“Wait a bit. I’ll tell you——”
He turned on her with a ferocity that was like the stroke of a lion’s paw.
“Shut up. I don’t want any talking. Get down there.”
She flashed one of her brilliant and mechanical smiles at him.
“That’s quite a good gaff!”
Next moment he had taken her by the shoulders, and pushed her over the edge of the broken deck, holding her by one arm till she had got a grip of something and seeing her descend like a clawing and astonished cat. He followed her. They finished up among the Sappho’s bilge-plates, looking at each other across the bent propeller shaft.
“What’s the joke?”
She was a little out of breath, hugely angry, and inclined to think him mad.
“Come on.”
He reached over and caught her by the hair.
“Come on. This is my show.”
For an instant her eyes flared; they were the eyes of a devil. And then she came climbing over the propeller shaft with that antarctic smile on her face.
“Oh, I see the joke alright!”
She thought him mad. The catastrophe had knocked his reason edgeways, but he stood six feet one and had the chest of a gladiator!
Gretton led her to the reef, holding her by the hair.
“See that clump of palms?”
He pointed and she nodded, her thin mouth furious.
“Unlash that case, and shoulder it over to the palm grove. Then come back for something else. That’s your job. See?”
He let her go, and she looked at him as though she had a knife hidden behind her back, and was wondering where to strike him. Then she unknotted the rope, got the case on her right shoulder, and started off.
Gretton watched her. His nostrils were quivering, and he was breathing hard. For a moment his old, tame, civilized self tried to obtrude itself, but was kicked back into its kennel. He was looking at the female figure in front of him. She was not female; he felt that as he looked at her. Her torn blouse showed two humpy shoulder-blades with a deep hollow between them, and in the hollow swam a big brown mole. He looked at the two bare legs below the short petticoat. They were irritating legs, rather like badly shaped stockings stuffed with bran, complacent, sleek, sexless. Her feet were too long. There was a flatness about her whole figure, a flatness that displeased him. He turned back to the wreck.
“She thinks me mad!”
He stood and laughed, opening his shoulders and throwing back his head.
“She can go on thinking it—till I have taught her her lesson.”
And then he thought of Mildred Arkell and dead Hanson, and his laughter died away.
“What irony! Hell! but I wonder how long this has got to last?”
He set to work on the wreck, collecting all the undamaged stores from the storeroom and slinging them over the side. The Sappho’s water-tanks had caved in, but he found a small tank in the steward’s pantry that still held water, enough to last for a couple of days. He drank from an aluminium tumbler that he had found, and remembered Helen Glaber.
“I wonder if she’ll come back?”
He walked to the end of the broken deck, and found her waiting down below. She was polite, venomously formal.
“What next, Mr. Gretton?”
His distaste for her increased, but he felt himself responsible.
“I have found some water. Come up and drink.”
She obeyed him, but he let her use an enamelled mug. The aluminium tumbler was his. He saw that she hated him, and knew that her acquiescence humoured his supposed insanity.
“All those stores must be carried across.”
She smiled.
“Don’t you think, Mr. Gretton——?”
“I am thinking,” he said roughly; and she turned about, but he called her back.
“You will have a meal ready at noon. Here’s what you want. A tin opener, knives and forks, four plates. I’ll pass them down to you.”
She went like a lamb, but he suspected the wolf in the lambskin, and all through the morning between his pitching of ropes, spars, tools, and sail-cloth on to the reef, he kept an eye on her activities. She was as strong as most men, and she stuck to her work, going sullenly to and fro between the wreck and the palm grove, but Gretton had no pity.
“If Mildred were alive,” he thought, “and you were in my place, you would be making her toil like a galley-slave.”
When noon came, he walked across to the palm grove and found that she had everything ready, three boxes to serve as seats and a table, plates and knives and forks laid out, biscuits piled neatly, a tin of tongue and a tin of peaches open. He sat down and waited. She carved the tongue, helped herself, and was about to push it across to him when she found him looking hard at her.
