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 beauty16 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.”

17 “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.”

18 “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.