A single cover having been laid at the end of a long table in the salle
for the lieutenant, he had his meal there while the others sat down to
theirs in the kitchen, the usual strangely assorted company served by
the anxious and silent Catherine. Peyrol, thoughtful and hungry, faced
Citizen Scevola in his working clothes and very much withdrawn within
himself. Scevola’s aspect was more feverish than usual, with the red
patches on his cheek-bones very marked above the thick beard. From time
to time the mistress of the farm would get up from her place by the side
of old Peyrol and go out into the salle to attend to the lieutenant. The
other three people seemed unconscious of her absences. Towards the end
of the meal Peyrol leaned back in his wooden chair and let his gaze rest
on the ex-terrorist who had not finished yet, and was still busy over
his plate with the air of a man who had done a long morning’s work. The
door leading from the kitchen to the salle stood wide open, but no sound
of voices ever came from there.
Till lately Peyrol had not concerned himself very much with the mental
states of the people with whom he lived. Now, however, he wondered to
himself what could be the thoughts of the ex-terrorist patriot, that
sanguinary and extremely poor creature occupying the position of master
of the Escampobar Farm. But when Citizen Scevola raised his head at
last to take a long drink of wine there was nothing new on that face
which in its high colour resembled so much a painted mask. Their eyes
met.
“Sacrebleu!” exclaimed Peyrol at last. “If you never say anything to
anybody like this you will forget how to speak at last.”
The patriot smiled from the depths of his beard, a smile which Peyrol
for some reason, mere prejudice perhaps, always thought resembled the
defensive grin of some small wild animal afraid of being cornered.
“What is there to talk about?” he retorted. “You live with us; you
haven’t budged from here; I suppose you have counted the bunches of
grapes in the enclosure and the figs on the fig-tree on the west wall
many times over....” He paused to lend an ear to the dead silence in the
salle, and then said with a slight rise of tone, “You and I know
everything that is going on here.”
Peyrol wrinkled the corners of his eyes in a keen, searching glance.
Catherine clearing the table bore herself as if she had been completely
deaf. Her face, of a walnut colour, with sunken cheeks and lips, might
have been a carving in the marvellous immobility of its fine wrinkles.
Her carriage was upright and her hands swift in their movements. Peyrol
said: “We don’t want to talk about the farm. Haven’t you heard any news
lately?”
The patriot shook his head violently. Of public news he had a horror.
Everything was lost. The country was ruled by perjurers and renegades.
All the patriotic virtues were dead. He struck the table with his fist
and then remained listening as though the blow could have roused an
echo in the silent house. Not the faintest sound came from anywhere.
Citizen Scevola sighed. It seemed to him that he was the only patriot
left, and even in his retirement his life was not safe.
“I know,” said Peyrol. “I saw the whole affair out of the window. You
can run like a hare, citizen.”
“Was I to allow myself to be sacrificed by those superstitious brutes?”
argued Citizen Scevola in a high-pitched voice and with genuine
indignation, which Peyrol watched coldly. He could hardly catch the
mutter of “Perhaps it would have been just as well if I had let those
reactionary dogs kill me that time.”
The old woman washing up at the sink glanced uneasily towards the door
of the salle.
“No!” shouted the lonely sans-culotte. “It isn’t possible! There must be
plenty of patriots left in France. The sacred fire is not burnt out
yet.”
For a short time he presented the appearance of a man who is sitting
with ashes on his head and desolation in his heart. His almond-shaped
eyes looked dull, extinguished. But after a moment he gave a sidelong
look at Peyrol as if to watch the effect and began declaiming in a low
voice and apparently as if rehearsing a speech to himself: “No, it isn’t
possible. Some day tyranny will stumble and then it will be time to pull
it down again. We will come out in our thousands and--ça ira!”