She understood his look quite well. There was a moment’s hesitation, then she passed the plate to him. He nodded, and pointed to his mug.
“Water.”
He had filled a metal jug with water and brought it across. She got up and poured water into his tumbler. The man-emperor was served.
They worked together all the afternoon, carrying up stores and gear, and Gretton spent two hours putting up a couple of canvas shelters under the palms. The sun blazed, but they carried on. About five o’clock they knocked off for tea, a tea that consisted of water, biscuits and jam. The man-emperor did not unbend; the silence between them was so stiff with mutual antipathy that it showed no signs of becoming ridiculous.
“Mr. Gretton, I want to go to the wreck.”
He was sitting with his back against a tree, examining a box of sodden cigars, and wondering how long they would take to dry in the sun.
“All right.”
“Clothes, you know.” She flashed a smile at him. “Dick had a petrol-lighter. I might find it, or matches.”
He nodded.
“There’s Hanson, lying on the sands.”
“I haven’t forgotten him,” he said curtly. “You’ll bring back some matches and dry them. You can have an hour.”
She looked at him queerly and went her way, and Gretton spent the time rigging up a spar and a flag in a conspicuous position on the beach. He meant to bury Hanson and the engineer at sundown, and he was suddenly confronted with the thought that Mildred Arkell’s body might be washed ashore. He straightened himself and looked at the sea. “Keep her,” he said aloud, “it is better so;” and turning, found Helen Glaber behind him.
Her eyes said: “Yes, you are mad. Mad people talk to themselves.”
But there was more in her eyes than that. She had a sly, smooth look, like a cat that has stolen something and feels sleek with successful cleverness. Gretton noticed the change in her. This reversion to a more primitive attitude of the sexes seemed to have quickened his instincts, and made him as observant of detail as a savage. He felt things; he felt the change in the woman and in her mood towards him. “She has found something. She thinks she has got behind my back!” What was that something? He decided that it was a weapon.
Gretton dissembled.
“Any matches?”
She showed him a little canvas bag full of soaked packets.
“Good. I suppose they will dry.”
They walked back to the palm grove, Gretton keeping slightly behind her and observing her with vague eyes. If she had found a weapon she had hidden it on her person or near the camp.
“Did you find your clothes?”
“No; but some of Mildred’s.”
This angered him most strangely, and he said no more.
When they reached the camp he took the matches from her and pretended to amuse himself in opening the boxes and laying the sticks to dry on the top of a biscuit box. Helen Glaber had rescued some blankets from the yacht. She had carried them up in a tangled rope, and was bending over them and spreading them on the ground. Gretton was behind her, right hand poised and holding a match. As she bent down he saw something swing under her petticoat and bulge it out ever so slightly, and Gretto
n smiled.
He got up, yawned, stretched himself, edging near to her with casual indirectness as though vaguely interested in the blankets. She had disentangled them, meaning to spread them on the bushes. She glanced round. Gretton was close to her.
And suddenly he made a leap and caught her wrists. They stood close, looking into each other’s eyes. The woman was afraid.
“Put your hands up, over your head! Keep them there.”
She obeyed him, furious yet cowed. He knelt down, groped for a moment, gave a fierce twitch of the arm and stood up holding a revolver that she had slung from her waist with a piece of tape.
“I thought so.”
He examined it and saw that it was loaded.
“You thought that you might like to use it?”
She said nothing. Her impression of his madness began to fade away. Her angry eyes masked a sudden respect for him.
“Any more of these toys?”
She shook her head.
“Thank you. But no more tricks. You understand.”
He towered over her, and for the moment he thought that she was going to try the feminine trick of tears. She blinked, looked up at him with a sort of absurd bewilderment and then nodded her head. The man in him felt that he had her beaten.
