I
After entering at break of day the inner roadstead of the Port of
Toulon, exchanging several loud hails with one of the guardboats of the
Fleet, which directed him where he was to take up his berth,
Master-Gunner Peyrol let go the anchor of the sea-worn and battered ship
in his charge, between the arsenal and the town, in full view of the
principal quay. The course of his life, which in the opinion of any
ordinary person might have been regarded as full of marvellous incidents
(only he himself had never marvelled at them) had rendered him
undemonstrative to such a degree, that he did not even let out a sigh of
relief at the rumble of the chain. And yet it ended a most anxious six
months of knocking about at sea with valuable merchandize in a damaged
hull, most of the time on short rations, always on the lookout for
English cruisers, once or twice on the verge of shipwreck and more than
once on the verge of capture. But as to that, old Peyrol had made up his
mind from the first to blow up his valuable charge--unemotionally, for
such was his character, formed under the sun of the Indian seas in
lawless contests with his kind for a little loot that vanished as soon
as grasped, but mainly for bare life almost as precarious to hold
through its ups and downs, and which now had lasted for fifty-eight
years.
While his crew of half-starved scarecrows, hard as nails and ravenous as
so many wolves for the delights of the shore, swarmed aloft to furl the
sails nearly as thin and as patched as the grimy shirts on their backs,
Peyrol took a survey of the quay. Groups were forming along its whole
stretch to gaze at the new arrival. Peyrol noted particularly a good
many men in red caps and said to himself: “Here they are.” Amongst the
crews of ships that had brought the tricolour into the seas of the East,
there were hundreds professing sans-culotte principles; boastful and
declamatory beggars he had thought them. But now he was beholding the
shore breed. Those who had made the Revolution safe. The real thing.
Peyrol after taking a good long look, went below into his cabin to make
himself ready to go ashore.
He shaved his big cheeks with a real English razor, looted years ago
from an officer’s cabin in an English East Indiaman, captured by a ship
he was serving in then. He put on a white shirt, a short blue jacket
with metal buttons and a high roll-collar, a pair of white trousers
which he fastened with a red bandana handkerchief, by way of a belt.
With a black, shiny low-crowned hat on his head he made a very
creditable prize-master. He beckoned from the poop to a boatman and got
himself rowed to the quay.
By that time the crowd had grown to a large size. Peyrol’s eyes ranged
over it with no great apparent interest, though it was a fact that he
had never in all his man’s life seen so many idle white people massed
together to stare at a sailor. He had been a rover of the outer seas;
he had grown into a stranger to his native country. During the few
minutes it took the boatman to row him to the steps, he felt like a
navigator about to land on a newly discovered shore.
On putting his foot on it he was mobbed. The arrival of a prize made by
a squadron of the Republic in distant seas was not an everyday
occurrence in Toulon. The wildest rumours had been already set flying.
Peyrol elbowed himself through the crowd somehow, but it continued to
move after him. A voice cried out, “Where do you come from, citoyen?”
“From the other side of the world,” Peyrol boomed out.
He did not get rid of his followers till the door of the Port Office.
There he reported himself to the proper officials as master of a prize
taken off the Cape by Citoyen Renaud, Commander-in-Chief of the
Republican Squadron in the Indian Seas. He had been ordered to make for
Dunkerque but, said he, having been chased by the sacrés Anglais three
times in a fortnight between Cape Verde and Cape Spartel, he had made up
his mind to run into the Mediterranean where, he had understood from a
Danish brig he had met at sea, there were no English men-of-war just
then. And here he was; and there were his ship’s papers and his own
papers and everything in order. He mentioned also that he was tired of
rolling about the seas, and that he longed for a period of repose on
shore. But till all the legal business was settled he remained in Toulon
roaming about the streets at a deliberate gait, enjoying general
consideration as Citizen Peyrol, and looking everybody coldly in the
eye.
His reticence about his past was of that kind which starts a lot of
mysterious stories about a man. No doubt the maritime authorities of
Toulon had a less cloudy idea of Peyrol’s past, though it need not
necessarily have been more exact. In the various offices connected with
the sea where his duties took him, the wretched scribes, and even some
of the chiefs, looked very hard at him as he went in and out, dressed
very neatly, and always with his cudgel, which he used to leave outside
the door of private offices when called in for an interview with one or
another of the “gold-laced lot.” Having, however, cut off his queue and
got in touch with some prominent patriots of the Jacobin type, Peyrol
cared little for people’s stares and whispers. The person that came
nearest to trying his composure, was a certain naval captain with a
patch over one eye and a very threadbare uniform coat, who was doing
some administrative work at the Port Office. That officer, looking up
from some papers, remarked brusquely, “As a matter of fact you have been
the best part of your life skimming the seas, if the truth were known.
