BREST, 9_th July_, 1881.
We reach port at last, however, and this is my last day of duty on
board. I disembark to-morrow.
We are in the heart of the Brest docks, where the _Sèvre_ comes from
time to time to rest between two high walls. High gloomy-looking
buildings overlook us; around us courses of native rock support the
ramparts, a roundway, a whole heavy pile of granite, oozing sadness and
humidity. I know all these things by heart.
And as we are now in July there are foxgloves, and tufts of silenes
clinging here and there to the grey stones. These red plants growing on
the walls strike a note of summer in this sunless Brest.
I have a kind of pleasure, nevertheless, in going away. This Brittany
always causes me, in spite of everything, a melancholy sense of
oppression; I feel it now, and when I think of the novelty and the
unknown which await me, it seems to me that I am about to awaken with
the passing of a kind of night. . . . Whither shall I be sent? Who
knows? In what particular corner of the earth shall I have to
acclimatize myself to-morrow? No doubt in some country of the sun where
I shall become another person altogether, with different senses, and
where I shall forget, alas! the beloved things I am now about to leave
behind me.
But my poor Yves and my little Pierre, I shall not part from either of
them without a pang.
Poor Yves, who has so often himself had to be treated like a spoilt and
capricious child, it is he now, at the hour of my departure, who
surrounds me with a thousand kind attentions, almost childlike, at a
loss to know what he can do to show sufficiently his affection. And this
attitude in him has the greater charm, because it is not in his ordinary
nature.
The time we have just passed together, in a daily fraternal intimacy,
has not been without its storms. He still deserved in some degree,
unfortunately, the epithets "undisciplined, uncontrollable," inscribed
long ago in his sailor's pay-book; but he had improved very much, and,
if I had been able to keep him near me, I should have saved him.
After dinner we came up on deck for our usual evening promenade.
I say for a last time:
"Yves, make me a cigarette."
And we begin our regular little walk up and down the wooden deck of the
_Sèvre._ We know by heart all the little hollows where the water
collects, all the angle blocks in which one's feet may be caught, all
the rings over which one may stumble.
The sky is overcast for our last walk together, the moon hidden, and the
air damp. In the distance, from the direction of Recouvrance, come as
usual the eternal songs of the sailors.
We speak of many things. I give Yves much advice, and he, very
submissive, makes many promises; and it is very late when he leaves me
to seek his hammock.
At noon on the following day, my trunks scarcely packed and many visits
unpaid, I am at the station with Yves and my friends of the wardroom who
have come to see me off. I shake hands with them all, I think even that
I embrace them, and then I depart.
A little before dark I reach Toulven, where I propose to stop for a
couple of hours to make my adieux.
How green it is and decked with flowers, this Toulven, this fresh and
shady region, the most delightful in Brittany!
There I find them waiting for me to cut little Pierre's hair. The idea
that anyone would entrust me with such a task had never occurred to me.
They told me "that I was the only one who could keep him quiet." The
previous week, they had brought in the barber from Toulven, and little
Pierre had made such a fuss that the first thing the scissors did was to
cut his little ears; and it had been necessary to abandon the project. I
made the attempt, however, in order to please them, hard put to it not
to laugh.
Then when I had done, the notion came to me to keep one of the little
brown curls which I had cut off, and I took it away with me, surprised
that I should set so much store by it.