Those words, and even the passionate energy of the tone, left Peyrol
unmoved. With his head sustained by his thick brown hand he was thinking
of something else so obviously as to depress again the feebly struggling
spirit of terrorism in the lonely breast of Citizen Scevola. The glow
of reflected sunlight in the kitchen became darkened by the body of the
fisherman of the lagoon, mumbling a shy greeting to the company from the
frame of the doorway. Without altering his position Peyrol turned his
eyes on him curiously. Catherine, wiping her hands on her apron,
remarked: “You come late for your dinner, Michel.” He stepped in then,
took from the old woman’s hand an earthenware pot and a large hunk of
bread and carried it out at once into the yard. Peyrol and the
sans-culotte got up from the table. The latter, after hesitating like
somebody who has lost his way, went brusquely into the passage, while
Peyrol, avoiding Catherine’s anxious stare, made for the backyard.
Through the open door of the salle he obtained a glimpse of Arlette
sitting upright with her hands in her lap gazing at somebody he could
not see, but who could be no other than Lieutenant Réal.
In the blaze and heat of the yard the chickens, broken up into small
groups, were having their siesta in patches of shade. But Peyrol cared
nothing for the sun. Michel, who was eating his dinner under the pent
roof of the cart shed, put the earthenware pot down on the ground and
joined his master at the well encircled by a low wall of stones and
topped by an arch of wrought iron on which a wild fig-tree had twined a
slender offshoot. After his dog’s death the fisherman had abandoned the
salt lagoon, leaving his rotting punt exposed on the dismal shore and
his miserable nets shut up in the dark hut. He did not care for another
dog, and besides, who was there to give him a dog? He was the last of
men. Somebody must be last. There was no place for him in the life of
the village. So one fine morning he had walked up to the farm in order
to see Peyrol. More correctly perhaps, to let himself be seen by Peyrol.
That was exactly Michel’s only hope. He sat down on a stone outside the
gate with a small bundle, consisting mainly of an old blanket, and a
crooked stick lying on the ground near him, and looking the most lonely,
mild and harmless creature on this earth. Peyrol had listened gravely to
his confused tale of the dog’s death. He, personally, would not have
made a friend of a dog like Michel’s dog, but he understood perfectly
the sudden breaking up of the establishment on the shore of the lagoon.
So when Michel had concluded with the words, “I thought I would come up
here,” Peyrol, without waiting for a plain request, had said: “Très
bien. You will be my crew,” and had pointed down the path leading to the
sea-shore. And as Michel, picking up his bundle and stick, started off,
waiting for no further directions, he had shouted after him: “You will
find a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine in a locker aft, to break your
fast on.”
These had been the only formalities of Michel’s engagement to serve as
“crew” on board Peyrol’s boat. The rover, indeed, had tried without loss
of time to carry out his purpose of getting something of his own that
would float. It was not so easy to find anything worthy. The miserable
population of Madrague, a tiny fishing hamlet facing towards Toulon, had
nothing to sell. Moreover, Peyrol looked with contempt on all their
possessions. He would have as soon bought a catamaran of three logs of
wood tied together with rattans as one of their boats; but lonely and
prominent on the beach, lying on her side in weather-beaten melancholy,
there was a two-masted tartane with her sun-whitened cordage hanging in
festoons and her dry masts showing long cracks. No man was ever seen
dozing under the shade of her hull, on which the Mediterranean gulls
made themselves very much at home. She looked a wreck thrown high up on
the land by a disdainful sea. Peyrol, having surveyed her from a
distance, saw that the rudder still hung in its place. He ran his eye
along her body and said to himself that a craft with such lines would
sail well. She was much bigger than anything he had thought of, but in
her size, too, there was a fascination. It seemed to bring all the
shores of the Mediterranean within his reach, Baleares and Corsica,
Barbary and Spain. Peyrol had sailed over hundreds of leagues of ocean
in craft that were no bigger. At his back, in silent wonder, a knot of
fishermen’s wives, bareheaded and lean, with a swarm of ragged children
clinging to their skirts, watched the first stranger they had seen for
years.
