Bompard openly expressed his mind.
“Not a bottle of wine or a drop of rum, swabs.”
“Well, you’ve got some tobacco,” said Cléo, “and there’s tea and coffee and cups and saucers, and a teapot—no coffeepot—well one can make coffee in anything—” She was running over the stores in her mind, standing, reviewing them with no thought of anything else and her soul filled with a joy and satisfaction absolutely new.
Blankets! Tea! Coffee! and clothes—even mens’ clothes if it came to the worst. One might have fancied her to have fixed definitely in her mind that she was to spend a very long time on the shores of Kerguelen and to have accepted the terrible prospect with equanimity. It was not so. She was living in the moment, so entirely in the moment that these things were tremendous and vivid and compared with them Art, Music, Religion, Ambition, and the gauds of Civilization were as nothing.
This power to live in the moment is the form of strength that brings men through battles and women through adversity. It fells cities and builds them. On Kerguelen it is salvation. For, here to think of the future, unless in terms of material necessities, to dream, to brood, means death or madness.
But Bompard and La Touche, resting themselves after their labours, were not living in the moment nor in the past nor in the present, they were living in that strange sad land called the Might-Have-Been. They might have been in the way to a jolly booze by now if that fool who provisioned the cache had not forgotten the drink. They were thankful for nothing. They had food, they had clothes, they had tobacco. They were glad enough of the blankets, but even the thought of the blankets could not relieve their depression.
They were not drunkards, but the cache had given them hopes of drinks. These hopes shattered they sat like discontented children who had been promised sweets and disappointed.
But this did not last long, the Hopeless is its own antidote and after half a pipe of tobacco their cheerfulness, such as it was, returned and they fell to discussing with the girl the best way of treating the stores.
Bompard, considering the difficulty of transporting the stuff to the caves, proposed that they should move their abode right up to the cache.
Cléo pointed out that there were no caves here, so, unless they moved the caves as well as their belongings, they would have nowhere to sleep in.