Six o'clock on the following morning. A dark mass having the form of a
man in the gutter--by the side of a kind of deserted street overhung by
ramparts. It is still dark. The rain still falls, fine and cold; and the
winter wind continues to roar. It had "watched," as they say in the
navy, and passed the night in groaning.
It was in the lower part of the town, a little below the bridge of
Brest, at the foot of the great walls, in that locality where sailors
commonly find themselves, who are without a home and who have had the
vague intention, blind drunk as they were, of returning to their ship
and have fallen en route.
There is already a kind of half light in the air; a wan, pallid light,
the light of a winter's day rising on granite. Water was streaming over
this human form which lay on the ground, and, right at its side, poured
in a cascade into the opening of a drain.
It began to get a little brighter; a sort of light made up its mind to
descend along the high granite walls. The dark thing in the gutter was
now clearly seen to be the body of a tall man, a sailor, lying with arms
outstretched in the form of a cross.
A first passer-by made a sound of wooden sabots on the hard pavé, as of
someone staggering. Then another, then many. They followed all the same
direction in a lower street which led to the gate of the naval dockyard.
Soon this tapping of sabots became a thing extraordinary; a fatiguing,
continuous noise, hammering the silence like a nightmare music.
Hundreds and hundreds of sabots, tramping before daylight, coming from
everywhere, and passing along the street below; a kind of early morning
procession of evil import: it was the workers returning to the dockyard,
still staggering from having drank so much the night before, the gait
unsteady, the eyes lustreless.
And there were women also, ugly, pale, and wet, who went to right and
left as if seeking someone: in the half light they peered into the faces
of the men--waiting and watching there, to see if the husband, or the
son, had at last come out of the taverns, if he was going to do his
day's work.
The man lying in the gutter was also examined by them; two or three bent
over him so that they might better distinguish his face. They saw
features youthful but weatherbeaten, and set now in a corpse-like
fixity, the lips contracted, the teeth clenched. No, they did not know
him. And in any case he was not a workman, this man; he wore the large
blue collar of a sailor.
One of them, nevertheless, who had a son a sailor, tried, out of
kindness of heart, to drag him from the water. He was too heavy.
"What a big corpse!" she said as she let his arms drop.
This body on which had fallen all the rain of the night was Yves.
A little later, when it was full daylight, his comrades, who were
passing, recognized him and carried him away.
They laid him, all soaked with the water of the gutter, at the bottom of
the cutter, itself wet from the spray of the sea, and quickly they put
off with canvas spread.
The sea was rough; there was a head wind. They beat to windward for a
long time, and were hard put to it to reach their ship.