From the salt-white sand of the beach to eastward, and some two hundred yards from the palm-clump a ridge of coral rocks ran out into the sea like a natural pier. The water lay deep off these rocks and the fishing would have been good had the ship-wrecked ones possessed lines and hooks.
Gaspard, next day, late in the afternoon was standing at the end of this coral pier, the sea of an incredible blue, sailless, forlorn, came glassing shoreward in long gentle lines of swell, slobbering and sighing by the rocks and breaking sadly on the sands.
When the sea comes in like this in long spaced undulations a voice steals through her voice, the something tragic, the quid obscurum that hides in nature and speaks through the elements and the passions is heard. The sea has a hundred voices, Gaiety, Triumph, Strength, Sadness, Regret, the wave speaks them all. But stand on a day like this on a desolate island in the tropics and listen to the voice that steals from all that splendour of light and gaiety of colour, the violent heaving wastes of water, the triumphant sun, the sky of living blue, through all these, from all these you will hear a voice, it is borne by the languid voice of the sea.
It is the voice of Loneliness.
Loneliness—Fate, Death, Tragedy—all these are dwarfed before her, to escape from whom the very atoms of matter cling together, animals join in herds, men in communities. She who says to man “I walk by you from the cradle to the grave, with me you go forth from the world alone, because of me you work out your fate alone, by the shores and desolate plains of the north I shew my face, by the tropic sea men hear my voice. I am she who makes Death terrible. I am she who makes Love beautiful. Love my only enemy.”
Gaspard, standing on the reef, heard the voice, his eyes were fixed on the green water in the shadow of the rocks, an albicore like a flashing sword had passed a moment ago, now there was nothing to be seen but the crystalline vagueness through which here and there floated a scrap of fucus. Just in that second, held between the sound of the sea and the mesmeric crystal of the water his mind heard Loneliness speak. Just in that moment was borne in on him dimly, and without awakening true comprehension, the tragic fact of human isolation, the fact that each man is on a desert island set round by the sea of life, and that there alone he must work out his fate, unless from some island in the distance Love should bring him help.
The fact came to him as a sensation rather than a thought, the grave harmonics of the sea had whispered to him this eternal truth, the fact which is the master fact of life.
Suddenly, from behind, as he stood there gazing into the depths came a voice that made him turn. Yves far away amidst the low bushes was beckoning and calling to him, capering, gesticulating, flinging his arms about. Yves seemed to have gone mad, and Gaspard, making along the rocks, ran across the sand, and through the bushes towards him.
Over the bushes the air was shaking with the heat, Yves was much farther off than he had seemed from the rocks; he was almost at the centre of the islet, and now as Gaspard made his way through the bushes he saw that his companion held something in his hand.
“Hurry up, lazy bones,” cried Yves, “and see what I have found.” He waved the thing in the air, it was a belt with a brass buckle and a pouch attached to it. He was laughing, one might have fancied that he had fallen on some great, good fortune.