II

Citizen Peyrol stayed at the inn-yard gate till the night had swallowed

up all those features of the land to which his eyes had clung as long as

the last gleams of daylight. And even after the last gleams had gone he

had remained for some time staring into the darkness, in which all he

could distinguish was the white road at his feet and the black heads of

pines where the cart track dipped towards the coast. He did not go

indoors till some carters who had been refreshing themselves had

departed with their big two-wheeled carts, piled up high with empty

wine-casks, in the direction of Fréjus. The fact that they did not

remain for the night pleased Peyrol. He ate his bit of supper alone, in

silence, and with a gravity which intimidated the old woman who had

aroused in him the memory of his mother. Having finished his pipe and

obtained a bit of candle in a tin candlestick, Citizen Peyrol went

heavily upstairs to rejoin his luggage. The crazy staircase shook and

groaned under his feet as though he had been carrying a burden. The

first thing he did was to close the shutters most carefully as though he

had been afraid of a breath of night air. Next he bolted the door of the

room. Then sitting on the floor, with the candlestick standing before

him between his widely straggled legs, he began to undress, flinging off

his coat and dragging his shirt hastily over his head. The secret of

his heavy movements was disclosed then in the fact that he had been

wearing next his bare skin--like a pious penitent his hair-shirt--a sort

of waistcoat made of two thicknesses of old sail-cloth and stitched all

over in the manner of a quilt with tarred twine. Three horn buttons

closed it in front. He undid them, and after he had slipped off the two

shoulder-straps which prevented this strange garment from sagging down

on his hips he started rolling it up. Notwithstanding all his care there

were during this operation several faint chinks of some metal which

could not have been lead.

His bare torso thrown backwards and sustained by his rigid big arms

heavily tattooed on the white skin above the elbows, Peyrol drew a long

breath into his broad chest with a pepper and salt pelt down the

breastbone. And not only was the breast of Citizen Peyrol relieved to

the fullest of its athletic capacity, but a change had also come over

his large physiognomy on which the expression of severe stolidity had

been simply the result of physical discomfort. It isn’t a trifle to have

to carry girt about your ribs and hung from your shoulders a mass of

mixed foreign coins equal to sixty or seventy thousand francs in hard

cash; while as to the paper money of the Republic, Peyrol had had

already enough experience of it to estimate the equivalent in cartloads.

A thousand of them. Perhaps two thousand. Enough in any case to justify

his flight of fancy, while looking at the countryside in the light of

the sunset, that what he had on him would buy all that soil from which

he had sprung: houses, woods, vines, olives, vegetable gardens, rocks

and salt lagoons--in fact, the whole landscape, including the animals

in it. But Peyrol did not care for the land at all. He did not want to

own any part of the solid earth for which he had no love. All he wanted

from it was a quiet nook, an obscure corner out of men’s sight where he

could dig a hole unobserved.

That would have to be done pretty soon, he thought. One could not live

for an indefinite number of days with a treasure strapped round one’s

chest. Meantime, an utter stranger in his native country the landing on

which was perhaps the biggest adventure in his adventurous life, he

threw his jacket over the rolled-up waistcoat and laid his head down on

it after extinguishing the candle. The night was warm. The floor of the

room happened to be of planks, not of tiles. He was no stranger to that

sort of couch. With his cudgel laid ready at his hand Peyrol slept

soundly till the noises and the voices about the house and on the road

woke him up shortly after sunrise. He threw open the shutter, welcoming

the morning light and the morning breeze in the full enjoyment of

idleness which, to a seaman of his kind, is inseparable from the fact of

being on shore. There was nothing to trouble his thoughts; and though

his physiognomy was far from being vacant, it did not wear the aspect of

profound meditation.

It had been by the merest accident that he had discovered during the

passage, in a secret recess within one of the lockers of his prize, two

bags of mixed coins: gold mohurs, Dutch ducats, Spanish pieces, English

guineas. After making that discovery he had suffered from no doubts

whatever. Loot, big or little, was a natural fact of his freebooter’s

life. And now when by the force of things he had become a master-gunner

of the Navy he was not going to give up his find to confounded landsmen,

mere sharks, hungry quill-drivers, who would put it in their own

pockets. As to imparting the intelligence to his crew (all bad

characters), he was much too wise to do anything of the kind. They would

not have been above cutting his throat. An old fighting sea-dog, a

Brother of the Coast, had more right to such plunder than anybody on

earth. So at odd times, while at sea, he had busied himself within the

privacy of his cabin in constructing the ingenious canvas waistcoat in

which he could take his treasure ashore secretly. It was bulky, but his

garments were of an ample cut, and no wretched customs-guard would dare

to lay hands on a successful prize-master going to the Port Admiral’s

offices to make his report. The scheme had worked perfectly. He found,

however, that this secret garment, which was worth precisely its weight

in gold, tried his endurance more than he had expected. It wearied his

body and even depressed his spirits somewhat. It made him less active

and also less communicative. It reminded him all the time that he must

not get into trouble of any sort--keep clear of rows, of intimacies, of

promiscuous jollities. This was one of the reasons why he had been

anxious to get away from the town. Once, however, his head was laid on

his treasure he could sleep the sleep of the just.