You must have been a deserter from the Navy at one time, whatever you
may call yourself now.”
There was not a quiver on the large cheeks of the gunner Peyrol.
“If there was anything of the sort it was in the time of kings and
aristocrats,” he said steadily. “And now I have brought in a prize, and
a service letter from Citizen Renaud, commanding in the Indian seas. I
can also give you the names of good Republicans in this town who know my
sentiments. Nobody can say I was ever anti-revolutionary in my life. I
knocked about the Eastern seas for forty-five years--that’s true. But
let me observe that it was the seamen who stayed at home that let the
English into the Port of Toulon.” He paused for a moment and then added,
“When one thinks of that, Citoyen Commandant, any little slips I and
fellows of my kind may have made five thousand leagues from here and
twenty years ago cannot have much importance in these times of equality
and fraternity.”
“As to fraternity,” remarked the post-captain in the shabby coat, “the
only one you are familiar with is the brotherhood of the coast, I should
say.”
“Everybody in the Indian Ocean except milksops and youngsters had to
be,” said the untroubled Citizen Peyrol. “And we practised republican
principles long before a republic was thought of; for the Brothers of
the Coast were all equal and elected their own chiefs.”
“They were an abominable lot of lawless ruffians,” remarked the officer
venomously, leaning back in his chair. “You will not dare to deny that.”
Citizen Peyrol refused to take up a defensive attitude. He merely
mentioned in a neutral tone that he had delivered his trust to the Port
Office all right, and as to his character he had a certificate of civism
from his section. He was a patriot and entitled to his discharge. After
being dismissed by a nod he took up his cudgel outside the door and
walked out of the building with the calmness of rectitude. His large
face of the Roman type betrayed nothing to the wretched quill-drivers,
who whispered on his passage. As he went along the streets, he looked as
usual everybody in the eye; but that very same evening he vanished from
Toulon. It wasn’t that he was afraid of anything. His mind was as calm
as the natural set of his florid face. Nobody could know what his forty
years or more of sea life had been, unless he told them himself. And of
that he didn’t mean to tell more than what he had told the inquisitive
captain with the patch over one eye. But he didn’t want any bother for
certain other reasons; and more than anything else he didn’t want to be
sent perhaps to serve in the fleet now fitting out in Toulon. So at dusk
he passed through the gate on the road to Fréjus in a high two-wheeled
cart belonging to a well-known farmer whose habitation lay that way. His
personal belongings were brought down and piled up on the tailboard of
the cart by some ragamuffin patriots whom he engaged in the street for
that purpose. The only indiscretion he committed was to pay them for
their trouble with a large handful of assignats. From such a prosperous
seaman, however, this generosity was not so very compromising. He
himself got into the cart over the wheel, with such slow and ponderous
movements, that the friendly farmer felt called upon to remark: “Ah, we
are not so young as we used to be--you and I.” “I have also an awkward
wound,” said Citizen Peyrol sitting down heavily.
And so from farmer’s cart to farmer’s cart, getting lifts all along,
jogging in a cloud of dust between stone walls and through little
villages well known to him from his boyhood’s days, in a landscape of
stony hills, pale rocks, and dusty green of olive trees, Citizen Peyrol
went on unmolested till he got down clumsily in the yard of an inn on
the outskirts of the town of Hyères. The sun was setting to his right.
Near a clump of dark pines with blood-red trunks in the sunset Peyrol
perceived a rutty track branching off in the direction of the sea.
At that spot Citizen Peyrol had made up his mind to leave the high road.
