H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ And then, suddenly, and as if from the sky came the thought of Providence, the feeling that she had been led along the beach to find the wood and to find this. The remembrance of how she had been saved from the Gaston de Paris rose up in her mind also—saved almost by a miracle.
To a person torn from civilization and flung into the arms of Nature the most terrible thing is the sense of the amorphous, the feeling that there is no structure in this world where houses are not and laws are not and streets are not, no power to intervene between oneself and injury, no thread to cling to. ”

“ She had done that chap in proper; the work of the gulls and the work of the girl were hardly dissociated in his mind—there was the Result. Just as though a baby had smashed a rock with its fist. Hence the chuckles, heightened by her clinging ways, her fragility, her musical voice, her starvation due to loneliness, her double tongue, her unaccountable tricks of manner.
And she, as she sat in the sunset not knowing his thoughts, had you asked her how she felt about him would have answered with steadfast eyes that she loved him. ”

“ Oyster catches passed the boat with their melancholy cry, but the fishing gannets and the swimming puffins seemed scarcely to heed the intruders. Puffins swimming a biscuit toss away as though they had never learned the fear of man.
They had drawn nearer shore so that the boom of the swell in the caves and on the rocks came to them with the crying of the shore birds; passing a headland like a vast lizard they opened a beach curved like the new moon and seven miles from horn to horn.
“There’s our landing-place,” cried Bompard, “big enough to pick and choose from.” ”

“ The great beach of Kerguelen shews above tide mark long stretches where no sand is, only rock. Basalt planed and smoothed by the seas of countless ages, level as a ball-room floor and broken by rifts and pot holes, between tide marks these pot holes serve as traps for all sorts of sea creatures. Once the waves must have beaten right up to the low and broken basalt cliffs full of caves floored with sand, but volcanic action raising the beach has pushed the tide mark out leaving a shore varying in width from half a mile to a few hundred yards. ”

“ And across all that not a sign of life save the wings of the tireless birds, teal and duck, cormorants, and beyond the seaward rocks the great sea geese fishing and the guillemots flighting and the white tern darting like dragon-flies.
Where was Bompard?
Had he, by any chance, come back and taken some other road off the beach? There was only one way: the break in the cliffs, beyond the caves. She thought it highly improbable that he would have come back only to leave the beach by another way, the descent from where she stood and towards the bed country was quite easy, alluringly easy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With a sudden rush, moving with that swiftness with which she had seen them moving on first landing, the bull could have reached her, but the bull did not move, his lordship from the sea, filled with the absolute and complete contentment of the male at rest, moved only his trunk, he seemed sniffing her and the momentary fear that had seized her passed utterly away.
She could sniff him too. Just as cows fill the air with the fragrance of milk the herd filled the place with the scent of fish and fur and a tang of deep sea like the smell of beach, only sharper and fresher. ”

“ Lying as she was she could see nothing but the ribbed sides of the boat, the grey sky above, and a gull with domed wings and down-curved head, poised, as though suspended on the end of a string. It screamed at her, shifted its position, and then passed, as though blown away on the wind. She sat up. Bompard had drawn away from her and was lying curled up on his side. La Touche on his back, forward, shewed nothing but his knees; across the gunnel lay the sea, desolate in the dawn, turbulent, yet hard and mournful as a view of slated roofs after rain. ”

“ To starboard and stern of the Gaston de Paris, a great ship, within pistol shot of the deck, and with her canvas spilling the wind and thrashing and thundering, was dipping her bows in the sea. Men were fighting for the boats, and the stern was so high that more than half of the rudder shewed like a great door swinging on its hinges. On the counter in pale letters the word
“ALBATROSS”
shewed, and to the mind of the gazer all the horror seemed focussed in that calm statement, those commonplace letters written upon destruction. ”

“ The Wooley, which is the fist of Kerguelen suddenly clenched and hitting out from the shoulder of the great islands now suddenly stormed about with foam and veiled in spray.
Half stunned, she twisted round, still lying but fronting it now with her arm protecting her face. The beach had loudened up in thunder from end to end but the yelling Wooley as it met the cliffs and howled inland almost drowned the thunder of the waves. Then it died down as suddenly as it had come, and the boom of the surf rose high, as the girl, gathering herself together, got up and struggled on. ”

“ Sex is more than a physical difference between one being and another, one can fancy it as one of the outstanding signs of the Wild to be read by instinct, as instinct reads the weather or season signs, or the sea mile posts that lead the seals and sea elephants thousands of leagues to strike some particular beach as an arrow strikes the bull’s eye of a target. ”

“ Then on the morning when the blessed sun shone she was able to come out and sit on a patch of sand with one of the blankets for a rug.
She looked old and worn, but no longer terrible, and as she sat with her thin hands folded in her lap watching the great sea bulls and the cows, as if contemplating them for the first time, the man who had helped her out and placed her there was at a loss—she was a sight to inspire pity in a savage. He took his seat beside her on a piece of rock and rolling some tobacco in his hand stuffed his pipe. ”