Nevertheless in the morning he shrank from putting it on again. With a

mixture of sailor’s carelessness and of old-standing belief in his own

luck he simply stuffed the precious waistcoat up the flue of the empty

fireplace. Then he dressed and had his breakfast. An hour later,

mounted on a hired mule, he started down the track as calmly as though

setting out to explore the mysteries of a desert island.

His aim was the end of the peninsula which, advancing like a colossal

jetty into the sea, divides the picturesque roadstead of Hyères from the

headlands and curves of the coast forming the approaches of the Port of

Toulon. The path along which the sure-footed mule took him (for Peyrol,

once he had put its head the right way, made no attempt at steering)

descended rapidly to a plain of arid aspect, with the white gleams of

the Salins in the distance, bounded by bluish hills of no great

elevation. Soon all traces of human habitations disappeared from before

his roaming eyes. This part of his native country was more foreign to

him than the shores of the Mozambique Channel, the coral strands of

India, the forests of Madagascar. Before long he found himself on the

neck of the Giens peninsula, impregnated with salt and containing a blue

lagoon, particularly blue, darker and even more still than the expanses

of the sea to the right and left of it, from which it was separated by

narrow strips of land not a hundred yards wide in places. The track ran

indistinct, presenting no wheel-ruts, and with patches of efflorescent

salt as white as snow between the tufts of wiry grass and the

particularly dead-looking bushes. The whole neck of land was so low that

it seemed to have no more thickness than a sheet of paper laid on the

sea. Citizen Peyrol saw on the level of his eye, as if from a mere raft,

sails of various craft, some white and some brown, while before him his

native island of Porquerolles rose dull and solid beyond a wide strip of

water. The mule, which knew rather better than Citizen Peyrol where it

was going to, took him presently amongst the gentle rises at the end of

the peninsula. The slopes were covered with scanty grass; crooked

boundary walls of dry stones ran across the fields, and above them, here

and there, peeped a low roof of red tiles shaded by the heads of

delicate acacias. At a turn of the ravine appeared a village with its

few houses, mostly with their blind walls to the path, and, at first, no

living soul in sight. Three tall platanes, very ragged as to their bark

and very poor as to foliage, stood in a group in an open space; and

Citizen Peyrol was cheered up by the sight of a dog sleeping in the

shade. The mule swerved with great determination towards a massive stone

trough under the village fountain. Peyrol, looking round from the saddle

while the mule drank, could see no signs of an inn. Then, examining the

ground nearer to him, he perceived a ragged man sitting on a stone. He

had a broad leathern belt and his legs were bare to the knee. He was

contemplating the stranger on the mule with stony surprise. His dark

nut-brown face contrasted strongly with his grey shock of hair. At a

sign from Peyrol he showed no reluctance and approached him readily

without changing the stony character of his stare.

The thought that if he had remained at home he would have probably

looked like that man crossed unbidden the mind of Peyrol. With that

gravity from which he seldom departed he inquired if there were any

inhabitants besides himself in the village. Then, to Peyrol’s surprise,

that destitute idler smiled pleasantly and said that the people were out

looking after their bits of land.

There was enough of the peasant-born in Peyrol, still, to remark that he

had seen no man, woman, or child, or four-footed beast for hours, and

that he would hardly have thought that there was any land worth looking

after anywhere around. But the other insisted. Well, they were working

on it all the same, at least those that had any.

At the sound of the voices the dog got up with a strange air of being

all backbone, and, approaching in dismal fidelity, stood with his nose

close to his master’s calves.

“And you,” said Peyrol, “you have no land then?” The man took his time

to answer. “I have a boat.”

Peyrol became interested when the man explained that his boat was on the

salt pond, the large, deserted and opaque sheet of water lying dead

between the two great bays of the living sea. Peyrol wondered aloud why

anyone should want a boat on it.

“There is fish there,” said the man.

“And is the boat all your worldly goods?” asked Peyrol.

The flies buzzed, the mule hung its head, moving its ears and flapping

its thin tail languidly.

“I have a sort of hut down by the lagoon and a net or two,” the man

confessed, as it were. Peyrol, looking down, completed the list by

saying: “And this dog.”

The man again took his time to say:

“He is company.”