Peyrol borrowed a short ladder in the hamlet (he knew better than to
trust his weight to any of the ropes hanging over the side) and carried
it down to the beach, followed at a respectful distance by the staring
women and children: a phenomenon and a wonder to the natives, as it had
happened to him before on more than one island in distant seas. He
clambered on board the neglected tartane and stood on the decked
fore-part, the centre of all eyes. A gull flew away with an angry
scream. The bottom of the open hold contained nothing but a little sand,
a few broken pieces of wood, a rusty hook, and some few stalks of straw
which the wind must have carried for miles before they found their rest
in there. The decked after-part had a small skylight and a companion,
and Peyrol’s eyes rested fascinated on an enormous padlock which secured
its sliding door. It was as if there had been secrets or treasures
inside--and yet most probably it was empty. Peyrol turned his head away
and with the whole strength of his lungs shouted in the direction of the
fishermen’s wives, who had been joined by two very old men and a
hunchbacked cripple swinging between two crutches.
“Is there anybody looking after this tartane, a caretaker?”
At first the only answer was a movement of recoil. Only the hunchback
held his ground and shouted back in an unexpectedly strong voice.
“You are the first man that has been on board her for years.”
The wives of the fishermen admired his boldness, for Peyrol indeed
appeared to them a very formidable being.
“I might have guessed that,” thought Peyrol. “She is in a dreadful
mess.” The disturbed gull had brought some friends as indignant as
itself and they circled at different levels uttering wild cries over
Peyrol’s head. He shouted again:
“Who does she belong to?”
The being on crutches lifted a finger towards the circling birds and
answered in a deep tone:
“They are the only ones I know.” Then, as Peyrol gazed down at him over
the side, he went on: “This craft used to belong to Escampobar. You know
Escampobar? It’s a house in the hollow between the hills there.”
“Yes, I know Escampobar,” yelled Peyrol, turning away and leaning
against the mast in a pose which he did not change for a long time. His
immobility tired out the crowd. They moved slowly in a body towards
their hovels, the hunchback bringing up the rear with long swings
between his crutches, and Peyrol remained alone with the angry gulls. He
lingered on board the tragic craft which had taken Arlette’s parents to
their death in the vengeful massacre of Toulon and had brought the
youthful Arlette and Citizen Scevola back to Escampobar, where old
Catherine, left alone at that time, had waited for days for somebody’s
return. Days of anguish and prayer, while she listened to the booming of
guns about Toulon and with an almost greater but different terror to the
dead silence which ensued.
Peyrol, enjoying the sensation of some sort of craft under his feet,
indulged in no images of horror connected with that desolate tartane. It
was late in the evening before he returned to the farm, so that he had
to have his supper alone. The women had retired, only the sans-culotte,
smoking a short pipe out of doors, had followed him into the kitchen and
asked where he had been and whether he had lost his way. This question
gave Peyrol an opening. He had been to Madrague and had seen a very fine
tartane lying perishing on the beach.
“They told me down there that she belonged to you, citoyen.”
At this the terrorist only blinked.
“What’s the matter? Isn’t she the craft you came here in? Won’t you sell
her to me?” Peyrol waited a little. “What objection can you have?”
It appeared that the patriot had no positive objections. He mumbled
something about the tartane being very dirty. This caused Peyrol to look
at him with intense astonishment.
“I am ready to take her off your hands as she stands.”
“I will be frank with you, citoyen. You see, when she lay at the quay in
Toulon a lot of fugitive traitors, men and women, and children too,
swarmed on board of her, and cut the ropes with a view of escaping, but
the avengers were not far behind and made short work of them. When we
discovered her behind the Arsenal I and another man, we had to throw a
lot of bodies overboard, out of the hold and the cabin. You will find
her very dirty all over. We had no time to clear up.” Peyrol felt
inclined to laugh. He had seen decks swimming in blood and had himself
helped to throw dead bodies overboard after a fight; but he eyed the
citizen with an unfriendly eye. He thought to himself: “He had a hand in
that massacre, no doubt,” but he made no audible remark. He only thought
of the enormous padlock securing that emptied charnel-house at the
stern. The terrorist insisted. “We really had not a moment to clean her
up. The circumstances were such that it was necessary for me to get away
quickly lest some of the false patriots should do me some carmagnole or
other. There had been bitter quarrelling in my section. I was not alone
in getting away, you know.”
