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.

43 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 time44 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.

45 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,46 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.

47 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 power48 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.