Peyrol sat as serious as a judge. “You haven’t much to make a living

of,” he delivered himself at last. “However!... Is there no inn, café,

or some place where one could put up for a day? I have heard up inland

that there was some such place.”

“I will show it to you,” said the man, who then went back to where he

had been sitting and picked up a large empty basket before he led the

way. His dog followed with his head and tail low, and then came Peyrol

dangling his heels against the sides of the intelligent mule, which

seemed to know beforehand all that was going to happen. At the corner

where the houses ended there stood an old wooden cross stuck into a

square block of stone. The lonely boatman of the Lagoon of Pesquiers

pointed in the direction of a branching path where the rises terminating

the peninsula sank into a shallow pass. There were leaning pines on the

skyline, and in the pass itself dull silvery green patches of olive

orchards below a long yellow wall backed by dark cypresses, and the red

roofs of buildings which seemed to belong to a farm.

“Will they lodge me there?” asked Peyrol.

“I don’t know. They will have plenty of room, that’s certain. There are

no travellers here. But as for a place of refreshment, it used to be

that. You have only got to walk in. If he isn’t there, the mistress is

sure to be there to serve you. She belongs to the place. She was born on

it. We know all about her.”

“What sort of woman is she?” asked Citizen Peyrol, who was very

favourably impressed by the aspect of the place.

“Well, you are going there. You shall soon see. She is young.”

“And the husband?” asked Peyrol, who, looking down into the other’s

steady upward stare, detected a flicker in the brown, slightly faded

eyes. “Why are you staring at me like this? I haven’t got a black skin,

have I?”

The other smiled, showing in the thick pepper and salt growth on his

face as sound a set of teeth as Citizen Peyrol himself. There was in his

bearing something embarrassed, but not unfriendly, and he uttered a

phrase from which Peyrol discovered that the man before him, the lonely

hirsute, sunburnt and barelegged human being at his stirrup, nourished

patriotic suspicions as to his character. And this seemed to him

outrageous. He wanted to know in a severe voice whether he looked like a

confounded landsman of any kind. He swore also without, however, losing

any of the dignity of expression inherent in his type of features and in

the very modelling of his flesh.

“For an aristocrat you don’t look like one, but neither do you look like

a farmer or a pedlar or a patriot. You don’t look like anything that has

been seen here for years and years and years. You look like one, I dare

hardly say what. You might be a priest.”

Astonishment kept Peyrol perfectly quiet on his mule. “Do I dream?” he

asked himself mentally. “You aren’t mad?” he asked aloud. “Do you know

what you are talking about? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

“All the same,” persisted the other innocently, “it is much less than

ten years ago since I saw one of them of the sort they call Bishops, who

had a face exactly like yours.”

Instinctively Peyrol passed his hand over his face. What could there be

in it? Peyrol could not remember ever having seen a Bishop in his life.

The fellow stuck to his point, for he puckered his brow and murmured:

“Others too.... I remember perfectly.... It isn’t so many years ago.

Some of them skulk amongst the villages yet, for all the chasing they

got from the patriots.”

The sun blazed on the boulders and stones and bushes in the perfect

stillness of the air. The mule, disregarding with republican austerity

the neighbourhood of a stable within less than a hundred and twenty

yards, dropped its head, and even its ears, and dozed as if in the

middle of a desert. The dog, apparently changed into stone at his

master’s heel, seemed to be dozing too with his nose near the ground.

Peyrol had fallen into a deep meditation, and the boatman of the lagoon

awaited the solution of his doubts without eagerness and with something

like a grin within his thick beard. Peyrol’s face cleared. He had solved

the problem, but there was a shade of vexation in his tone.

“Well, it can’t be helped,” he said. “I learned to shave from the

English. I suppose that’s what’s the matter.”

At the name of the English the boatman pricked up his ears.

“One can’t tell where they are all gone to,” he murmured. “Only three

years ago they swarmed about this coast in their big ships. You saw

nothing but them, and they were fighting all round Toulon on land. Then

in a week or two, crac!--nobody! Cleared out devil knows where. But

perhaps you would know.”

“Oh, yes,” said Peyrol, “I know all about the English, don’t you worry

your head.”

“I am not troubling my head. It is for you to think about what’s best to

say when you speak with him up there. I mean the master of the farm.”

“He can’t be a better patriot than I am, for all my shaven face,” said

Peyrol. “That would only seem strange to a savage like you.”

With an unexpected sigh the man sat down at the foot of the cross, and,

immediately, his dog went off a little way and curled himself up amongst

the tufts of grass.

“We are all savages here,” said the forlorn fisherman from the lagoon.

“But the master up there is a real patriot from the town. If you were

ever to go to Toulon and ask people about him they would tell you. He

first became busy purveying the guillotine when they were purifying the

town from all aristocrats. That was even before the English came in.