Peyrol waved his arm to cut short the explanation. But before he and the
terrorist had parted for the night Peyrol could regard himself as the
owner of the tragic tartane.
Next day he returned to the hamlet and took up his quarters there for a
time. The awe he had inspired wore off, though no one cared to come
very near the tartane. Peyrol did not want any help. He wrenched off the
enormous padlock himself with a bar of iron and let the light of day
into the little cabin which did indeed bear the traces of the massacre
in the stains of blood on its woodwork, but contained nothing else
except a wisp of long hair and a woman’s ear-ring, a cheap thing which
Peyrol picked up and looked at for a long time. The associations of such
finds were not foreign to his past. He could without very strong emotion
figure to himself the little place choked with corpses. He sat down and
looked about at the stains and splashes which had been untouched by
sunlight for years. The cheap little ear-ring lay before him on the
rough-hewn table between the lockers, and he shook his head at it
weightily. He, at any rate, had never been a butcher.
Peyrol, unassisted, did all the cleaning. Then he turned con amore to
the fitting out of the tartane. The habits of activity still clung to
him. He welcomed something to do; this congenial task had all the air of
preparation for a voyage, which was a pleasing dream, and it brought
every evening the satisfaction of something achieved to that illusory
end. He rove new gear, scraped the masts himself, did all the sweeping,
scrubbing and painting single-handed, working steadily and hopefully as
though he had been preparing his escape from a desert island; and
directly he had cleaned and renovated the dark little hole of a cabin he
took to sleeping on board. Once only he went up on a visit to the farm
for a couple of days, as if to give himself a holiday. He passed them
mostly in observing Arlette. She was perhaps the first problematic
human being he had ever been in contact with. Peyrol had no contempt
for women. He had seen them love, suffer, endure, riot, and even fight
for their own hand, very much like men. Generally with men and women you
had to be on your guard, but in some ways women were more to be trusted.
As a matter of fact, his country-women were to him less known than any
other kind. From his experience of many different races, however, he had
a vague idea that women were very much alike everywhere. This one was a
lovable creature. She produced on him the effect of a child, aroused a
kind of intimate emotion which he had not known before to exist by
itself in a man. He was startled by its detached character. “Is it that
I am getting old?” he asked himself suddenly one evening, as he sat on
the bench against the wall looking straight before him, after she had
crossed his line of sight.
He felt himself an object of observation to Catherine, whom he used to
detect peeping at him round the corners or through half-opened doors. On
his part he would stare at her openly, aware of the impression he
produced on her: mingled curiosity and awe. He had the idea she did not
disapprove of his presence at the farm, where, it was plain to him, she
had a far from easy life. This had no relation to the fact that she did
all the household work. She was a woman of about his own age, straight
as a dart but with a wrinkled face. One evening as they were sitting
alone in the kitchen Peyrol said to her: “You must have been a handsome
girl in your day, Catherine. It’s strange you never got married.”
She turned to him under the high mantel of the fireplace and seemed
struck all of a heap, unbelieving, amazed, so that Peyrol was quite
provoked. “What’s the matter? If the old moke in the yard had spoken you
could not look more surprised. You can’t deny that you were a handsome
girl.”
She recovered from her scare to say: “I was born here, grew up here, and
early in my life I made up my mind to die here.”
“A strange notion,” said Peyrol, “for a young girl to take into her
head.”
“It’s not a thing to talk about,” said the old woman, stooping to get a
pot out of the warm ashes. “I did not think, then,” she went on, with
her back to Peyrol, “that I would live long. When I was eighteen I fell
in love with a priest.”
“Ah, bah!” exclaimed Peyrol under his breath.
“That was the time when I prayed for death,” she pursued in a quiet
voice. “I spent nights on my knees upstairs in that room where you sleep
now. I shunned everybody. People began to say I was crazy. We have
always been hated by the rabble about here. They have poisonous tongues.
