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.20 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;21 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 or22 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 a23 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 stood24 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.
25 “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.
26 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!