A smoke-coloured band, curious, and like a thin curved cloud, cut the grey background of sky to eastward. It was in motion. Even as he looked it changed subtly in shape till now it became a comet of smoke, head pointing to the island.
Far away to the northeast, another band of smoke, grey and also in motion, caught his eye.
There was something sinister in these apparitions so strange to the eye, so perplexing to the mind, so dismal in colour against the dismal grey of the sky.
What could they be?
The coin he held in his hand was forgotten; unconsciously he put it in his pocket and, folding his arms, looked.
Now the approaching comet of smoke altered again in form, becoming a line definite, distinct, and swiftly approaching like an apparition in a dream.
Ah! what was that—that voice mournful and complaining? In a flash the meaning of the phenomenon was revealed. They were birds. A vast flock of gulls, thousands, beating the air as with one wing, crying aloud as with one voice; then silent, always advancing.
And now the gulls of the island rose clamouring, like a burst of smoke; in a moment the air was filled with birds, in a moment the oncomers had joined the island250 birds, in a moment, all rising as if by common consent, the feathered thousands took definite form and encircled the island in a vast moving ring.
The “hush” of their wings sounded like the continuous beating of the sea on the shore.
Gaspard, with head upturned, gazing at the wonderful sight, saw the second flight approaching. It joined the others, circled with them, and then, just as if the moving ring had been bent by a wind, it broke and in two vast flocks the moving host passed away to westward, became clouds again, and slowly vanished, leaving the island to silence and desolation.
There was something tragic in this great migration of birds and in the utter silence that followed their vanishing. There was something disturbing in the absolute peace which had taken the whole world into its keeping.
Close to Gaspard, caught in the branches of the bay-cedar bushes, lay something white. As he turned his eyes from the western horizon, whence the great flock had vanished, his eyes caught this white thing, and he approached it. It was the skull of Serpente, thrown away by Sagesse, now grinning at the grey sky as though reading there some frightful joke, some diabolical secret of Nature.
Gaspard turned his eyes from this thing to the distant vessel, caught in its flight, arrested and held in bondage by the calm. One might have fancied that the grinning skull drew its mirth from the predicament of Sagesse. To Gaspard it seemed that the skull was the centre from which all that silence and desolation of sea and sky radiated, the quid obscurum at the heart of that peace which was holding the world in its spell.
He turned to the southern beach and sought the tent.251 As he entered it and lay down to rest his aching head, the sea again, moving uneasily, boomed on the reef to northward and sighed on the sand of the southern beach. The unrest, the unhappiness that lives in the heart of things, seemed to speak in that voice.
He turned as he lay and cast himself face downwards with arms outstretched. Tricked, betrayed, marooned, robbed of the gold for which he had forgotten her, he remembered now Marie. Sagesse, the treasure, La Belle Arlésienne, all that trash vanished from his mind for a moment before the vision of the thing he loved.
Had there been the slightest chance of outwitting Sagesse, of regaining his hold upon the treasure, the fever for revenge and gold would have held his mind from all else; but he recognized that the game was lost, and in his desolation he turned to his only thought of comfort. And here again the game was lost. Love had tricked him just as fortune had tricked him, and just as cruelly.
To find Marie again he must first find Martinique. Suppose, even, that a ship were to rescue him; that ship might be bound for any port in the world but Martinique. He had no money, no trade. To gain enough to return to St. Pierre he would have to go back to the stokehold, he would have to work ships across and across the world before his wretched pay, saved and scraped together, would give him money sufficient to return with. He might write to M. Seguin, but where in his wandering life would he get the reply?
It might be months before a ship rescued him; it might be months before that ship landed him at a port where he could get work; it might be years before he reached Martinique—and meanwhile, what of Marie? Ah! the want of money, just a little of that money which the rich find so252 burdensome, that want is the curse of the poor, that want is the essence of the true tragedy of life.
The hunger which poverty imposes on man is nothing to the loneliness and the separation, the heart-break and the starvation for want of love.
He loved Marie now, with the love that comes after marriage, the love that has nothing to do with passion. Across separation and disaster he saw her as she really was, beautiful, single-hearted, loving, and faithful—and he might never meet her again. To reach her he would have to journey to all parts of the world, working as a slave in a stokehold with that ache in his heart, earning sou by sou, the money that would bring him to her—and every moment of separation seemed a year.
Stung suddenly to madness, with the tears upon his face, he left the tent and sought the beach outside, walking up and down it like a frenzied creature, cursing, calling out, wild with the petty things that had him in their grip, the little Fates that had bound him to this islet as the Lilliputians bound Gulliver. He saw nothing of his own handiwork in this fate which he cursed; he saw nothing of the grave faults of mind, the weaknesses, the impetuosities that had flawed his life, killing Yves, and binding him to the will of Sagesse; he only saw his Fate and that it was horrid—and he cursed it.
After awhile he paused. A wind had risen and was blowing from the north across the islet. He recognised that the day had grown suddenly darker and as he stood wiping the sweat from his brow, confused, and exhausted with the conflict of thought through which he had passed, he heard a............