I got the nickname of ‘la fiancée du prêtre.’ Yes, I was handsome, but
who would have looked at me if I had wanted to be looked at? My only
luck was to have a fine man for a brother. He understood. No word passed
his lips, but sometimes when we were alone, and not even his wife was
by, he would lay his hand on my shoulder gently. From that time to this
I have not been to church, and I never will go. But I have no quarrel
with God now.”
There were no signs of watchfulness and care in her bearing now. She
stood straight as an arrow before Peyrol and looked at him with a
confident air. The rover was not yet ready to speak. He only nodded
twice, and Catherine turned away to put the pot to cool in the sink.
“Yes, I wished to die. But I did not, and now I have got something to
do,” she said, sitting down near the fireplace and taking her chin in
her hand. “And I dare say you know what that is,” she added.
Peyrol got up deliberately.
“Well! bonsoir,” he said. “I am off to Madrague. I want to begin work
again on the tartane at daylight.”
“Don’t talk to me about the tartane! She took my brother away for ever.
I stood on the shore watching her sails growing smaller and smaller.
Then I came up alone to this farmhouse.”
Moving calmly her faded lips which no lover or child had ever kissed,
old Catherine told Peyrol of the days and nights of waiting, with the
distant growl of the big guns in her ears. She used to sit outside on
the bench longing for news, watching the flickers in the sky and
listening to heavy bursts of gunfire coming over the water. Then came a
night as if the world were coming to an end. All the sky was lighted up,
the earth shook to its foundations, and she felt the house rock, so that
jumping up from the bench she screamed with fear. That night she never
went to bed. Next morning she saw the sea covered with sails, while a
black and yellow cloud of smoke hung over Toulon. A man coming up from
Madrague told her that he believed that the whole town had been blown
up. She gave him a bottle of wine and he helped her to feed the stock
that evening. Before going home he expressed the opinion that there
could not be a soul left alive in Toulon, because the few that survived
would have gone away in the English ships. Nearly a week later she was
dozing by the fire when voices outside woke her up, and she beheld
standing in the middle of the salle, pale like a corpse out of a grave,
with a blood-soaked blanket over her shoulders and a red cap on her
head, a ghastly-looking young girl in whom she suddenly recognized her
niece. She screamed in her terror: “François, François!” This was her
brother’s name, and she thought he was outside. Her scream scared the
girl, who ran out of the door. All was still outside. Once more she
screamed “François!” and, tottering as far as the door, she saw her
niece clinging to a strange man in a red cap and with a sabre by his
side, who yelled excitedly: “You won’t see François again. Vive la
République!”
“I recognized the son Bron,” went on Catherine. “I knew his parents.
When the troubles began he left his home to follow the Revolution. I
walked straight up to him and took the girl away from his side. She
didn’t want much coaxing. The child always loved me,” she continued,
getting up from the stool and moving a little closer to Peyrol. “She
remembered her Aunt Catherine. I tore the horrid blanket off her
shoulders. Her hair was clotted with blood and her clothes all stained
with it. I took her upstairs. She was as helpless as a little child. I
undressed her and examined her all over. She had no hurt anywhere. I was
sure of that--but of what more could I be sure? I couldn’t make sense of
the things she babbled at me. Her very voice distracted me. She fell
asleep directly I had put her into my bed, and I stood there looking
down at her, nearly going out of my mind with the thought of what that
child may have been dragged through. When I went downstairs I found that
good-for-nothing inside the house. He was ranting up and down the salle,
vapouring and boasting till I thought all this must be an awful dream.
My head was in a whirl. He laid claim to her, and God knows what. I
seemed to understand things that made my hair stir on my head. I stood
there clasping my hands with all the strength I had, for fear I should
go out of my senses.”
“He frightened you,” said Peyrol, looking at her steadily. Catherine
moved a step nearer to him.
“What? The son Bron, frighten me! He was the butt of all the girls,
mooning about amongst the people outside the church on feast days in the
time of the King. All the countryside knew about him. No. What I said to
myself was that I musn’t let him kill me. There upstairs was the child I
had just got away from him, and there was I, all alone with that man
with the sabre and unable to get hold of a kitchen knife even.”
“And so he remained,” said Peyrol.