“ With the twist of the helm Reality made the coast a destination. Up to this moment the uncertainty of whether they could land had held her mind, up to this moment all sorts of vague possibilities, the chance of meeting a ship, the chance of being blown out to sea, the chance of this or that had come between her and the realisation of the fact that this prison was hers.
The monstrosity of the idea stood fully revealed only now on that beach where there was nothing but sand, nothing but rocks, nothing but gulls. ”

“ It was as though she had never come across a real thing before, and across her mind came a vague, vague recognition of that great truth that real things bruise one, eat at one, try to make one their own, once they manage to break down the barrier of custom that separates the false from the true; that quite common things have a power greater than the power of mind, that only amidst the falsity of civilised life and the stage are the properties subordinate to the persons and emotions of the actors.
At this moment Bompard, suddenly moving in his sleep, roused himself and sat up. ”

“ Far across the water of the bay before them the land rose again in a precipice steep as the one on whose edge they stood.
The ripples of the bay washed in on a beach of black pebbles easily reached by the declivity of the land and on the beach, stewing like witches’ cauldrons, queer looking try-pots were sending up their smoke. Near the pots carcases of sea-bulls lay ripped and gory and being cleared of their blubber by small men, strange-looking, stripped to the waist and with arms and chests splashed by blood. ”

“ In the darkness aft of the bridge nothing could be seen but the pale hint of the bridge canvas and a trace of spars and funnels now wiped out with mist, now visible again against the night.
The Prince leaned on the weather rail and looked over at the tumble and sud of the water lit here and there with the gleam of a port light.
Cléo de Bromsart had fascinated him, grown upon him, compelled him in some mysterious way to ask her to marry him. He had sworn after his disastrous first experience never to marry again. He had attempted to break his oath. Was he in love with her? ”

“ Nothing is more impressive to the unaccustomed mind than the spars and canvas of a ship under full sail seen from the deck, nothing more suggestive of power and the daring of man than the sight of those leviathan spars and vast sail spaces rising dizzily from main and foresail in pyramids to where the truck works like a pencil point writing on the sky. Nothing more arresting than the power of the steersman. ”

“ It was like looking at Silence herself, silence91 set off and explained by the beach noises, the sound of the surf, the calling of the terns, the mewing of the great white gulls.
She saw Kerguelen as it is, as it was, as it ever will be. Standing there alone she saw it for the first time in all its utter nakedness. If no food were to be found on the busy beach, what food could be found in that carved, silent, cruel land where not a single tree shewed in all the miles of desolation? ”

“ When she came out the rain had ceased and through air fresh as though from the hand of Creation vast clouds were rolling away towards the islands over a blue-green sea.
They had made a fire on the night before and had cooked some of the mussels in the baling tin, the rest had been put by to cook for breakfast; hot food of any sort is a revelation if you have been condemned to live on cold stuff for any time, but this morning there was to be nothing hot. The firewood, one of the bottom boards of the boat chopped up, had been left out in the rain. ”

“ That wind knocked me down as I was coming along the beach. I didn’t grumble, and there is no use in thinking. I was thinking as I walked along that I had no brush and comb to do my hair with, you two have short hair and you can’t imagine what it is to a person with long hair when they find themselves without a brush and comb. I was grumbling to myself about it when the wind knocked me down. I want just to tell you what is in my mind: we will die or go mad if we do not forget everything as much as we can and not think of to-morrow or yesterday or ships coming to take us off. ”

“ She had determined not to sleep and she had lain down fully dressed; even to the oilskin coat and with her boots on; to-morrow she would go off and hide amongst the bushes beyond the cliff break and get some sleep, but to-night she would not close her eyes; so she told herself.
She had taken the knife from its sheath and placed it beside her, her hand rested on it. An hour passed, and now, as she lay listening to the pouring of the rain her fingers felt the pattern of the hilt. ”

“ A new fear seized upon her, a fear akin to the dread she had felt that dark night in the cave when she had caught the sound of La Touche dragging himself close to her, the dread of imminently impending action.
“Let us go away,” said she, “another ship may come; anything is better than having a fight with those men.”
“Have you got that knife safe?” asked Raft. She still wore the fisherman’s knife round her waist. She put her hand on it.
“Yes, the knife is safe.”
“If that chap downs me for good,” said Raft, “stick that knife through yourself. ”

“ Accustomed to people who talked much and had much to talk about she could not understand. All this was part of the new world in which she found herself, part of the boat itself, of the mast, now stepped against the grey sky, the waves, the gulls, and that tremendous outline of mountains now more visible to the east—Kerguelen. A world of things without thought, or all but thoughtless, things that, yet, dominated mind more profoundly than the power of mind itself.
Bompard was munching a biscuit he had taken from one of the bread bags as he worked. ”