Neither of the men replied for a moment, then La Touche said: “There wasn’t another boat could have got away.”
The sun was well risen now, the clouds were high and breaking and the far away land shewed up, vast in the distance, with a white line of snow-covered peaks against the sky, desolate as when Kerguelen first sighted them.
Cléo with her eyes fixed across the leagues of tumbling tourmaline tinted sea almost forgot the others. That was the place where the wind was bearing them to, a place where there was nothing. Neither hotels nor houses nor huts, nor men nor women, a place where no landing-stage would receive them, no voice welcome them. Her throat worked for a second convulsively as she battled with the quite new things that the far off mountains were telling her.
It was now and not till now that she recognised fully what Fate had done to her. It was now and not till now that she saw Time before her as a thing from which all the known features had been deleted.
“Mademoiselle’s bath is quite ready.”
“Mademoiselle, the first gong has sounded.”
Oh, the day—the day with its hundred phases and divisions, the breakfast hour, the luncheon hour, the hour that brought afternoon tea, the dresses that went with each phase, the emotions and interests, and changing forms of being, the day which made a person change to its light and the person of ten o’clock in the morning quite different from the person of noon—this thing which we talk of as the day appeared before her now as what it really is, life itself, as civilized men know life, a thing outside ourselves yet of ourselves and without which the circling of the sun is as the circling of a pointer on a blank dial—. This thing was gone.
La Touche had got more forward and was smoking and, though the wind was with them, a faint scent of tobacco smoke came on the spill of the wind from the sail. Bompard was chewing, spitting occasionally to starboard and wiping his mouth with the back of his bronzed tattooed hand.
The vague scent of the tobacco threaded up all sorts of things in the girl’s mind: Madame de Warens, the streets of Paris, the deck of the yacht. She remembered the piece of embroidery work she had been engaged on last night, and then a scrap of conversation she had overheard between the doctor and the artist towards the end of dinner, they were talking of the passéistes and futurists, of the work of Pablo Picasso, of Sunyer, of Boccioni and Durio, arguing with extraordinary passion about the work of these people.
“There’s weather or something over there,” said La Touche who had slipped down and was seated on the bottom boards with his back to a thwart; he nodded his head towards Kerguelen.