“What would you have had me to do?” asked Catherine steadily. “He had
brought the child back out of those shambles. It was a long time before
I got an idea of what had happened. I don’t know everything even yet,
and I suppose I will never know. In a very few days my mind was more at
ease about Arlette, but it was a long time before she would speak and
then it was never anything to the purpose. And what could I have done
single-handed? There was nobody I would condescend to call to my help.
We of the Escampobar have never been in favour with the peasants here,”
she said proudly. “And that is all I can tell you.”
Her voice faltered, she sat down on the stool again and took her chin in
the palm of her hand. As Peyrol left the house to go to the hamlet he
saw Arlette and the patron come round the corner of the yard wall
walking side by side but as if unconscious of each other.
That night he slept on board the renovated tartane and the rising sun
found him at work about the hull. By that time he had ceased to be the
object of awed contemplation to the inhabitants of the hamlet, who
still, however, kept up a mistrustful attitude. His only intermediary
for communicating with them was the miserable cripple. He was Peyrol’s
only company, in fact, during his period of work on the tartane. He had
more activity, audacity, and intelligence, it seemed to Peyrol, than all
the rest of the inhabitants put together. Early in the morning he could
be seen making his way on his crutches with a pendulum motion towards
the hull on which Peyrol would have been already an hour or so at work.
Peyrol then would throw him over a sound rope’s end and the cripple,
leaning his crutches against the side of the tartane, would pull his
wretched little carcass, all withered below the waist, up the rope, hand
over hand, with extreme ease. There, sitting on the small foredeck with
his back against the mast and his thin, twisted legs folded in front of
him, he would keep Peyrol company, talking to him along the whole length
of the tartane in a strained voice and sharing his midday meal, as of
right, since it was he generally who brought the provisions slung round
his neck in a quaint flat basket. Thus were the hours of labour
shortened for Peyrol by shrewd remarks and bits of local gossip. How the
cripple got hold of it it was difficult to imagine, and the rover had
not enough knowledge of European superstitions to suspect him of flying
through the night on a broomstick like a sort of male witch--for there
was a manliness in that twisted scrap of humanity which struck Peyrol
from the first. His very voice was manly and the character of his gossip
was not feminine. He did indeed mention to Peyrol that people used to
take him about the neighbourhood in carts for the purpose of playing a
fiddle at weddings and other festive occasions; but this seemed hardly
adequate, and even he himself confessed that there was not much of that
sort of thing going on during the Revolution, when people didn’t like to
attract attention and everything was done in a hole-and-corner manner.
There were no priests to officiate at weddings, and if there were no
ceremonies how could there be rejoicings. Of course children were born
as before, but there were no christenings--and people got to look funny
somehow or other. Their countenances got changed somehow; the very boys
and girls seemed to have something on their minds.
Peyrol, busy about one thing and another, listened without appearing to
pay much attention to the story of the Revolution, as if to the tale of
an intelligent islander on the other side of the world talking of bloody
rites and amazing hopes of some religion unknown to the rest of mankind.
But there was something biting in the speech of that cripple which
confused his thoughts a little. Sarcasm was a mystery which he could
not understand. On one occasion he remarked to his friend the cripple
as they sat together on the foredeck munching the bread and figs of
their midday meal:
“There must have been something in it. But it doesn’t seem to have done
much for you people here.”
“To be sure,” retorted the scrap of man vivaciously, “it hasn’t
straightened my back or given me a pair of legs like yours.”
Peyrol, whose trousers were rolled up above the knee because he had been
washing the hold, looked at his calves complacently. “You could hardly
have expected that,” he remarked with simplicity.
“Ah, but you don’t know what people with properly made bodies expected
or pretended to,” said the cripple. “Everything was going to be changed.
Everybody was going to tie up his dog with a string of sausages for the
sake of principles.” His long face, which, in repose, had an expression
of suffering peculiar to cripples, was lighted up by an enormous grin.