After the English got driven out there was more of that work than the

guillotine could do. They had to kill traitors in the streets, in

cellars, in their beds. The corpses of men and women were lying in heaps

along the quays. There were a good many of his sort that got the name of

drinkers of blood. Well, he was one of the best of them. I am only just

telling you.”

Peyrol nodded. “That will do me all right,” he said. And before he could

pick up the reins and hit it with his heels the mule, as though it had

just waited for his words, started off along the path.

In less than five minutes Peyrol was dismounting in front of a low, long

addition to a tall farmhouse with very few windows, and flanked by walls

of stones enclosing not only the yard but apparently a field or two

also. A gateway stood open to the left, but Peyrol dismounted at the

door, through which he entered a bare room, with rough whitewashed walls

and a few wooden chairs and tables, which might have been a rustic café.

He tapped with his knuckles on the table. A young woman with a fichu

round her neck and a striped white and red skirt, with black hair and a

red mouth, appeared in an inner doorway.

“Bonjour, citoyenne,” said Peyrol. She was so startled by the unusual

aspect of this stranger that she answered him only by a murmured

“Bonjour,” but in a moment she came forward and waited expectantly. The

perfect oval of her face, the colour of her smooth cheeks, and the

whiteness of her throat forced from the Citizen Peyrol a slight hiss

through his clenched teeth.

“I am thirsty, of course,” he said, “but what I really want is to know

whether I can stay here.”

The sound of a mule’s hoofs outside caused Peyrol to start, but the

woman arrested him.

“She is only going to the shed. She knows the way. As to what you said,

the master will be here directly. Nobody ever comes here. And how long

would you want to stay?”

The old rover of the seas looked at her searchingly.

“To tell you the truth, citoyenne, it may be in a manner of speaking for

ever.”

She smiled in a bright flash of teeth, without gaiety or any change in

her restless eyes that roamed about the empty room as though Peyrol had

come in attended by a mob of shades.

“It’s like me,” she said. “I lived as a child here.”

“You are but little more than that now,” said Peyrol, examining her with

a feeling that was no longer surprise or curiosity, but seemed to be

lodged in his very breast.

“Are you a patriot?” she asked, still surveying the invisible company in

the room.

Peyrol, who had thought that he had “done with all that damned

nonsense,” felt angry and also at a loss for an answer.

“I am a Frenchman,” he said bluntly.

“Arlette!” called out an aged woman’s voice through the open inner door.

“What do you want?” she answered readily.

“There’s a saddled mule come into the yard.”

“All right. The man is here.” Her eyes, which had steadied, began to

wander again all round and about the motionless Peyrol. She moved a step

nearer to him and asked in a low confidential tone: “Have you ever

carried a woman’s head on a pike?”

Peyrol, who had seen fights, massacres on land and sea, towns taken by

assault by savage warriors, who had killed men in attack and defence,

found himself at first bereft of speech by this simple question, and

next moved to speak bitterly.

“No. I have heard men boast of having done so. They were mostly

braggarts with craven hearts. But what is all this to you?”

She was not listening to him, the edge of her white even teeth pressing

her lower lip, her eyes never at rest. Peyrol remembered suddenly the

sans-culotte--the blood-drinker. Her husband. Was it possible?... Well,

perhaps it was possible. He could not tell. He felt his utter

incompetence. As to catching her glance, you might just as well have

tried to catch a wild sea-bird with your hands. And altogether she was

like a sea-bird--not to be grasped. But Peyrol knew how to be patient,

with that patience that is so often a form of courage. He was known for

it. It had served him well in dangerous situations. Once it had

positively saved his life. Nothing but patience. He could well wait now.

He waited. And suddenly as if tamed by his patience this strange

creature dropped her eyelids, advanced quite close to him and began to

finger the lapel of his coat--something that a child might have done.

Peyrol all but gasped with surprise, but he remained perfectly still. He

was disposed to hold his breath. He was touched by a soft indefinite

emotion, and as her eyelids remained lowered till her black lashes

seemed to lie like a shadow on her pale cheek, there was no need for him

to force a smile. After the first moment he was not even surprised. It

was merely the sudden movement, not the nature of the act itself, that

had startled him.

“Yes. You may stay. I think we shall be friends. I’ll tell you about the

Revolution.”

At these words Peyrol, the man of violent deeds, felt something like a

chill breath at the back of his head.

“What’s the good of that?” he said.

“It must be,” she said and backed away from him swiftly, and without

raising her eyes turned round and was gone in a moment, so lightly that

one would have thought her feet had not touched the ground. Peyrol,

staring at the open kitchen door, saw after a moment an elderly woman’s

head, with brown thin cheeks and tied up in a coloured handkerchief,

peeping at him fearfully.

“A bottle of wine, please,” he shouted at it.