“Hi! Hi! Hi!—you there on the reef. Hi! Hi! Hi!—you there alone!—alone!—alone!—see how the wind takes us, wheeling, fishing, forever—alone—alone—alone.”
He turned his face to where, across the islet, far away in the blue, the gulls’ white wings were winking and beckoning to him; their voices, thinned by distance, had a desolation rendered even more desolate by the gorgeour of the burning blue sky, the triumphant sunlight, the licking of the warm weak wind.
There is no desolation so terrible as the desolation that lies in summer warmth and blue skies. Here life ought to have been superabundant, but here there was no life or moving thing save the wind and the gulls and the waves.
“God!” said the Moco. He thrust his clenched fist in his pocket and, turning from the lagoon, made his way along the rocks to the shore.
He returned to the south of the islet, not through the bushes, but along the eastern sea-edge where the reefs were like rows of teeth and the rock edges like razors. Here it was that most of the wreckage of the Rhone had come ashore, and here there was still wreckage enough, in all truth. Here was something to do.
In a moment he was up to his knees in water. The Rhone, when the explosion of the boilers rent her asunder, had cast wreckage enough upon the water, but even still, as she lay beneath the surface, sinking more and more completely to ruin, things were breaking loose from her and rising as bubbles rise from a submerged body, and drifting ashore with the tide. Hencoops, boxes, spars, barrels, were pounding about in the surf. Heavy spars were here, all chawn and frayed by the reefs; the coral teeth had left their marks on everything; there was nothing worth salving, yet Gaspard worked like a dock labourer, hauling upon spars, heaving at barrels, forgetting Loneliness in the exertion of manual labour.
But she was there, and her voice forever speaking, subtle, like a music interpenetrating all things from the sound of the wave to the silence of the sky, made itself heard again.
As the power of friction brings a machine to a pause, so did this voice, which was a part of the sunlight, a part of the silence, a part of the blueness of sea and sky, bring Gaspard to a stand.
He wiped his brow and looked at the heap of things he had collected. He remembered how Yves had laboured at the same job, and now, for the first time since the tragedy, as he stood looking at the heap of spars and wreckwood, a feeling of pity came to his heart for the man lying there dead amidst the bay-cedar bushes.
The outburst of grief to which he had given way on the evening before was, to speak truth, an outpouring of his southern nature; anger suddenly checked and flung back by Death, inverted and bursting forth furiously at the sight of the irreparable result of his anger.