“They must feel jolly well sold by this time,” he added. “And of course
that vexes them, but I am not vexed. I was never vexed with my father
and mother. While the poor things were alive I never went hungry--not
very hungry. They couldn’t have been very proud of me.” He paused and
seemed to contemplate himself mentally. “I don’t know what I would have
done in their place. Something very different. But then, don’t you see,
I know what it means to be like I am. Of course they couldn’t know, and
I don’t suppose the poor people had very much sense. A priest from
Almanarre--Almanarre is a sort of village up there where there is a
church....”
Peyrol interrupted him by remarking that he knew all about Almanarre.
This, on his part, was a simple delusion because in reality he knew much
less of Almanarre than of Zanzibar or any pirate village from there up
to Cape Guardafui. And the cripple contemplated him with his brown eyes,
which had an upward cast naturally.
“You know ...! For me,” he went on, in a tone of quiet decision, “you
are a man fallen from the sky. Well, a priest from Almanarre came to
bury them. A fine man with a stern face. The finest man I have seen from
that time till you dropped on us here. There was a story of a girl
having fallen in love with him some years before. I was old enough then
to have heard something of it, but that’s neither here nor there.
Moreover, many people wouldn’t believe the tale.”
Peyrol, without looking at the cripple, tried to imagine what sort of
child he might have been--what sort of youth? The rover had seen
staggering deformities, dreadful mutilations which were the cruel work
of man: but it was amongst people with dusky skins. And that made a
great difference. But what he had heard and seen since he had come back
to his native land, the tales, the facts, and also the faces, reached
his sensibility with a particular force, because of that feeling that
came to him so suddenly after a whole lifetime spent amongst Indians,
Malagashes, Arabs, blackamoors of all sorts, that he belonged there, to
this land, and had escaped all those things by a mere hair’s breadth.
His companion completed his significant silence, which seemed to have
been occupied with thoughts very much like his own, by saying:
“All this was in the King’s time. They didn’t cut off his head till
several years afterwards. It didn’t make my life any easier for me, but
since those Republicans had deposed God and flung Him out of all the
churches I have forgiven Him all my troubles.”
“Spoken like a man,” said Peyrol. Only the misshapen character of the
cripple’s back prevented Peyrol from giving him a hearty slap. He got up
to begin his afternoon’s work. It was a bit of inside painting, and from
the foredeck the cripple watched him at it with dreamy eyes and
something ironic on his lips.
It was not till the sun had travelled over Cape Cicié, which could be
seen across the water like dark mist in the glare, that he opened his
lips to ask: “And what do you propose to do with this tartane, citoyen?”
Peyrol answered simply that the tartane was fit to go anywhere now, the
very moment she took the water.
“You could go as far as Genoa and Naples and even further,” suggested
the cripple.
“Much further,” said Peyrol.
“And you have been fitting her out like this for a voyage?”
“Certainly,” said Peyrol, using his brush steadily.
“Somehow I fancy it will not be a long one.”
Peyrol never checked the to-and-fro movement of his brush, but it was
with an effort. The fact was that he had discovered in himself a
distinct reluctance to go away from the Escampobar Farm. His desire to
have something of his own that could float was no longer associated with
any desire to wander. The cripple was right. The voyage of the renovated
tartane would not take her very far. What was surprising was the fellow
being so very positive about it. He seemed able to read people’s
thoughts.
The dragging of the renovated tartane into the water was a great affair.
Everybody in the hamlet, including the women, did a full day’s work and
there was never so much coin passed from hand to hand in the hamlet in
all the days of its obscure history. Swinging between his crutches on a
low sand-ridge the cripple surveyed the whole of the beach. It was he
that had persuaded the villagers to lend a hand and had arranged the
terms for their assistance. It was he also who, through a very
miserable-looking pedlar (the only one who frequented the peninsula),
had got in touch with some rich persons in Fréjus who had changed for
Peyrol a few of his gold pieces for current money. He had expedited the
course of the most exciting and interesting experience of his life, and
now planted on the sand on his two sticks in the manner of a beacon he
watched the last operation. The rover, as if about to launch himself
upon a track of a thousand miles, walked up to shake hands with him and
look once more at the soft eyes and the ironic smile.
“There is no denying it--you are a man.”
