CHAPTER XLII THE MORNING SEA

In a moment, night, wearing all her jewellery, was standing above the sea, the wind had died away, the cormorants had ceased crying, and the boom of the waves was the only sound beneath the stillness of the stars.

Gaspard turned to his provision store for supper. He had placed the canned meat and the biscuits close to one of the tree boles, and to-morrow he would have to make a ca?he to protect them from the sun. Thinking of this, he ate his supper without appetite or knowing what he ate; his mind had passed into that dazed condition which comes from surfeit of sensation; it had fed full of treasure and now was torpid.

When he had supped, he lit a pipe, but scarcely had he done so than sleep came upon him, the pipe fell from his mouth beside him as he lay there on the sands, the stars shining upon him and the sea singing to him; marooned, ragged, without a roof to shelter him, and with the wealth of emperors at his elbow.

Hours passed and the great moving dome of the stars shifted above the world; one might have thought the figure on the sand a corpse cast up by the sea from some wreck. Then it began to move and struggle and cry out; one might have fancied it attacked by some unseen enemy. It was.

Scarcely had the deep unconsciousness of the first sleep lifted, admitting the mind into dreamland, than Gaspard276 found himself surrounded by his enemies. He was passing through horrible back streets and men were following him to rob him. Yves, Sagesse, and the chief engineer of the Rhone were amongst them.

Then the dream changed and he was standing in a bar with Yves, showing him the treasure, and, behold, the rubies and diamonds had changed to pieces of glass and the rest to sea shells and rubbish—he had not even the price of a drink and he had brought Yves in to stand him a bottle of wine, brought him in arm in arm, boasting of his wealth!

Then he was coming on board at the docks of Marseilles, joining the ship with the treasure in his pocket, the beautiful spirit of unreasonableness who presides over the affairs of Dreamland did not hint to him of the absurdity of the situation, his obfuscated reasoning faculty was engaged in trying to solve the problem before him—the problem of how to hide a million’s worth of gems and act as stoker on a transatlantic steamer at the same time. To increase the difficulty he had placed the snake of gold under the muffler he wore round his neck—but it refused to be hidden; and then, all at once, he was back again in the docks in a tavern, fighting in a corner with his back to the wall, whilst Malays from the P. & O. boats, Dagoes armed with sheath knives and a Chinaman—a hatchet man such as he had heard tell of amidst the stokers—attacked him for his treasure. He awoke gasping and still fighting his viewless enemies. After a while he fell asleep again, only to continue his experiences in Dreamland, awaking finally, just as the sun’s rim was rising above the sea.

The wind was blowing now from E.S.E., and the sea had lost its waves and had fallen back into quietude and long lapses of swell—the gulls were back.

277 Not the cormorants and frigate birds of the northern beach, but the fishing gulls, the familiar spirits of the island, whose voices had once terrified Gaspard. They had returned during the night, but they did not terrify him now. Nothing could terrify him now except, perhaps, the idea of a robber.

It was extraordinary, the effect of this fortune on this imaginative mind, stiffening and strengthening it against all imaginary fears save the fear of material enemies. The man who dreads burglars has no time to dream of ghosts.

Immediately on waking he turned and placed his hand upon the treasure, then he sat up facing the brave, bright morning; it was all true, then, despite his dreams and his visionary enemies he was still in possession of this incredible and fantastic wealth; his mind, clear now and strengthened by sleep, could grasp the matter in its true proportions; the stuff was his by all right, he was lineal heir by the right of labour and suffering, to the fortune that Sagesse had taken from the hand of Chance.

He could go to M. Seguin with a clear conscience and ask him to help in the disposal of these things.

He rose up and walked along the beach, every moment casting back an eye at the place where the treasure was. The storm had brought treasure of its own to the beach, other than gems, and the falling tide was leaving behind it strips of emerald and clear-brown seaweed, starfish, seaweed whose roots were clinging still to fragments of red branch coral, great bunches of flying-fish eggs like bunches of white currants, shells shewing all the tints of opal and pearl.

The great hand of the storm had stripped the sea coves, the tidal rocks, the gardens of the lagoons, and had cast the coloured harvest on the sand; the sea itself had a278 brighter look, a fresher smell; great depths seemed to have been stirred and the freshness and youth that lie at the heart of ocean to have been diffused through its being.

O, the vision of the morning sea! The blue distance, the green, curling waves, the blowing wind; it is the only thing that never grows old; unspoiled by time or change, it is to-day as it was when Jason sailed it, when Helen knew it, when the blue-painted triremes clashed beaks at Salamis in the morning of the world.

When we first saw Gaspard, a stoker fresh from the Rhone, sitting under a palm tree smoking and waiting for Yves, he was a man who would have been moved not at all by the youth and spirit of this morning sea; the crushed aesthetic sense, the imagination that had been subdued to bar rooms and girls of the type of Anisette, would have responded scarcely at all to this hilarity of blue waves and morning light—but it was different now. He had changed and the world had changed; the change was perhaps more subtle than profound, altering rather the point of view than the viewer, yet he had changed. He had learned to expand his nostrils to the breeze, to feel pleasure in the morning light, and satisfaction in the sense of being.

