telegraph office pressed a silent group of women, the tragedy of the
sea written on their faces. No one spoke. Only the rapid click of the
telegraph key came through the open door. Then a man appeared, holding
high a bit of paper.
‘Susanne Allanic,’ he called; and added quickly, ‘Your man’s safe!’
Susanne, standing on the edge of the crowd, with a baby in her arms,
threw up her head, gave a cry, and broke into sobs.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Michel sharply, for Allanic was one of the
Jeanot’s crew.
‘The Jeanot’s gone down,’ said a woman breathlessly; ‘four men are
missing. We don’t know who they are.’
Michel stood stunned. The sunlight seemed suddenly wiped from the
world. ‘The Jeanot’s gone down! The Jeanot’s gone down!’ kept pounding
through his brain. He knew he should have to tell his grandmother, and
in just those words; he could think of no others. At the gate he met
her. Her face was as white as his own, and he knew that she had heard.
‘The Jeanot----’ he stammered, trembling.
‘Yes,’ said his grandmother, ‘but Ives will telegraph.’ And she took
the pail of clams from him and went into the house to make the chowder.
They all knew now that last night’s storm was but the spent end of a
great tempest, which had swept the coast from Spain northward, and that
the Jeanot, struggling to keep to the open sea, had been forced on the
rocks below the Bay of Biscay.
From obscure Spanish towns the belated telegrams kept coming in all
that week. Three bodies had been washed ashore, and eleven men were
accounted for; only Ives Karadoc was missing. Some sailors had come
home with the story of the wreck. After the break-up of the Jeanot,
Ives had been seen clinging to a floating barrel. That was the last
known of him. So the days dragged on, hollow and dark.
People went back to their daily affairs, and began to talk of other
things than the wreck of the Jeanot. But in Michel’s home things were
not as before. Laughter had died away from the hearthstone. A knock or
a strange step on the flags set their hearts beating, and every night
the little lamp burned in the window.
‘Ives has been picked up and taken to some far country,’ persisted
Grandmother. ‘We shall hear, we shall hear.’ But one morning Michel,
finding her all in a heap near the fireplace, weeping with her apron
over her head, knew that she had lost hope.
He himself could not give up, and with hot protest in his heart he
started for the headland beyond the village where one could look far
out to sea. It was the point where they had all gathered to watch
for the Iceland fleet when it had returned less than a month ago,
the Jeanot leading, her sails agleam in the setting sun. And now the
Jeanot had gone down! Why, she was as familiar and friendly and dear
as the kitchen itself! And Uncle Ives was such a jolly young uncle,
so full of understanding! The children adored him. Last year at this
time they had begun to fill the sea chest for his first voyage with
the Iceland fleet. Together they had saved their pennies to buy sweet,
sticky ginger and chocolate and biscuits to tuck into the corners
as surprises. Guen had knit socks and hemmed towels. Grandmother had
made the underclothing. Finally, together, they had fashioned the
tarpaulins, which were to keep Uncle Ives dry in the worst of storms.
Grandmother had cut and sewed them on the machine with three and four
rows of stitching. Then they had dipped them in oil; and the children
had dragged them out to the hillside and spread them on the bushes to
dry, weighting them down with stones, turning them to the sun and the
wind, bringing them out each day anew and taking them in at night. At
last the three coatings of oil were dry, and the suit was light and
tough and waterproof. How they had laughed when Uncle Ives had tried
it on, and had pulled the huge stocking feet of the trousers over his
boots! Before he sailed he had asked them what they wished him to bring
them from Iceland, just as the father of the three daughters in the
fairy story did. They could not say, not knowing what things there
might be in Iceland; but Ives had brought walrus teeth to the boys, a
sack of eiderdown to Grandmother, and dolls in quaint native costume to
the girls. And then, just as they thought they had him back again, he
had started off with the Jeanot to buy salt for next year’s catch!
[Illustration: THEY HAD WAVED GOOD-BYE TO HIM]
They had waved good-bye to him, and watched until the Jeanot was a
white fleck beyond the islands. Now all that was bright in life seemed
to have been dashed to pieces on the black rocks of Biscay.
Michel pushed his way through the gorse, which pricked thickly about
him. At the summit of the headland stood a great stone cross, its
carvings worn by centuries of wind and brine. Here women who had waited
long for men at sea came to pray. On the step, with his cap pressed
to his breast, Michel knelt. His heart was too full to pray in words.
Besides, what could he say if God did not already know how much he
wanted Uncle Ives back?
Below him spread the bay, a sweep of pale gold. Tiny islands, rose and
lavender, or velvety black where the seaweed clung to them, studded the
surface like gems. A row of twisted pine trees followed the line of the
opposite shore.
After a while Michel stood up, and shading his eyes, gazed seaward.
There where the straits led into the open channel lay the Isle of
Breha, and round its point came the Paimpol fishing fleet returning
for the night. As they drew nearer Michel could distinguish each boat
by some well-known mark as one can tell a neighbor’s cow by a crumpled
horn or the white patches on its flanks. There was the high curved
prow of Raoul’s boat, a black and green trawler. There was the orange
patch on Jean Baptiste’s gray sail. Among the well-known boats there
was a stranger with tawny sails and a bulky hull larger than the rest.
What boat was that? Pricked by a boy’s curiosity, Michel forgot his
grief. If he raced back by way of the beach he might reach the wharf
almost as soon as the boats reached it.
Slipping and crashing down the hillside, he came to the beach and
thudded over the sands in his wooden shoes. When he reached Paimpol the
boats were already moored. A crowd had gathered, and Michel could see
confusedly that sailors were carrying someone on a stretcher from the
strange boat.
A cheer went up from the crowd. Michel, dodging under elbows, squirmed
his way nimbly to the inner circle. He could see a form wrapped in
blankets on the stretcher, around which the men were pressing eagerly.
‘Is it a rescue?’ he asked, for such things often happened.
‘Hello, old pal!’ cried a familiar voice, and Michel stood speechless.
The darkness seemed to fall from him, and the world to become real
again, all his broken courage coming back to him.
‘Hello, Uncle Ives!’ he cried, his voice high with excitement. ‘I
didn’t believe you were dead.’ And then all at once he knew how
terribly afraid he had been. ‘But Grandmother did,’ he continued. His
chin quivered, and great tears fell on the wharf.
‘Look here, Michel,’ said Uncle Ives softly, ‘you cut ahead and tell
her there’s nothing the matter with me but a broken leg.’
And so Michel was the swift forerunner of the triumphant procession
that wound from the landing to the Karadoc cottage.
No one heard a word of Uncle Ives’s story that night. Grandmother
sent them all to bed earlier than usual, and closed the door on eager
neighbors. But the next day in the sunny garden, where bees bobbed
in and out of the honeysuckle, they heard of the dark night when the
Jeanot had gone down in a crash of wind and foam, and of the miracle
by which Uncle Ives, clinging to an empty salt keg, had been drawn
away from the rocks by the ebbing tide. He had been unconscious when
a fishing boat had picked him up the next day, and one leg was broken
from a blow of which he knew nothing. The fishing boat was bound to
Honfleur on the French Coast, but had changed its course to bring the
wounded man home. The dear ship Jeanot was mourned with many tears.
Devoutly Michel and Josef carved a model of her, and rigged it. They
took it to the little gray church by the sea, where, with innumerable
others, it hangs in the dim shadows of the roof, a thank-offering for
the safe return of Uncle Ives.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.