This same Raft whom the fo’c’sle could subdue to the surroundings, making him as faithful a part of the picture as the kerosene lamp, on the beach stood immense both in size and significance.

It was as though the fo’c’sle had the power to dwindle him, the beach, to expand him.

The girl had never seen him in the fo’c’sle so she could not appreciate the difference that environment made in him, and perhaps she saw him ever so slightly magnified, but it seemed to her that he was big enough to form part of the landscape, that he was one with the seven mile beach and the Lizard Point and the great islands and the sea elephants.

Not only had she been crushed down by loneliness; size had helped. Raft seemed to reduce the size of things, so that the seven mile strand and the vast islands and sea spaces no longer burdened her, and in some magical way whilst he reduced the proportions of his surroundings they increased his potency and significance. He was in his true setting, part of a vast picture without a frame.

It was not alone his physical dimensions. Bompard had been a big man, but Bompard could not fill that beach. No, it was something else—what we call, for want of a better expression, “the man himself.”

Then there was another thing about him, he found food of all sorts where Bompard and La Touche had found nothing; he brought in crabs and cray-fish and penguins eggs, he brought down rabbits with stones. That was his great art. A stone in the hand of Raft was a terrible missile and his aim was deadly.

At the end of a week the girl was able to accompany him along the beach to the cache where he unearthed some stores and came upon the harpoon which he carried back with them.

Then one day he suddenly appeared before her carrying her lost sou’wester. He had gone off down the beach in the direction of the Lizard Point and he came back carrying the hat in his hand. He must have been into the cave where the remains of La Touche lay, but he said nothing about that.

It was nearly a fortnight since she had told him of how she had lost it and he must have treasured the fact up in his mind all that time.

The weather had cleared again, after a tremendous blow from the south, and as they sat that evening in the sunset blaze before the caves, Raft, who had been staring steadfastly out to sea as if watching something, began to talk.

“That chap Ponting told me this side of the coast is no use for ships,” said he. “They keep beyond them islands for fear of the reefs. I reckon the old sea cows know that or there wouldn’t be so many on this beach. He said there was a bay round to the westward where ships put in.”

“How far?” asked the girl.

“A goodish bit,” replied Raft. “I was making for that bay when I struck you. I was thinking,” he finished, “that when you were stronger on your pins we might make for there.”

“Leave here?”

“Ay,” said Raft, “there’s not much use sticking here.”

She said nothing for a moment, she felt disturbed.

Since her recovery she had fallen into a state of quietude. She who had been the leader of Bompard and La Touche, she who had fought and worked so determinedly for existence had now no ambition, no desire for anything but rest. The strength of this man who had given her back her life seemed a shield against everything, just as a wall is a shield against the wind; she was content to sit in its shelter and rest. The idea of new exertions and unknown places terrified her.

“But how are you to know the bay?” asked she, “there may be a good many bays along the coast.”

“No,” said Raft, “Ponting told me there wasn’t a decent anchorage but this. He said this bay wasn’t to be mistook, looks as if it was cut out with a spade and the cliffs run high and black, there’s a seal beach that way and it’s after seals the ships come. Well, there’s time enough to think of it seeing you are not fit to move yet.”

“Oh, I’ll soon be all right,” said she. “I’m getting stronger every day.”

“What gets me,” said Raft, “is how you fell to pieces like that, with all that stuff at your elbow and a river close by.”

“It was being alone,” replied she, “I did not know it at the time, but I got so that I did not care to eat and then at last I believe I didn’t eat anything at all. I couldn’t have imagined that just being alone would make a person like that. You see I had food and water. If I had been compelled to hunt about for food I expect I would have been all right, as it was I had nothing to do and was just driven in on myself.”

Raft said nothing for a moment, he was turning this over in his mind. He could not understand it. The idea of a person with plenty of food and a good set of teeth dying of starvation just because she was lonely seemed to him outrageous, yet he knew she was speaking the truth. It was another strange thing about this strange woman. She was altogether strange, different from any human being he had ever met and growing more different every day now that she was “filling out,” and getting her voice back.

