Then when the stuff was cooked, having no spoon, he had to wait until it cooled a bit before tasting it. He went to the cave mouth to have a look at the woman. The quarrelling of the great gulls had evidently awakened her, for her eyes were open, and as his figure cut the light at the cave entrance her head moved. He ran back for the precious tin and, carrying it carefully, and half carried away by the entrancing smell of it, knelt down beside her, then picking up the spoon began to feed her before feeding himself.
CHAPTER XXIII
RAFT
It took him three days to bring her back safe to life. It poured with rain during those three days but he managed to light little fires in one of the caves with seal blubber and routing out the things in her cave he found everything she had so carefully salved, the cups and plates, the tin of coffee, half empty now—everything, even to the tobacco the men had taken from the cache, he found Bompard’s tinder-box and the Swedish match box belonging to La Touche. He had given the woman life and she had given him tobacco and sometimes, sitting in the adjoining cave and smoking between nursing times, he would bring his big fist down on his thigh, just that.
Here was a woman starving to death and dying of thirst with food enough for a ship’s company at her elbow. And the tobacco! Where was the explanation? She was able to speak a little now. She had spoken at first in French, which he could not understand, then she spoke in English as good as his; another mystery. A woman all gone to pieces that spoke two tongues and was different somehow from any woman he had ever known.
Then the things she had said: “Who are you? I am not dreaming this? Are you really, really, truly—Oh, don’t leave me.” Crazy talk like that. And it was always “Oh, don’t leave me.” Then he would lay his pipe down carefully on the sand of the cave and pass through the sheeting rain to have a look at her. Sometimes she would have dozed off and he could get back to his pipe, sometimes she was awake and then he would have to sit down beside her and hold her hand and stroke it or play with her fingers just as one plays with the fingers of a child. At these moments he was transformed, he was no longer a man, he was a mother, and the hand that could break down the resistance of a bellying sail was the hand of a child. He no longer thought of her as the “poor woman,” an infant is sexless, so did she seem, or so would she have seemed had he thought of the matter. He didn’t. As a matter of fact thought was not his strong suit in the game of life. He was a man from the world of Things. That was why, perhaps, he made such a good sick nurse. He did not fuss, nor talk, his touch was firm, firm as his determination to “get food into her” and his hand, big as a ham, was delicate because it was the hand of a perfect steersman. It was used to handling women in the form of three thousand ton ships, coaxing them, humouring them—up to a point.
He fed her now from one of the tin cups. Every two hours of the day, unless she was asleep, half a cupful of food went into her whether she liked it or not; “hot stuff,” for though the firewood was done he found that the blubber alone was the best fuel in the world.
On the second day she was able to raise herself up, and once when he came in he found that she had been moving about the cave and that she had rearranged the blanket that did for a pillow.