The girl watched him. Not only did these new-found companions chase away loneliness and ghostly fears, but they brought her comfort. They seemed so sure, sure of food and life and the right to live, so undisturbed; it was as though she felt the presence of the ghostly shepherd who looks after the flocks of sea and land and who counts even the sparrows. She cast her eyes towards the islands and the sea-line; some day a ship would come and all this would be a dream of the past. She knew it. Her mind went back over all that she had been saved from—the wreck, the deathtraps and worst of all—La Touche. It was strange to think that a man should be worse than the others.
If that fisherman’s knife had not been included in the gear of the boat!
It was now, as she sat thinking this and watching the huge harmless things around her, that a hatred of La Touche came into her mind, a hatred that seemed to have been waiting to enter until her mind was at rest. He seemed to her evil itself. He seemed to her connected with all the disasters that had happened and part of them. He had been the lookout on the Gaston de Paris, his quarrel had sent Bompard to his death, he had nearly unhinged her mind with terror. Had he possessed the evil eye? Then, for the first time, she recalled her premonition of disaster, yet, how she had refused to let the yacht be put off its course. They might now have been at New Amsterdam only for that. Yet it was not her fault. She had refused to alter the course, not for any selfish reason, quite the reverse, she had refused because she did not wish to spoil the plans of her host. It was Fate, not blind Fate, because the premonition was full sighted, it was Fate obeying some order. And it seemed to her that she could read in the order that she was to be saved. Why? God only knew, but so she read the facts, and she would be saved to the end and go back to the life she knew, or had known and die, perhaps, at last an old, old woman.
It seemed to her that this coming on to the sea elephant beach was a stage in her great journey that had brought her definitely nearer to the end of her loneliness. And whether all this were true knowledge or whether it was only the fancy of the ego its effect was to give her peace.
Then, as she sat there the strangest lonely figure on earth, she explored the pocket of her skirt and took the things from it. La Touche’s knife, her rings knotted up in her handkerchief, the tobacco box of Captain Slocum, the tinder-box and box of matches. Then she opened the tobacco box and re-read the purple writing with the tag “keep up your spirits.” She could not visualize the old slab-sided whaling captain who had scrawled that, inspired no doubt by practical knowledge of disaster and the horrors of Kerguelen, but the message came now as an additional comfort, it seemed to her written by a hand other than that of man. She put the paper back in the box and, then, everything back in her pocket.
Then, like a stroke of humour, an incident occurred to lighten the whole beach.
A big platoon of penguins had crossed the river and marched up to the sacred precincts of the seal beach. Turning her head to see what the disturbance was about she sighted the penguins just at the end of their march and three bulls fronting them. The penguins wished to pass, either from impudence or a real desire to cross the beach, but the bulls barred the way, heading them off, turning and twisting, snorting as if to blow the feathered ones away.
The penguins bowed and scraped and explained, but the bulls, blind to politeness and deaf to argument only presented their heads, then they raised their rumps and made a half charge. The girl watched the penguins going at the double with heads slewed round as though fearful of their tails. Then she laughed.
The sea elephants had not only made her able to laugh, they had given her something to laugh over. Then came the thought: why had they refused the penguins and accepted her?
She did not know that the penguins were rival fishermen, she fancied that the sea elephants were somehow friendly to her, divining her friendship for them, and maybe she was right, though not perhaps in the way she fancied, for when God made friendship He made it out of queer and sometimes negative materials.