That voice, soft and musical and refined, had disturbed the sea elephants when she first talked to them as people talk to horses and dogs, it was something they had never heard before in the language of tone, and so it was with this sea animal with a red beard. He could not tell whether he liked it or not, never asked himself the question, it was part of her general strangeness and to be considered along with her clinging, man killing and double-tongued qualities, also with the fact that she had starved almost to death because she was alone; also with her eyes and new face, for she was growing younger looking every day and better looking, and her eyes, naturally lovely, were growing natural again.

As he looked at her now sitting in the sunset this return of beauty struck him as it almost might have struck the sea elephants. It pleased him. Had he put his thoughts into words he would have said that she was filling out and getting more pleasant looking. At her very best he would never have tacked the word beauty on to her; a buxom, rotund, beady-eyed young female would have made the word beauty spring to his lips—ClÉo de Bromsart, never. But she was getting more pleasant looking and her eyes were getting over their “stiffness”—which was something, and he felt pleased.

Presently, alone in his cave, he would bring his fist down on his thigh with a bang and chuckle over her contrarieties, reviewing her against that terrific picture he had seen in the cave when he had gone to fetch the sou’wester; the picture of a man who had been torn to pieces by Burgomasters and cormorants. It had been necessary to wash the sou’wester for a long time in sea water before bringing it back.

She had done that chap in proper; the work of the gulls and the work of the girl were hardly dissociated in his mind—there was the Result. Just as though a baby had smashed a rock with its fist. Hence the chuckles, heightened by her clinging ways, her fragility, her musical voice, her starvation due to loneliness, her double tongue, her unaccountable tricks of manner.

And she, as she sat in the sunset not knowing his thoughts, had you asked her how she felt about him would have answered with steadfast eyes that she loved him. Meaning that she loved him as she had learned to love the sea-elephants, or as she would have loved a great carthorse that had stood between her and danger, or a huge dog. She scarcely thought of him as a man—just as a great benign thing, human, but nearer to the heart than any human being life had brought her in contact with till now.

Her almost passionate gratitude had little to do with this measure of him; any kindly man might have done what he had done. It was perhaps the feeling of his great strength, of his possible fierceness that gave the touch of benignity to him.

“Weren’t you afraid of them sea cows?” said he at last, “you must have come clean through them to get to that cave.”

“No,” she replied, “I didn’t mind them, quite the reverse. I came here because of them.”

“Because of them!”

“Yes. They were company.”

“Meaning—”

“Friends.”

“Y’mean to say—friends did you call them? Well, I don’t know, there’s no accountin’.”

He hung in irons. So she had been keeping company with the sea cows—and she talked of them as “friends.”

Now Raft, for all his limitless power of compassion for a female in distress would have slaughtered those same “sea-cows” to the last bull, and without a shred of compunction or compassion, had he possessed kettles to boil down the blubber and a vessel to carry the oil. He had already done in two of the babies for food when she was not looking. The idea of talking about them as friends tickled his mind in a new place. Then, as he glanced at the great bulls taking headers in the sunset light and snorting in from the sea and squatting over the beach, he came as near as anything to bursting into a roar of laughter.

Then he suddenly remembered supper and went off to prepare it.

The girl, left to herself, smiled. He had given her back that power and, like the sea elephants when they repulsed the penguins, he had given her something to smile over. She saw that he could not understand her in the least in a lot of little things, whilst she understood him through and through—or so she thought. She had thought the same about the sea elephants till the great battle, and—she had never seen Raft with murder in his eyes making the elements of beef tea.

He had made a stew for supper out of mussels, canned vegetables, seal meat and a piece of rabbit and when supper was over she went to bed in the bed he had made for her, for he had stripped the cache of all its wearing apparel and the remaining blankets, reserving the blankets for her use.

Then as she lay awake before dropping off to sleep she heard a sudden burst of noise from the night outside. It sounded as though one of the bulls had suddenly perceived a joke and were giving vent to his feelings.

She knew what it was, and she guessed the joke, and then, lying there in the dark, she began to laugh softly to herself with laughter that seemed to ease her mind of some old incubus clinging to it—less laughter than a sort of inverted form of crying and ending up almost in the latter with a few sniffs.

Then she fell asleep and dreamed that Raft had turned into something that seemed like a sea lion. She had never seen a sea lion, but this dream—one looked something like a lion and something like a sea elephant and something like Raft—with a touch of a carthorse. It had flippers, then it had wings, and the setting was the Place de la Concorde which bordered quite naturally the great beach of Kerguelen.