a sound.

Someone close to the tent had, so it seemed to him, struck a single blow on a drum. He raised himself on his arm; sleep had fallen from him like a cloak, and his mind was alert again, and alive to fear.

He listened, but heard nothing except the weary washing sound of the waves on the beach.

Then, as he listened, it came again, but from a distance. Boom! A monstrous sound in that desolate place, alarming and uncanny as the sound of a trumpet.

If it were a drum note, then, judging by the sound, the drum must be of Gargantuan size.

With the sweat running from his face he crept out from under the tent and stood beneath the trees.

Nothing. The new moon had risen and was floating like a little silver boat amidst the stars; the starlight flooded the sea and brimmed over on to the foam. So solid was the sky with stars that the palm fronds cut their silhouettes on it sharply and distinctly. Never was there a more lovely southern night.

As he stood and listened, again, from very far away this time, came the sound.

Boom! As though the drummer had stridden away leagues across the sea to beat his drum around the world before dawn.

Had Gaspard known these waters the sound would have had less terror for him. It was the sound of great devil-fish, sea-bats that rise from the water, quiver for a moment in the air, and then fall, smashing the waves to foam, with a noise that reverberates for miles. But he knew nothing of the sea-bats, and he stood pursuing in his mind the drummer who had beaten this strange réveil and with his eyes fixed on the horizon to eastward where the sky was stained by the dawn.

It came, killing the stars, clear and cold in tint, beneath a sky shifting in colour from smoke-grey to aquamarine and icy blue. Then it bloomed into warmth and kindness of tone. Just as children hold buttercups to one another’s faces to see the yellow reflection, so one might suppose some hand beneath the horizon was holding a vast buttercup to the dawn’s pallid face.

A thread of living gold stole along the sea-line, became a fiery, moving caterpillar, and, at a stroke, the last stars were washed away, dissolving in blueness and infinite distance, the sun was peeping across the water and then suddenly, as though he had taken a leap elbow-high and elbow resting on the sea-line, he leaned forward and struck the world in the face with his great golden hand.

Had you been watching Gaspard, as he stood with the dawn wind blowing his hair, you would have seen the stroke of the sun’s hand on his face, on the palms behind him, on the sea before him, suddenly given as a blow.

The same hand was striking the Bahamas, and in a hundred blue harbours from Cape Sable to Port of Spain ships’ topmasts were catching the light. Martinique, Guadeloupe, Grenada, peak, morne, and valley, were already flaming to it like green torches in the dawn wind. Key West would be stricken in a moment and the gulf to Galveston and Tampico be turned from a lake of stars to a living sapphire, the Caribbean would leap alive from Grand Cayman to Darien, from San Juan to La Guaira, alive and burning and blue. The wind that was blowing in Gaspard’s face, a wind that came over the blue and laughter of the morning sea like a wind from the golden age and the youth of the world, held freshness for the orange groves and the gardens of all these Western islands where the night jessamines were closing, the night insects ceasing their songs, and the fireflies preparing to put out their lamps.

Gaspard knew nothing of that tremendous poem in colour which the dawn shows to God each time she lifts the darkness from the tropics; just now he did not even see the sunrise and its splendour, he had, for a moment, forgotten even his fears; his eyes were fixed on an object about a mile away to the southeast, something round and black that bobbed in the sparkle and glitter of the water.

It was like the head of a swimmer, and now it was like a drifting buoy. It was drawing nearer, the current was setting it towards the island, and now—it was like a boat.

It was a boat!

There could be no mistake; it underwent alterations of shape as it twisted to the slap of the waves, now head on for the island, now nearly broadside on.

A boat—release from the islet and its dreams and terrors! The cry that escaped from Gaspard seemed echoed by the gulls.

He made for the pier of coral reef, running along the sand to it, forgetful of everything, never glancing at the place where the footsteps of Yves had been, scrambling over the coral till he reached the extreme end, where, surrounded by the morning sea, and the wind, and the light, he shaded his eyes and watched.

The boat was now plainly in view dancing on the waves with the lightness of a walnut shell on the ripple of a pond. It was empty and drifting towards the islet, but it would not touch the beach, it would pass by a few hundred yards; he saw that, and he prepared for the event by casting off his clothes.

It seemed a small boat midway between a dinghy and a ship’s quarterboat, and never to Gaspard’s eyes had anything appeared so gay in motion or so friendly as this tiny craft dancing upon the waves.

At a distance it had seemed black, but now he saw that it was painted white; it was clinker built, for, so clear was the air, he could see the overlapping planks, and now as he stood preparing to take to the water and swim to it, the terror of the islet which he had shaken off for a moment came behind him again, and at once held him back and urged him forward.

What if the Terror followed him into the sea? Behind him there seemed a deadly enemy filled with wrath at his attempt to escape, and, for a moment, the want of power that comes to us in nightmare held him shivering in the wind, the next he was in the sea, striking out for the boat.

He had to swim against the current that was carrying it, the waves hit him in the face like wet hands trying to drive him back; but the shock of the plunge had given him his courage.

The boat was close now, beautiful and buoyant, and white as a gull, smacking the sea as she came, shining with spray, the green water under her showing clear as an emerald. Now, she was only an arm’s length away, and now, he was grasping the starboard thwart. She heeled over slightly as he got his elbow on the thwart and peeped in. She was empty of everything but the bottom boards and a pair of sculls, clean scoured with spray; a dead flying-fish was lying washing about in the few inches of water she had shipped; it was newly dead and had struck her only perhaps an hour ago.

He worked his way round to the stern, boarded her and stood upright.

He was free of the island at last, but he would have to land to get his clothes and some provisions and water.

CHAPTER VIII
THE ESCAPE

He stood for a moment balancing himself, his eyes sweeping the sky-line to southward, which shewed neither sail nor stain of smoke, and as he stood he heard the island calling to him.

“Hi! Hi! Hi! you there in the boat! come back! come back! Hi! Think you to escape us? Ha! ha!—hi! Fishing, wheeling, calling, O the weariness, the blueness, the waves, the wind, the sun; they are ours and they are yours, forever—forever—forever. Hi!”

Through the voices of the gulls came the monotonous tune of the beach across the bright morning sea. The tent flap had got loose again and was beckoning. Come what might, provisions and water must be taken on board and the clothes he had left on the reef spar recovered.

He felt like a man who had just escaped from a haunted house, yet he had to go back. To land again on that terrible spot and leave the boat whilst he hunted for the things was an act requiring real courage, but it had to be done.