A singlecover 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 Peyrol, thoughtful and hungry, faced Citizen Scevola in his working clothes and very much withdrawn within himself.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. Butwhen 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 thoughthe 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 ofCitizen 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 lifeof 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 asmall 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, turningaway 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 inspiredwore 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 humanbeing 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. Therover 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 couldnot 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 Istood 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. Weof 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 broughtthe 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 notunderstand. 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 knewall 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 cutoff 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 tartanewould 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 whichwould 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 gentlebreeze 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 downearly, 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.
Perchedsideways on the circular wall bordering the well, in the full blaze of the midday sun, the rover of the distant seas and the fisherman of the lagoon, sharing between them a most surprising secret, had the air of two men conferring in the dark. The first word that Peyrol said was, “Well?”
“All quiet,” said the other.
“Have you fastened the cabin door properly?”
“You know what the fastenings are like.”
Peyrol could not deny that. It was a sufficient answer. It shifted the responsibility on to his shoulders, and all his life he had been accustomed to trust to the work of his own hands, in peace and in war. Yet he looked doubtfully at Michel before he remarked:
“Yes, but I know the man too.”
There could be no greater contrast than those two faces; Peyrol’s clean, like a carving of stone, and only very little softened by time, and that of the owner of the late dog, hirsute, with many silver threads, with something elusive in the features and the vagueness of expression of a baby in arms. “Yes, I know the man,” repeated Peyrol. Michel’s mouth fell open at this, a small oval set a little crookedly in the innocent face.
“He will never wake,” he suggested timidly.
The possession of a common and momentoussecret draws men together. Peyrol condescended to explain.
“You don’t know the thickness of his skull. I do.”
He spoke as though he had made it himself. Michel, who in the face of that positive statement had forgotten to shut his mouth, had nothing to say.
“He breathes all right?” asked Peyrol.
“Yes. After I got out and locked the door I listened for a bit and I thought I heard him snore.”
Peyrol looked interested and also slightly anxious.
“I had to come up and show myself this morning as if nothing had happened,” he said. “The officer has been here for two days, and he might have taken it into his head to go down to the tartane. I have been on the stretch all the morning. A goat jumping up was enough to give me a turn. Fancy him running up here with his broken head all bandaged up, with you after him.”
This seemed to be too much for Michel. He said almost indignantly:
“The man’s half killed.”
“It takes a lot to even half kill a Brother of the Coast. There are men and men. You, for instance,” Peyrol continued placidly, “you would have been altogether killed if it had been your head that got in the way. And there are animals, beasts twice your size, regular monsters, that may be killed with nothing more than just a tap on the nose. That’s well known. I was really afraid he would overcome you in some way or other....”
“Come, maître! One isn’t a little child,” protested Michel against this accumulation of improbabilities.He did it, however, only in a whisper and with childlike shyness. Peyrol folded his arms on his breast:
“Go, finish your soup,” he commanded in a low voice, “and then go down to the tartane. You locked the cabin door properly, you said?”
“Yes, I have,” protested Michel, staggered by this display of anxiety. “He could sooner burst the deck above his head, as you know.”
“All the same, take a small spar and shore up that door against the heel of the mast. And then watch outside. Don’t you go in to him on any account. Stay on deck and keep a lookout for me. There is a tangle here that won’t be easily cleared and I must be very careful. I will try to slip away and get down as soon as I get rid of that officer.”
The conference in the sunshine being ended, Peyrol walked leisurely out of the yard gate, and protruding his head beyond the corner of the house, saw Lieutenant Réal sitting on the bench. This he had expected to see. But he had not expected to see him there alone. It was just like this: wherever Arlette happened to be, there were worrying possibilities. But she might have been helping her aunt in the kitchen with her sleeves rolled up on such white arms as Peyrol had never seen on any woman before. The way she had taken to dressing her hair in a plait with a broad black velvet ribbon and an Arlesian cap was very becoming. She was wearing now her mother’s clothes of which there were chestfuls, altered for her of course. The late mistress of the Escampobar Farm had been an Arlesienne. Well-to-do, too. Yes, even for women’s clothes the Escampobar natives could do without intercourse with the outer world. It was quite timethat this confounded lieutenant went back to Toulon. This was the third day. His short leave must be up. Peyrol’s attitude towards naval officers had been always guarded and suspicious. His relations with them had been very mixed. They had been his enemies and his superiors. He had been chased by them. He had been trusted by them. The Revolution had made a clean cut across the consistency of his wild life—Brother of the Coast and gunner in the national Navy—and yet he was always the same man. It was like that, too, with them. Officers of the King, officers of the Republic, it was only changing the skin. All alike looked askance at a free rover. Even this one could not forget his epaulettes when talking to him. Scorn and mistrust of epaulettes were rooted deeply in old Peyrol. Yet he did not absolutely hate Lieutenant Réal. Only the fellow’s coming to the farm was generally a curse and his presence at that particular moment a confounded nuisance and to a certain extent even a danger. “I have no mind to be hauled to Toulon by the scruff of my neck,” Peyrol said to himself. There was no trusting those epaulette-wearers. Any one of them was capable of jumping on his best friend on account of some officer-like notion or other.