Every feature of the country with the darkly wooded rises, the barren
flat expanse of stones and sombre bushes to his left, appealed to him
with a sort of strange familiarity, because they had remained unchanged
since the days of his boyhood. The very cartwheel tracks scored deep
into the stony ground had kept their physiognomy; and far away, like a
blue thread, there was the sea of the Hyères roadstead with a lumpy
indigo swelling still beyond--which was the island of Porquerolles. He
had an idea that he had been born on Porquerolles, but he really did not
know. The notion of a father was absent from his mentality. What he
remembered of his parents was a tall, lean, brown woman in rags, who was
his mother. But then they were working together at a farm which was on
the mainland. He had fragmentary memories of her shaking down olives,
picking stones out of a field, or handling a manure fork like a man,
tireless and fierce, with wisps of greyish hair flying about her bony
face; and of himself running barefooted in connection with a flock of
turkeys, with hardly any clothes on his back. At night, by the farmer’s
favour, they were permitted to sleep in a sort of ruinous byre built of
stones and with only half a roof on it, lying side by side on some old
straw on the ground. And it was on a bundle of straw that his mother had
tossed ill for two days and had died in the night. In the darkness, her
silence, her cold face had given him an awful scare. He supposed they
had buried her but he didn’t know, because he had rushed out
terror-struck, and never stopped till he got as far as a little place by
the sea called Almanarre, where he hid himself on board a tartane that
was lying there with no one on board. He went into the hold because he
was afraid of some dogs on shore. He found down there a heap of empty
sacks, which made a luxurious couch, and being exhausted went to sleep
like a stone. Some time during the night the crew came on board and the
tartane sailed for Marseilles. That was another awful scare--being
hauled out by the scruff of the neck on the deck and being asked who the
devil he was and what he was doing there. Only from that one he could
not run away. There was water all around him and the whole world,
including the coast not very far away, wobbled in a most alarming
manner. Three bearded men stood about him and he tried to explain to
them that he had been working at Peyrol’s. Peyrol was the farmer’s name.
The boy didn’t know that he had one of his own. Moreover he didn’t know
very well how to talk to people, and they must have misunderstood him.
Thus the name of Peyrol stuck to him for life.
There the memories of his native country stopped, overlaid by other
memories, with a multitude of impressions of endless oceans, of the
Mozambique Channel, of Arabs and negroes, of Madagascar, of the coast of
India, of islands and channels and reefs; of fights at sea, rows on
shore, desperate slaughter and desperate thirst, of all sorts of ships
one after another: merchant ships and frigates and privateers; of
reckless men and enormous sprees. In the course of years he had learned
to speak intelligibly and think connectedly, and even to read and write
after a fashion. The name of the farmer Peyrol attached to his person on
account of his inability to give a clear account of himself acquired a
sort of reputation, both openly, in the ports of the East and, secretly,
amongst the Brothers of the Coast, that strange fraternity with
something masonic and not a little piratical in its constitution. Round
the Cape of Storms, which is also the Cape of Good Hope, the words
Republic, Nation, Tyranny, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and the
cult of the Supreme Being came floating on board ships from home: new
cries and new ideas which did not upset the slowly developed
intelligence of the gunner Peyrol. They seemed the invention of
landsmen, of whom the seaman Peyrol knew very little--nothing, so to
speak. Now after nearly fifty years of lawful and lawless sea-life
Citizen Peyrol, at the yard gate of the roadside inn, looked at the late
scene of his childhood. He looked at it without any animosity but a
little puzzled as to his bearings amongst the features of the land.
“Yes, it must be somewhere in that direction,” he thought vaguely.
Decidedly he would go no further along the high road.... A few yards
away the woman of the inn stood looking at him, impressed by the good
clothes, the great shaven cheeks, the well-to-do air of that seaman; and
suddenly Peyrol noticed her. With her anxious brown face, her grey
locks, and her rustic appearance she might have been his mother, as he
remembered her, only she wasn’t in rags.
“Hé! la mère,” hailed Peyrol. “Have you got a man to lend a hand with my
chest into the house?”
He looked so prosperous and so authoritative that she piped without
hesitation in a thin voice, “Mais oui, citoyen. He will be here in a
moment.”
In the dusk the clump of pines across the road looked very black against
the quiet clear sky; and Citizen Peyrol gazed at the scene of his young
misery with the greatest possible placidity. Here he was after nearly
fifty years, and to look at things it seemed like yesterday. He felt for
all this neither love nor resentment. He felt a little funny as it were,
and the funniest thing was the thought which crossed his mind that he
could indulge his fancy (if he had a mind to it) to buy up all this land
to the furthermost field, away over there where the track lost itself
sinking into the flats bordering the sea where the small rise at the end
of the Giens peninsula had assumed the appearance of a black cloud.
“Tell me, my friend,” he said in his magisterial way to the farmhand
with a tousled head of hair who was awaiting his good pleasure, “doesn’t
this track lead to Almanarre?”
“Yes,” said the labourer, and Peyrol nodded. The man continued mouthing
his words slowly as if unused to speech. “To Almanarre and further too,
beyond the great pond right out to the end of the land, to Cape
Esterel.”
Peyrol was lending his big flat hairy ear. “If I had stayed in this
country,” he thought, “I would be talking like this fellow.” And aloud
he asked:
“Are there any houses there, at the end of the land?”
“Why, a hamlet, a hole, just a few houses round a church, and a farm
where at one time they would give you a glass of wine.”