"You must forgive me; you can see that I am not myself."
When once Yves had said that, the storm was finally over; but it was
often a long time before he said it. When the fit of drunkenness had
passed, for two or three days, he would remain gloomy, depressed,
without speaking; until suddenly, at some quite negligible thing, his
smile would appear once more with an expression of childlike
embarrassment. Then the clouds would break for poor Marie and she would
smile too, a smile of her own, without ever uttering a word of reproach;
and that was the end of the ordeal.
Once she dared very softly to ask him:
"But what is the need for sulking for three days, when it is over."
And he, more softly still, with a naïve half-smile, looking at her
sideways, in obvious embarrassment: "What is the need for sulking for
three days, do you say? Why, Marie, do you think I am pleased with
myself when I have these bouts. . . . Oh! but it's not against you, my
poor Marie, I assure you." Then she came very close to him and leaned
against his shoulder, and he, answering her silent appeal, kissed her.
"Oh! drink! drink!" he said slowly, averting his half-closed eyes with a
savage expression. "My father! my brothers! Now it's my turn!"
He had never said anything like this before. He had never alluded to the
terrible vice which possessed him, nor given any sign that he realized
its consequences.
How was it possible not to have still brief moments of hope seeing him
afterwards so sensible, so dutiful, playing at the fireside with his
son; dropping then all his domineering ways, alert with a thousand
kindly thoughts for his wife, in his effort to make her forget her
suffering?
And how believe that this same Yves would presently and fatally become
once more that _other_, the Yves of the bad days, the Yves of the vacant
gaze, the Yves depressed and brutal, the beast bewildered by alcohol,
whom nothing could move? Then Marie surrounded him with tenderness,
concentrated on him all the force of her will, watched over him as over
a child, trembling as she followed him with her eyes whenever he so much
as descended into the street where his blue-collared comrades passed and
where the taverns opened their doors.
On shore Yves was lost; he knew it well himself, and used to say sadly
that he would have to try to get to sea again.
He had grown up on the sea, at random, as wild plants grow. It had been
nobody's business to give him notions of duty or conduct, nor of
anything in the world. I alone perhaps, whom fate and his mother's
prayer had put in his way, had been able to speak to him of these new
things, but too late no doubt, and too vaguely. The discipline of the
ship, that was the great and only curb which had directed his material
life, maintaining it in that rude and healthy austerity which makes
sailors strong.
The _shore_ had for long been for him but a place of passage, where for
a time he was free from restraint and where there were women; he
descended on it as on a conquered country, between long voyages; and he
came well supplied with money and found, in the quarters of pleasure,
everything compliant to his whim and will.
But to live a regular life in a little household, to reckon up each
day's expenses, to behave himself and have thought for the morrow, his
sailor's ways could no longer adapt themselves to these unexpected
obligations. Besides, around him, in this corrupt, degenerate Brest,
alcohol seemed to ooze from the walls with the unwholesome damp. And he
sank to the depths like so many others, who also once had been good and
brave; he became debased, slipping down little by little to the level of
this population of drunkards; and his excesses became repulsive and
vulgar like those of a workman.