Peyrol, stepping round the corner, sat down by the side of Lieutenant Réal with the feeling somehow of coming to grips with a slippery customer. The lieutenant, as he sat there, unaware of Peyrol’s survey of his person, gave no notion of slipperiness. On the contrary, he looked rather immovably established. Very much at home. Too much at home. Even after Peyrol sat down by his side he continued to lookimmovable—or at least difficult to get rid of. In the still noonday heat the faint shrilling of cicadas was the only sound of life heard for quite a long time. Delicate, evanescent, cheerful, careless sort of life, yet not without passion. A sudden gloom seemed to be cast over the joy of the cicadas by the lieutenant’s voice though the words were the most perfunctory possible.
“Tiens! Vous voilà.”
In the stress of the situation Peyrol at once asked himself: Now why does he say that? Where did he expect me to be? The lieutenant need not have spoken at all. He had known him now for about two years off and on, and it had happened many times that they had sat side by side on that bench in a sort of “at arm’s length” equality without exchanging a single word. And why could he not have kept quiet now? That naval officer never spoke without an object, but what could one make of words like that? Peyrol achieved an insincere yawn and suggested mildly:
“A bit of siesta wouldn’t be amiss. What do you think, lieutenant?”
And to himself he thought: “No fear, he won’t go to his room.” He would stay there and thereby keep him, Peyrol, from going down to the cove. He turned his eyes on that naval officer and if extreme and concentrated desire and mere force of will could have had any effect Lieutenant Réal would certainly have been removed suddenly from that bench. But he didn’t move. And Peyrol was astonished to see that man smile, but what astonished him still more was to hear him say:
“The trouble is that you have never been frank with me, Peyrol.”
“Frank with you,” repeated the rover. “You want me to be frank with you? Well, I have wished you to the devil many times.”
“That’s better,” said Lieutenant Réal. “But why? I never tried to do you any harm.”
“Me harm,” cried Peyrol, “to me?”... But he faltered in his indignation as if frightened at it and ended in a very quiet tone: “You have been nosing in a lot of dirty papers to find something against a man who was not doingyouany harm and was a seaman before you were born.”
“Quite a mistake. There was no nosing amongst papers. I came on them quite by accident. I won’t deny I was intrigué finding a man of your sort living in this place. But don’t be uneasy. Nobody would trouble his head about you. It’s a long time since you have been forgotten. Have no fear.”
“You! You talk to me of fear ...? No,” cried the rover, “it’s enough to turn a fellow into a sans-culotte if it weren’t for the sight of that specimen sneaking around here.”
The lieutenant turned his head sharply, and for a moment the naval officer and the free sea rover looked at each other gloomily. When Peyrol spoke again he had changed his mood.
“Why should I fear anybody? I owe nothing to anybody. I have given them up the prize ship in order and everything else, except my luck; and for that I account to nobody,” he added darkly.
“I don’t know what you are driving at,” the lieutenant said after a moment of thought. “AllI know is that you seem to have given up your share of the prize money. There is no record of you ever claiming it.”
Peyrol did not like the sarcastic tone. “You have a nasty tongue,” he said, “with your damned trick of talking as if you were made of different clay.”
“No offence,” said the lieutenant, grave but a little puzzled. “Nobody will drag out that against you. It has been paid years ago to the Invalides’ fund. All this is buried and forgotten.”
Peyrol was grumbling and swearing to himself with such concentration that the lieutenant stopped and waited till he had finished.
“And there is no record of desertion or anything like that,” he continued then. “You stand there asdisparu. I believe that after searching for you a little they came to the conclusion that you had come by your death somehow or other.”
“Did they? Well, perhaps old Peyrol is dead. At any rate he has buried himself here.” The rover suffered from great instability of feelings, for he passed in a flash from melancholy into fierceness. “And he was quiet enough till you came sniffing around this hole. More than once in my life I had occasion to wonder how soon the jackals would have a chance to dig up my carcass; but to have a naval officer come scratching round here was the last thing....” Again a change came over him. “What can you want here?” he whispered, suddenly depressed.
The lieutenant fell into the humour of that discourse. “I don’t want to disturb the dead,” he said, turning full to the rover, who, after his last words, had fixedhis eyes on the ground. “I want to talk to the gunner Peyrol.”
Peyrol, without raising his eyes from the ground, growled: “He isn’t there. He isdisparu. Go and look at the papers again. Vanished. Nobody here.”
“That,” said Lieutenant Réal in a conversational tone, “that is a lie. He was talking to me this morning on the hill-side as we were looking at the English ship. He knows all about her. He told me he spent nights making plans for her capture. He seemed to be a fellow with his heart in the right place.Un homme de cœur.You know him.”
Peyrol raised his big head slowly and looked at the lieutenant.
