AN EVERYDAY STORY
Micheltrudged home to supper. All day he had been forking heavy, slippery seaweed into carts. His arms and legs ached, but he had earned five francs. That would be something to tell Uncle Ives when he got back from his cruise to the Bay of Biscay.
The seaweed, washed up on the beach by a month’s storm, was community property, prized as fertilizer and as bedding for the live stock. The mayor had appointed a day for each family to gather its share, and Michel had been hired by an absent citizen to harvest his part of this strange sea crop.
As he started home, the world, hitherto wrapped in a golden mist, began to darken; and looking at the sky, Michel was surprised to see a great mounting cloud, which had not been there a few moments before. As he opened the cottage door, it was nearly jerked from his hand by a sudden gust. He dropped his wooden shoes at the door, and entered the kitchen in his felt slippers.
His grandmother sat near the fireplace, giving little Martha her supper. On the hearthstone knelt Guen.There was an appetizing smell of frying fish. Now and then a drop of rain came down the chimney and splashing into the pan, made a great sizzling. The wooden shutters, closing with a bang, shut out the last glimmer of twilight. ‘Go out, Michel, and fasten them open,’ said Grandmother; ‘we will keep the lamp in the window to-night.’
‘I am glad Uncle Ives got off the coast before the storm came,’ said Guen. ‘Don’t you suppose the Jeanot is in the Bay of Biscay by this time, Grandmother?’
‘God knows,’ sighed the old woman. She turned the fish in the pan, Josef came in red-cheeked and muddy from a game of ball, and they had supper.
The bed in which Michel and Josef slept was built into the wall and heaped with pillows and bedding. It had sliding doors, which could be closed, so that it looked like a handsome carved wardrobe; but usually they were left open, showing the pretty chintz curtains. That night when Michel, sitting on Uncle Ives’s sea chest, pulled off his stockings, the storm was raging around the little stone house like a howling wolf. But the four children slept like dormice under their feather beds. Only grandmother, peering between her curtains, watched the flickering lamp all night long.
Michel had never been beyond the smell of the sea,and there was brine in his blood. He knew that sooner or later he, too, like his father and all his forebears, would become an Iceland fisherman; in fact he lived for the day when, asmousseor cabin boy, he would take ship under his Uncle Ives for the Arctic Circle; for Michel lived in the town of Paimpol, in that part of Brittany called theCôte du Nord. From this port every year in March a fishing fleet sails for northern waters, to return in August for a few weeks’ respite before starting for the Bay of Biscay to buy salt for the next year’s catch. Toward September those who have not slipped forever into the silence of the North are back in their homes for the cozy winter months, there to make ready for a fresh voyage in the spring. But there are always some for whom there is only a tablet in the gray church by the sea, like the one for Michel’s father, ‘Jules Karadoc, lost on the Iceland Coast’; and under the darkened rafters hangs the model of many a brave little ship gone down.
For the people of Brittany storm and shipwreck are things of every day. They work and eat and sleep as usual, but the women, who do not go to sea, learn to sigh with the wind and to pray as they work.
The next morning, after Josef and Guen had gone to school, Michel, taking a pail, ran down to the beach forclams. The sun was shining again, the tide was out, and only the banks of seaweed and the driftwood flung high on the beach gave any sign of last night’s storm.
Michel dug busily for clams, detecting their presence with the keenness of experience, and then with a full pail started homeward. As he skirted the town, the clack of many wooden shoes hurrying over the cobbles caught his ear. A crowd was running through the streets. Full of curiosity, Michel ran too, headlong for the square in the center of the town.
The wooden shoes were still thumping in from all sides, and about the telegraph office pressed a silent group of women, the tragedy of the sea written on their faces. No one spoke. Only the rapid click of the telegraph key came through the open door. Then a man appeared, holding high a bit of paper.
‘Susanne Allanic,’ he called; and added quickly, ‘Your man’s safe!’
Susanne, standing on the edge of the crowd, with a baby in her arms, threw up her head, gave a cry, and broke into sobs.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Michel sharply, for Allanic was one of the Jeanot’s crew.
‘The Jeanot’s gone down,’ said a woman breathlessly;‘four men are missing. We don’t know who they are.’
Michel stood stunned. The sunlight seemed suddenly wiped from the world. ‘The Jeanot’s gone down! The Jeanot’s gone down!’ kept pounding through his brain. He knew he should have to tell his grandmother, and in just those words; he could think of no others. At the gate he met her. Her face was as white as his own, and he knew that she had heard.
‘The Jeanot——’ he stammered, trembling.
‘Yes,’ said his grandmother, ‘but Ives will telegraph.’ And she took the pail of clams from him and went into the house to make the chowder.
They all knew now that last night’s storm was but the spent end of a great tempest, which had swept the coast from Spain northward, and that the Jeanot, struggling to keep to the open sea, had been forced on the rocks below the Bay of Biscay.
From obscure Spanish towns the belated telegrams kept coming in all that week. Three bodies had been washed ashore, and eleven men were accounted for; only Ives Karadoc was missing. Some sailors had come home with the story of the wreck. After the break-up of the Jeanot, Ives had been seen clinging to a floating barrel. That was the last known of him. So the days dragged on, hollow and dark.
People went back to their daily affairs, and began to talk of other things than the wreck of the Jeanot. But in Michel’s home things were not as before. Laughter had died away from the hearthstone. A knock or a strange step on the flags set their hearts beating, and every night the little lamp burned in the window.