“Don’t talk like this to me, citoyen,” said the cripple in a trembling
voice. Till then, suspended between his two sticks and with his
shoulders as high as his ears, he had not looked towards the approaching
Peyrol. “This is too much of a compliment!”
“I tell you,” insisted the rover roughly, and as if the insignificance
of mortal envelopes had presented itself to him for the first time at
the end of his roving life, “I tell you that there is that in you which
would make a chum one would like to have alongside one in a tight
place.”
As he went away from the cripple towards the tartane, while the whole
population of the hamlet disposed around her waited for his word, some
on land and some waist-deep in the water holding ropes in their hands,
Peyrol had a slight shudder at the thought: “Suppose I had been born
like that.” Ever since he had put his foot on his native land such
thoughts had haunted him. They would have been impossible anywhere else.
He could not have been like any blackamoor, good, bad or indifferent,
hale or crippled, king or slave; but here, on this Southern shore that
had called to him irresistibly as he had approached the Straits of
Gibraltar on what he had felt to be his last voyage, any woman, lean and
old enough, might have been his mother; he might have been any Frenchman
of them all, even one of those he pitied, even one of those he despised.
He felt the grip of his origins from the crown of his head to the soles
of his feet while he clambered on board the tartane as if for a long and
distant voyage. As a matter of fact he knew very well that with a bit of
luck it would be over in about an hour. When the tartane took the water
the feeling of being afloat plucked at his very heart. Some Madrague
fishermen had been persuaded by the cripple to help old Peyrol to sail
the tartane round to the cove below the Escampobar Farm. A glorious sun
shone upon that short passage and the cove itself was full of sparkling
light when they arrived. The few Escampobar goats wandering on the
hillside pretending to feed where no grass was visible to the naked eye
never even raised their heads. A gentle breeze drove the tartane, as
fresh as paint could make her, opposite a narrow crack in the cliff
which gave admittance to a tiny basin, no bigger than a village pond,
concealed at the foot of the southern hill. It was there that old
Peyrol, aided by the Madrague men, who had their boat with them, towed
his ship, the first really that he ever owned.
Once in, the tartane nearly filled the little basin, and the fishermen,
getting into their boat, rowed away for home. Peyrol, by spending the
afternoon in dragging ropes ashore and fastening them to various
boulders and dwarf trees, moored her to his complete satisfaction. She
was as safe from the tempests there as a house ashore.
After he had made everything fast on board and had furled the sails
neatly, a matter of some time for one man, Peyrol contemplated his
arrangements, which savoured of rest much more than of wandering, and
found them good. Though he never meant to abandon his room at the
farmhouse, he felt that his true home was in the tartane, and he
rejoiced at the idea that it was concealed from all eyes except perhaps
the eyes of the goats when their arduous feeding took them on the
southern slope. He lingered on board, he even threw open the sliding
door of the little cabin, which now smelt of fresh paint, not of stale
blood. Before he started for the farm the sun had travelled far beyond
Spain and all the sky to the west was yellow, while on the side of Italy
it presented a sombre canopy pierced here and there with the light of
stars. Catherine put a plate on the table, but nobody asked him any
questions.
He spent a lot of his time on board, going down early, coming up at
midday “pour manger la soupe,” and sleeping on board almost every night.
He did not like to leave the tartane alone for so many hours. Often,
having climbed a little way up to the house, he would turn round for a
last look at her in the gathering dusk, and actually would go back
again. After Michel had been enlisted for a crew and had taken his abode
on board for good, Peyrol found it a much easier matter to spend his
nights in the lantern-like room at the top of the farmhouse.
Often waking up at night he would get up to look at the starry sky out
of all his three windows in succession, and think: “Now there is nothing
in the world to prevent me getting out to sea in less than an hour.” As
a matter of fact it was possible for two men to manage the tartane. Thus
Peyrol’s thought was comfortingly true in every way, for he loved to
feel himself free, and Michel of the lagoon, after the death of his
depressed dog, had no tie on earth. It was a fine thought which somehow
made it quite easy for Peyrol to go back to his four-poster and resume
his slumbers.