As he stood looking away to southward over the blue sea, he heard the voice of the spirit that had mostly wrought the change in him. It was the voice of Martinique calling to him, the voice of Marie.

Ché.

In a moment and for a moment, Fortune, the island, everything, was forgotten.

Ché.

The little word came on the breeze to him. Was she, too, standing on some beach or headland gazing over the sea towards him? Was the little word a butterfly of279 thought blown to him on the breeze that was blowing from there?

Who can say, but he heard it as distinctly as he had heard it that evening when standing on the road to Morne Rouge and looking down at St. Pierre, he had waited for her and she had come to him.

He turned away from the sea, then he turned to it again and swept the horizon as though looking for a sail. There was nothing to be seen.

He walked back along the sea edge in the direction of the palms; the seven palms had been cast down by the rush of the hurricane, just as the stakes of a stock fence might be cast down by the rush of wild cattle; now, and for the first time, the thought occurred to Gaspard that with the palms gone the islet would be less likely to attract the attention of a passing ship. He looked at them as they lay, and then he approached the bundle of treasure and the glittering snake of gold, which were lying by the bole of the westernmost of the fallen trees. He touched the bundle with his foot. The action seemed half involuntary; he did not seem to be thinking of the bundle or its contents. Nor was he.

He was thinking of Marie.

A wild longing, such as the prisoned bird may feel for the blue sky, filled him, subordinating everything else to the thought of the being he loved.

Ever since La Belle Arlésienne had dropped Martinique behind her this longing had been living and growing in his heart; the treasure fever had obscured it, the storm had veiled it, the finding of the treasure had pushed it aside, but it was there, growing, and patiently waiting. It was the master passion of his life, the thing beside which all other things were nothing, though for a moment280 they might veil it, as a cloud veils a star, or a mist a mountain.

He turned away from the treasure and walked towards the bushes, then he began to cross the islet, taking the path that Sagesse’s sailors had made for the boat. Though he was profoundly engaged in thought, he noticed quite little things, as, for instance, that the salt crystals were nearly gone from the leaves of the bay-cedar bushes.

Half way across, where a view of the northern horizon could be obtained, he raised his head and scanned the sea line. Nothing—nothing—Ah! stop! What was that?

A tiny flake of feldspar seemed clinging to the sky horizon in N.N.W. In the wonderful half wheel of crystal blue this microscopic flaw might have been passed over by a casual observer. Gaspard folded his arms and stood gazing at this speck, his lips parted in a half smile, his eyes fixed. Had you been close to him, you would have noticed that he scarcely breathed.

The thing did not seem to alter in shape or increase in size, yet he knew that it represented the topsails of a ship hull down on the horizon. It was just so that he had first glimpsed La Belle Arlésienne from the open boat.

Then it increased in size. After keeping him in suspense for what seemed an age, suddenly his brain was able to say of the vision upon his retina, “It is bigger.”

Then, as he watched it increase, all doubt passed: It was a vessel of some sort steering southward. The wind was blowing now steady from E.S.E.; she would pass the island to westward, perhaps quite close, for it was all deep water there.

His mind, up to the moment of sighting the sail, had been filled with the thought of Marie, the craving for her had brought him here to look out for a sail. Now, after the281 first joyous leap of the heart, Marie was for the moment forgotten. It was as though the sail space on the sky had been a doorway through which the world had rushed in upon him.

He turned and ran back to the southern beach, picked up the treasure bundle and forced it into his pocket, picked up the jewelled snake and placed it round his neck under his shirt.

The collar of the flannel shirt scarcely concealed it; it would never do to board a vessel with such a gem so lightly concealed, so, hurriedly, with absurd haste, as though the ship were already abreast of the island and there was not a moment to lose, he stripped off his coat and shirt. For a moment he thought of placing it round his waist, but it was not long enough to serve as a belt—then he did what the jeweller who had designed the thing intended its wearer to do—made an armlet of it.

It clung to perfection, and he resumed his shirt and coat. The banknote that he had taken from the pocket-book of Sagesse, the white pearl, and the gold coin, were all in the left hand coat pocket; he felt them over with his left hand whilst his right examined again the bulge made by the jewels contained in the right hand pocket.

It was not so very noticeable and no one would have dreamed that it was caused by treasure. He looked around him on the sand to make sure that he had forgotten nothing, and then came back to the vantage point in the centre of the islet.

Yes, there she was, palpable to the sight and definite, no longer a smudge on the sky-line, but a vessel with all sail set and steering, one would have thought, straight for the islet.

Then, assured of this, he set to with his sheath knife,282 cutting dead brushwood and heaping it on the pathway; the smoke of a signal fire was his only chance of attracting her attention; and having made his preparations he knelt down by the heap and put his hand in his trousers pocket for his tinder box and steel.

It was gone.