OUR FIRST ROUGH SKETCHES FILLED IN.
While the hooker was in the gulf of Portland, there was but little sea
on; the ocean, if gloomy, was almost still, and the sky was yet clear.
The wind took little effect on the vessel; the hooker hugged the cliff
as closely as possible; it served as a screen to her.
There were ten on board the little Biscayan felucca--three men in crew,
and seven passengers, of whom two were women. In the light of the open
sea (which broadens twilight into day) all the figures on board were
clearly visible. Besides they were not hiding now--they were all at
ease; each one reassumed his freedom of manner, spoke in his own note,
showed his face; departure was to them a deliverance.
The motley nature of the group shone out. The women were of no age. A
wandering life produces premature old age, and indigence is made up of
wrinkles. One of them was a Basque of the Dry-ports. The other, with the
large rosary, was an Irishwoman. They wore that air of indifference
common to the wretched. They had squatted down close to each other when
they got on board, on chests at the foot of the mast. They talked to
each other. Irish and Basque are, as we have said, kindred languages.
The Basque woman’s hair was scented with onions and basil. The skipper
of the hooker was a Basque of Guipuzcoa. One sailor was a Basque of the
northern slope of the Pyrenees, the other was of the southern
slope--that is to say, they were of the same nation, although the first
was French and the latter Spanish. The Basques recognize no official
country. _Mi madre se llama Montaña_, my mother is called the mountain,
as Zalareus, the muleteer, used to say. Of the five men who were with
the two women, one was a Frenchman of Languedoc, one a Frenchman of
Provence, one a Genoese; one, an old man, he who wore the sombrero
without a hole for a pipe, appeared to be a German. The fifth, the
chief, was a Basque of the Landes from Biscarrosse. It was he who, just
as the child was going on board the hooker, had, with a kick of his
heel, cast the plank into the sea. This man, robust, agile, sudden in
movement, covered, as may be remembered, with trimmings, slashings, and
glistening tinsel, could not keep in his place; he stooped down, rose
up, and continually passed to and fro from one end of the vessel to the
other, as if debating uneasily on what had been done and what was going
to happen.
This chief of the band, the captain and the two men of the crew, all
four Basques, spoke sometimes Basque, sometimes Spanish, sometimes
French--these three languages being common on both slopes of the
Pyrenees. But generally speaking, excepting the women, all talked
something like French, which was the foundation of their slang. The
French language about this period began to be chosen by the peoples as
something intermediate between the excess of consonants in the north and
the excess of vowels in the south. In Europe, French was the language of
commerce, and also of felony. It will be remembered that Gibby, a London
thief, understood Cartouche.
The hooker, a fine sailer, was making quick way; still, ten persons,
besides their baggage, were a heavy cargo for one of such light draught.
The fact of the vessel’s aiding the escape of a band did not necessarily
imply that the crew were accomplices. It was sufficient that the captain
of the vessel was a Vascongado, and that the chief of the band was
another. Among that race mutual assistance is a duty which admits of no
exception. A Basque, as we have said, is neither Spanish nor French; he
is Basque, and always and everywhere he must succour a Basque. Such is
Pyrenean fraternity.
All the time the hooker was in the gulf, the sky, although threatening,
did not frown enough to cause the fugitives any uneasiness. They were
flying, they were escaping, they were brutally gay. One laughed, another
sang; the laugh was dry but free, the song was low but careless.
The Languedocian cried, “_Caoucagno!_” “_Cocagne_” expresses the highest
pitch of satisfaction in Narbonne. He was a longshore sailor, a native
of the waterside village of Gruissan, on the southern side of the
Clappe, a bargeman rather than a mariner, but accustomed to work the
reaches of the inlet of Bages, and to draw the drag-net full of fish
over the salt sands of St. Lucie. He was of the race who wear a red cap,
make complicated signs of the cross after the Spanish fashion, drink
wine out of goat-skins, eat scraped ham, kneel down to blaspheme, and
implore their patron saint with threats--“Great saint, grant me what I
ask, or I’ll throw a stone at thy head, _ou té feg un pic_.” He might
be, at need, a useful addition to the crew.