‘Ives has been picked up and taken to some far country,’ persisted Grandmother. ‘We shall hear, we shall hear.’ But one morning Michel, finding her all in a heap near the fireplace, weeping with her apron over her head, knew that she had lost hope.
He himself could not give up, and with hot protest in his heart he started for the headland beyond the village where one could look far out to sea. It was the point where they had all gathered to watch for the Iceland fleet when it had returned less than a month ago, the Jeanot leading, her sails agleam in the setting sun. And now the Jeanot had gone down! Why, she was as familiar and friendly and dear as the kitchen itself! And Uncle Ives was such a jolly young uncle, so full of understanding! The children adored him. Last year at this time they had begun to fill the sea chest for his first voyage with the Iceland fleet. Together they had saved their pennies to buy sweet, sticky ginger and chocolateand biscuits to tuck into the corners as surprises. Guen had knit socks and hemmed towels. Grandmother had made the underclothing. Finally, together, they had fashioned the tarpaulins, which were to keep Uncle Ives dry in the worst of storms. Grandmother had cut and sewed them on the machine with three and four rows of stitching. Then they had dipped them in oil; and the children had dragged them out to the hillside and spread them on the bushes to dry, weighting them down with stones, turning them to the sun and the wind, bringing them out each day anew and taking them in at night. At last the three coatings of oil were dry, and the suit was light and tough and waterproof. How they had laughed when Uncle Ives had tried it on, and had pulled the huge stocking feet of the trousers over his boots! Before he sailed he had asked them what they wished him to bring them from Iceland, just as the father of the three daughters in the fairy story did. They could not say, not knowing what things there might be in Iceland; but Ives had brought walrus teeth to the boys, a sack of eiderdown to Grandmother, and dolls in quaint native costume to the girls. And then, just as they thought they had him back again, he had started off with the Jeanot to buy salt for next year’s catch!
THEY HAD WAVED GOOD-BYE TO HIMTHEY HAD WAVED GOOD-BYE TO HIM
THEY HAD WAVED GOOD-BYE TO HIM
THEY HAD WAVED GOOD-BYE TO HIM
They had waved good-bye to him, and watched until the Jeanot was a white fleck beyond the islands. Now all that was bright in life seemed to have been dashed to pieces on the black rocks of Biscay.
Michel pushed his way through the gorse, which pricked thickly about him. At the summit of the headland stood a great stone cross, its carvings worn by centuries of wind and brine. Here women who had waited long for men at sea came to pray. On the step, with his cap pressed to his breast, Michel knelt. His heart was too full to pray in words. Besides, what could he say if God did not already know how much he wanted Uncle Ives back?
Below him spread the bay, a sweep of pale gold. Tiny islands, rose and lavender, or velvety black where the seaweed clung to them, studded the surface like gems. A row of twisted pine trees followed the line of the opposite shore.
After a while Michel stood up, and shading his eyes, gazed seaward. There where the straits led into the open channel lay the Isle of Breha, and round its point came the Paimpol fishing fleet returning for the night. As they drew nearer Michel could distinguish each boat by some well-known mark as one can tell a neighbor’s cow by a crumpled horn or the white patches on itsflanks. There was the high curved prow of Raoul’s boat, a black and green trawler. There was the orange patch on Jean Baptiste’s gray sail. Among the well-known boats there was a stranger with tawny sails and a bulky hull larger than the rest. What boat was that? Pricked by a boy’s curiosity, Michel forgot his grief. If he raced back by way of the beach he might reach the wharf almost as soon as the boats reached it.
Slipping and crashing down the hillside, he came to the beach and thudded over the sands in his wooden shoes. When he reached Paimpol the boats were already moored. A crowd had gathered, and Michel could see confusedly that sailors were carrying someone on a stretcher from the strange boat.
A cheer went up from the crowd. Michel, dodging under elbows, squirmed his way nimbly to the inner circle. He could see a form wrapped in blankets on the stretcher, around which the men were pressing eagerly.
‘Is it a rescue?’ he asked, for such things often happened.
‘Hello, old pal!’ cried a familiar voice, and Michel stood speechless. The darkness seemed to fall from him, and the world to become real again, all his broken courage coming back to him.
‘Hello, Uncle Ives!’ he cried, his voice high with excitement. ‘I didn’t believe you were dead.’ And then all at once he knew how terribly afraid he had been. ‘But Grandmother did,’ he continued. His chin quivered, and great tears fell on the wharf.
‘Look here, Michel,’ said Uncle Ives softly, ‘you cut ahead and tell her there’s nothing the matter with me but a broken leg.’
And so Michel was the swift forerunner of the triumphant procession that wound from the landing to the Karadoc cottage.
No one heard a word of Uncle Ives’s story that night. Grandmother sent them all to bed earlier than usual, and closed the door on eager neighbors. But the next day in the sunny garden, where bees bobbed in and out of the honeysuckle, they heard of the dark night when the Jeanot had gone down in a crash of wind and foam, and of the miracle by which Uncle Ives, clinging to an empty salt keg, had been drawn away from the rocks by the ebbing tide. He had been unconscious when a fishing boat had picked him up the next day, and one leg was broken from a blow of which he knew nothing. The fishing boat was bound to Honfleur on the French Coast, but had changed its course to bring the wounded man home. The dear ship Jeanot was mourned withmany tears. Devoutly Michel and Josef carved a model of her, and rigged it. They took it to the little gray church by the sea, where, with innumerable others, it hangs in the dim shadows of the roof, a thank-offering for the safe return of Uncle Ives.
THE END