Gretton walked down to the sea, and tossed the revolver well out into the water. Then he strolled along to the Sappho and searched every available nook and corner for any more toys of the same order. Hanson had owned a couple of sporting rifles, and Gretton found them in a case under Hanson’s bunk. He carried them away with him, and buried them in the sand close to the graves he dug for Hanson and the engineer. He marked the two graves with the blade of the broken oar, and stood awhile in solemn silence before returning to the palms.
Here a new spirit surprised him. The woman had supper ready, and on the box that was to serve as a table he saw his own whisky-flask, a petrol-lighter, a pipe and a tin of tobacco. He glanced at them and said nothing. Helen Glaber was busy in one of the canvas shelters; she had collected dry grass and was making a bed.
His bed! He guessed that at once, and yet the man in him was not touched. She had reverted suddenly to the primæval, feminine methods. The beast was to be managed, if he could not be ruled.
“Is that my bed?”
“Yes.”
He accepted her labours and her ingenuities with casual matter-of-factness. They supped; they sat awhile in silence, and then crawled each into their respective shelters. Gretton smoked for an hour, but he did not lie down until he knew by the sound of her breathing that the woman was asleep.
* * *
Gretton was up early, while Helen Glaber was still asleep.
With a big can slung over his shoulder he started westwards along the beach, intending to find the place where the island’s minute stream of fresh water made its way into the sea. Passing the wreck of the Sappho, and the two graves, he paused to light his pipe. His mood was one of grimness and depression, a mood of reaction after the strenuous happenings of the first day upon the island. Man is in the main a less persistent creature than woman, and Gretton was savagely bored by the prospect of a daily battle of wills between himself and Helen Glaber. He glimpsed the only possible law upon the island, an autocracy of one, the law of the male fist.
And then fate blew his pessimism into the limbo of forgotten ills. He had walked another half mile along the beach, and had stopped to relight his pipe, when the island behaved like Prospero’s island in The Tempest. Gretton stood absolutely still, the match burning between finger and thumb. He felt his heart beating fast and hard, for he had heard a voice, or rather the ghost of a voice, that cried out feebly, “Water, water!”
Gretton could see nothing but the broad stretch of sand between the scrub and the sea. This “Ariel” voice seemed to have come from nowhere, and then he heard it again, a little moaning cry, and the words:
“Water, water!”
He was trembling like a dog; and the next moment he was running along the sands, shouting as he ran:
“Where are you? Where are you?”
He came quite suddenly upon her, lying in a sandy hollow, and for a moment he stood on the low ridge above her resting-place, hardly able to believe that she was real. The coincidence seemed too impossible. Both women alive, and all the men, save himself, dead.
Almost instantly he was down on the sands beside her, bending over her with immense tenderness. The miracle had changed him and the whole island. She was looking at him vaguely, and then, stretching out an unsteady hand, touched his face as though she doubted its solidity. He saw that her right leg was broken, for it lay all twisted. She had crawled a little way up the beach and lain there for thirty-six hours, with nothing to drink all through the blaze of a southern day.
“Thank God I found you,” he said.
Her lips and mouth were so dry that she could hardly speak.
“Bob, is it you, really?”
“Thank God!” he said again; “thank God I came this way.”
She was so feeble and so spent that he began to be in terror for her life, and his heart beat to action. He bent over her, whispering like a mother to a child.
“Don’t be frightened any more, I am going to fetch you water. I have a camp over there, and a tent and food. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
She touched his face again with her fingers and smiled very faintly.
“Dear Bob!”
He kissed her forehead and ran back to the palm grove. Helen Glaber was just emerging from her shelter; she flashed him a limelight smile, but he had no words for Helen Glaber. He was a whirlwind, and she sat on her heels and watched him with suspicious eyes. His actions revived her opinion of his madness. He half filled the water can, stuffed the whisky flask and the tumbler into the pockets of his drill jacket, and added some biscuits and a jack-knife. Two pieces of wood from the lid of a box, a length of frayed rope, and a blanket completed his equipment. He started off again at full speed, and without a word to the woman.