The Provençal in the caboose was blowing up a turf fire under an
iron pot, and making broth. The broth was a kind of puchero, in which
fish took the place of meat, and into which the Provençal threw
chick peas, little bits of bacon cut in squares, and pods of red
pimento--concessions made by the eaters of _bouillabaisse_ to the
eaters of _olla podrida_. One of the bags of provisions was beside him
unpacked. He had lighted over his head an iron lantern, glazed with
talc, which swung on a hook from the ceiling. By its side, on another
hook, swung the weather-cock halcyon. There was a popular belief in
those days that a dead halcyon, hung by the beak, always turned its
breast to the quarter whence the wind was blowing. While he made the
broth, the Provençal put the neck of a gourd into his mouth, and now and
then swallowed a draught of aguardiente. It was one of those gourds
covered with wicker, broad and flat, with handles, which used to be hung
to the side by a strap, and which were then called hip-gourds. Between
each gulp he mumbled one of those country songs of which the subject is
nothing at all: a hollow road, a hedge; you see in the meadow, through a
gap in the bushes, the shadow of a horse and cart, elongated in the
sunset, and from time to time, above the hedge, the end of a fork loaded
with hay appears and disappears--you want no more to make a song.
A departure, according to the bent of one’s mind, is a relief or a
depression. All seemed lighter in spirits excepting the old man of the
band, the man with the hat that had no pipe.
This old man, who looked more German than anything else, although he had
one of those unfathomable faces in which nationality is lost, was bald,
and so grave that his baldness might have been a tonsure. Every time he
passed before the Virgin on the prow, he raised his felt hat, so that
you could see the swollen and senile veins of his skull. A sort of full
gown, torn and threadbare, of brown Dorchester serge, but half hid his
closely fitting coat, tight, compact, and hooked up to the neck like a
cassock. His hands inclined to cross each other, and had the mechanical
junction of habitual prayer. He had what might be called a wan
countenance; for the countenance is above all things a reflection, and
it is an error to believe that idea is colourless. That countenance was
evidently the surface of a strange inner state, the result of a
composition of contradictions, some tending to drift away in good,
others in evil, and to an observer it was the revelation of one who was
less and more than human--capable of falling below the scale of the
tiger, or of rising above that of man. Such chaotic souls exist. There
was something inscrutable in that face. Its secret reached the abstract.
You felt that the man had known the foretaste of evil which is the
calculation, and the after-taste which is the zero. In his
impassibility, which was perhaps only on the surface, were imprinted two
petrifactions--the petrifaction of the heart proper to the hangman, and
the petrifaction of the mind proper to the mandarin. One might have said
(for the monstrous has its mode of being complete) that all things were
possible to him, even emotion. In every savant there is something of the
corpse, and this man was a savant. Only to see him you caught science
imprinted in the gestures of his body and in the folds of his dress. His
was a fossil face, the serious cast of which was counteracted by that
wrinkled mobility of the polyglot which verges on grimace. But a severe
man withal; nothing of the hypocrite, nothing of the cynic. A tragic
dreamer. He was one of those whom crime leaves pensive; he had the brow
of an incendiary tempered by the eyes of an archbishop. His sparse gray
locks turned to white over his temples. The Christian was evident in
him, complicated with the fatalism of the Turk. Chalkstones deformed his
fingers, dissected by leanness. The stiffness of his tall frame was
grotesque. He had his sea-legs, he walked slowly about the deck, not
looking at any one, with an air decided and sinister. His eyeballs were
vaguely filled with the fixed light of a soul studious of the darkness
and afflicted by reapparitions of conscience.
From time to time the chief of the band, abrupt and alert, and making
sudden turns about the vessel, came to him and whispered in his ear. The
old man answered by a nod. It might have been the lightning consulting
the night.