One day, in the first fortnight of June, as old Yvonne was returning
home, some neighbours told her that she had been sent for by the
Commissioner from the Naval Registry Office. Of course it concerned her
grandson, but that did not frighten her in the least. The families of
seafarers are used to the Naval Registry, and she, the daughter, wife,
mother, and grandmother of seamen, had known that office for the past
sixty years.
Doubtless it had to do with his “delegation”; or perhaps there was a
small prize-money account from _La Circe_ to take through her proxy. As
she knew what respect was due to “_Monsieur le Commissaire_,” she put on
her best gown and a clean white cap, and set out about two o'clock.
Trotting along swiftly on the pathways of the cliff, she neared Paimpol;
and musing upon these two months without letters, she grew a bit
anxious.
She met her old sweetheart sitting out at his door. He had greatly aged
since the appearance of the winter cold.
“Eh, eh! When you're ready, you know, don't make any ceremony, my
beauty!” That “suit of deal” still haunted his mind.
The joyous brightness of June smiled around her. On the rocky heights
there still grew the stunted reeds with their yellow blossoms; but
passing into the hollow nooks sheltered against the bitter sea winds,
one met with high sweet-smelling grass. But the poor old woman did not
see all this, over whose head so many rapid seasons had passed, which
now seemed as short as days.
Around the crumbling hamlet with its gloomy walls grew roses, pinks,
and stocks; and even up on the tops of the whitewashed and mossy roofs,
sprang the flowerets that attracted the first “miller” butterflies of
the season.
This spring-time was almost without love in the land of Icelanders,
and the beautiful lasses of proud race, who sat out dreaming on their
doorsteps, seemed to look far beyond the visible things with their blue
or brown eyes. The young men, who were the objects of their melancholy
and desires, were remote, fishing on the northern seas.
But it was a spring-time for all that--warm, sweet, and troubling, with
its buzzing of flies and perfume of young plants.
And all this soulless freshness smiled upon the poor old grandmother,
who was quickly walking along to hear of the death of her last-born
grandson. She neared the awful moment when this event, which had taken
place in the so distant Chinese seas, was to be told to her; she
was taking that sinister walk that Sylvestre had divined at his
death-hour--the sight of that had torn his last agonized tears from him;
his darling old granny summoned to Paimpol to be told that he was dead!
Clearly he had seen her pass along that road, running straight on,
with her tiny brown shawl, her umbrella, and large head-dress. And that
apparition had made him toss and writhe in fearful anguish, while the
huge, red sun of the Equator, disappearing in its glory, peered through
the port-hole of the hospital to watch him die. But he, in his last
hallucination, had seen his old granny moving under a rain-laden sky,
and on the contrary a joyous laughing spring-time mocked her on all
sides.
Nearing Paimpol, she became more and more uneasy, and improved her
speed. Now she is in the gray town with its narrow granite streets,
where the sun falls, bidding good-day to some other old women, her
contemporaries, sitting at their windows. Astonished to see her; they
said: “Wherever is she going so quickly, in her Sunday gown, on a
week-day?”
“Monsieur le Commissaire” of the Naval Enlistment Office was not in just
then. One ugly little creature, about fifteen years old, who was his
clerk, sat at his desk. As he was too puny to be a fisher, he had
received some education and passed his time in that same chair, in his
black linen dust-sleeves, scratching away at paper.
With a look of importance, when she had said her name, he got up to get
the official documents from off a shelf.
There were a great many papers--what did it all mean? Parchments, sealed
papers, a sailor's record-book, grown yellow on the sea, and over all
floated an odour of death. He spread them all out before the poor old
woman, who began to tremble and feel dizzy. She had just recognized two
of the letters which Gaud used to write for her to her grandson, and
which were now returned to her never unsealed. The same thing had
happened twenty years ago at the death of her son Pierre; the letters
had been sent back from China to “Monsieur le Commissaire,” who had
given them to her thus.
Now he was reading out in a consequential voice: “Moan,
Jean-Marie-Sylvestre, registered at Paimpol, folio 213, number 2091,
died on board the _Bien Hoa_, on the 14th of ----.”
“What--what has happened to him, my good sir?”
“Discharged--dead,” he answered.
It wasn't because this clerk was unkind, but if he spoke in that brutal
way, it was through want of judgment, and from lack of intelligence in
the little incomplete being.
As he saw that she did not understand that technical expression, he said
in Breton:
“_Marw eo_!”
“_Marw eo_!” (He is dead.)
She repeated the words after him, in her aged tremulous voice, as a poor
cracked echo would send back some indifferent phrase. So what she had
partly foreseen was true; but it only made her tremble; now that it was
certain, it seemed to affect her no more. To begin with, her faculty
to suffer was slightly dulled by old age, especially since this last
winter. Pain did not strike her immediately. Something seemed to fall
upside down in her brain, and somehow or another she mixed this death up
with others. She had lost so many of them before. She needed a moment
to grasp that this was her very last one, her darling, the object of
all her prayers, life, and waiting, and of all her thoughts, already
darkened by the sombre approach of second childhood.
She felt a sort of shame at showing her despair before this little
gentleman who horrified her. Was that the way to tell a grandmother of
her darling's death? She remained standing before the desk, stiffened,
and tearing the fringes of her brown shawl with her poor aged hands,
sore and chapped with washing.
How far away she felt from home! Goodness! what a long walk back to be
gone through, and steadily, too, before nearing the whitewashed hut in
which she longed to shut herself up, like a wounded beast who hides
in its hole to die. And so she tried not to think too much and not to
understand yet, frightened above all at the long home-journey.
They gave her an order to go and take, as the heiress, the thirty francs
that came from the sale of Sylvestre's bag; and then the letters, the
certificates, and the box containing the military medal.
She took the whole parcel awkwardly with open fingers, unable to find
pockets to put them in.
She went straight through Paimpol, looking at no one, her body bent
slightly like one about to fall, with a rushing of blood in her ears;
pressing and hurrying along like some poor old machine, which could not
be wound up, at a great pressure, for the last time, without fear of
breaking its springs.
At the third mile she went along quite bent in two and exhausted; from
time to time her foot struck against the stones, giving her a painful
shock up to the very head. She hurried to bury herself in her home, for
fear of falling and having to be carried there.