“The man’s off his head,” she said to herself; “a nice life this, with a mad dog on an island!”
She picked up the lid of a biscuit tin and looked at the reflection of her own face. It seemed to please her. She sat and smiled.
After a morning dip, and an alfresco toilet made while the madman was playing Crusoe somewhere on the beach, she set herself to prepare breakfast, and even rose to the refinement of lighting a fire and boiling a kettle. She was opening a tin of tongue and making rather a mess of it when she heard Gretton pushing through the scrub. She had decided to try a coy and persuasive attitude, and she did not look round at him.
“Those blankets on the bushes. Get them.”
She glanced up, and her face seemed to lengthen till it was as long as the face of a Roman-nosed horse. She blinked, screwed up her hard mouth, and was on her feet instantly.
“What? Mildred!”
Gretton carried the girl past her.
“Wait. Is her leg broken? If so—you ought not——”
Gretton swung a look at her over his shoulder.
“Did you hear me? Get—those—blankets.”
For at the sight of the girl whom she had bullied for two years Helen Glaber’s matchless egotism had reasserted itself. The whole situation had changed. The man-thing was in the minority. Moreover, she had once more revised her opinion of his madness.
But Gretton’s words were like a blow in her face, a male fist that threatened. She hesitated, and then went for the blankets.
Gretton had carried Mildred Arkell into his canvas shelter and, kneeling, laid her very gently on the ground. He had splinted the broken leg and lashed her feet together so as to steady the broken limb while he carried her to the palm grove.
“How’s that? Have I hurt you?”
She smiled at him.
“No.”
He turned to find Helen Glaber pushing into the shelter with the blankets in her arms; but Gretton took the blankets from her and extru
ded her with a broad and uncompromising back.
“Go and pull some more grass for a pillow.”
It was then that Helen Glaber showed fight. Mildred Arkell belonged to her. Had she not taken the girl out of a country parsonage, paid her thirty pounds a year, and used her as the scapegoat for all her moods and tempers? Gretton had lost the supreme advantage that solitude had given him. Three constitutes a crowd, a society. Helen Glaber believed that she could dominate Mildred, and so control this desert island.
“Will you get out of my way, please. This is my affair. Mildred belongs to me.”
Gretton was spreading the blankets on the dry grass that had formed his bed.
“I think not,” he said quietly.
She tried to push past him.
“Mildred, dear, I must set that leg of yours—properly——”
It was her bid for power in that little world of three, but she was to be met and defeated by a force that she had always ignored, the thing that we call “love,” the power that is behind all the strivings and the sufferings of a civilization that began in a jungle life thousands of centuries ago. The girl on the ground cried out with sudden and passionate vehemence:
“I won’t be touched by her! I couldn’t bear to be touched by her. Bob, send her away.”
Gretton rose from his knees and turned on Helen Glaber.
Their eyes met.
“You are not wanted in here. I think that’s obvious.”
With a firm hand on her shoulder he pushed her out of Mildred Arkell’s sail-cloth tent and pointed to the other shelter.
“That’s yours. It’s a bit too near to our half of the camp. I’ll shift it for you presently.”
Her eyes flared with sudden hatred.
“I can do that for myself,” she said.
* * *
So love outvoted hate; and when, some six weeks later, the tramp steamship Alabama put in to water at the island where the Sappho’s wreck and the flag flying on the beach spoke of a tragedy, the captain’s glass discovered people who lived. A boat had put off from the Alabama, and a man and a girl were standing on the edge of the palm grove, watching the boat’s crew pulling towards the island. A hundred yards away a third figure, the figure of a woman, showed against the dark trunks of the palms. There appeared to be two separate camps on the island, one with two shelters placed side by side, the other with a solitary tent standing alone.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 23