“Humph,” he grunted. A heavy, non-committal grunt. His old heart was stirred, but the tangle was such that he had to be on his guard with any man who wore epaulettes. His profile preserved the immobility of a head struck on a medal while he listened to the lieutenant assuring him that this time he had come to Escampobar on purpose to speak with the gunner Peyrol. That he had not done so before was because it was a very confidential matter. At this point the lieutenant stopped and Peyrol made no sign. Inwardly he was asking himself what the lieutenant was driving at. But the lieutenant seemed to have shifted his ground. His tone, too, was slightly different. More practical.
“You say you have made a study of that English ship’s movements. Well, for instance, suppose a breeze springs up, as it very likely will towards the evening, could you tell me where she will be to-night? I mean, what her captain is likely to do.”
“No, I couldn’t,” said Peyrol.
“But you said you have been observing him minutely for weeks. There aren’t so many alternatives, and taking the weather and everything into consideration, you can judge almost with certainty.”
“No,” said Peyrol again. “It so happens that I can’t.”
“Can’t you? Then you are worse than any of the old admirals that you think so little of. Why can’t you?”
“I will tell you why,” said Peyrol after a pause and with a face more like a carving than ever. “It’s because the fellow has never come so far this way before. Therefore I don’t know what he has got in his mind, and in consequence I can’t guess what he will do next. I may be able to tell you some other day but not to-day. Next time when you come ... to see the old gunner.”
“No, it must be this time.”
“Do you mean you are going to stay here to-night?”
“Did you think I was here on leave? I tell you I am on service. Don’t you believe me?”
Peyrol let out a heavy sigh. “Yes, I believe you. And so they are thinking of catching her alive. And you are sent on service. Well, that doesn’t make it any easier for me to see you here.”
“You are a strange man, Peyrol,” said the lieutenant, “I believe you wish me dead.”
“No. Only out of this. But you are right. Peyrol is no friend either to your face or to your voice. They have done harm enough already.”
They had never attained to such intimate terms before. There was no need for them to look at eachother. The lieutenant thought: “Ah! he can’t keep his jealousy in.” There was no scorn or malice in that thought. It was much more like despair. He said mildly:
“You snarl like an old dog, Peyrol.”
“I have felt sometimes as if I could fly at your throat,” said Peyrol in a sort of calm whisper. “And it amuses you the more.”
“Amuses me. Do I look light-hearted?”
Again Peyrol turned his head slowly for a long, steady stare. And again the naval officer and the rover gazed at each other with a searching and sombre frankness. This new-born intimacy could go no further.
“Listen to me, Peyrol....”
“No,” said the other. “If you want to talk, talk to the gunner.”
Though he seemed to have adopted the notion of a double personality, the rover did not seem to be much easier in one character than in the other. Furrows of perplexity appeared on his brow, and as the lieutenant did not speak at once, Peyrol the gunner asked impatiently:
“So they are thinking of catching her alive.” It did not please him to hear the lieutenant say that it was not exactly this that the chiefs in Toulon had in their minds. Peyrol at once expressed the opinion that of all the naval chiefs that ever were, Citizen Renaud was the only one that was worth anything. Lieutenant Réal, disregarding the challenging tone, kept to the point.
“What they want to know is whether that English corvette interferes much with the coast traffic.”
“No, she doesn’t,” said Peyrol, “she leaves poor people alone unless, I suppose, some craft acts suspiciously. I have seen her give chase to one or two. But even those she did not detain. Michel—you know Michel?—has heard from the mainland people that she has captured several at various times. Of course, strictly speaking, nobody is safe.”
“Well, no. I wonder now what that Englishman would call ‘acting suspiciously.’”
“Ah, now you are asking something. Don’t you know what an Englishman is? One day easy and casual, next day ready to pounce on you like a tiger. Hard in the morning, careless in the afternoon, and only reliable in a fight, whether with or against you, but for the rest perfectly fantastic. You might think a little touched in the head, and there again it would not do to trust to that notion either.”
The lieutenant lending an attentive ear, Peyrol smoothed his brow and discoursed with gusto of Englishmen as if they had been a strange, very little-known tribe. “In a manner of speaking,” he concluded, “the oldest bird of them all can be caught with chaff, but not every day.” He shook his head, smiling to himself faintly, as if remembering a quaint passage or two.
“You didn’t get all that knowledge of the English while you were a gunner,” observed the lieutenant dryly.
“There you go again,” said Peyrol. “And what’s that to you where I learned it all? Suppose I learned it all from a man who is dead now. Put it down to that.”
“I see. It amounts to this, that one can’t get at the back of their minds very easily.”
“No,” said Peyrol, then added grumpily, “and some Frenchmen are not much better. I wish I could get at the back of your mind.”
“You would find a service matter there, gunner, that’s what you would find there, and a matter that seems nothing much at first sight, but when you look into it, is about as difficult to manage properly as anything you ever undertook in your life. It puzzled all the big-wigs. It must have, since I was called in. Of course I work on shore at the Admiralty, and I was in the way. They showed me the order from Paris and I could see at once the difficulty of it. I pointed it out and I was told....”
“To come here,” struck in Peyrol.
“No. To make arrangements to carry it out.”
“And you began by coming here. You are always coming here.”
“I began by looking for a man,” said the naval officer with emphasis.
Peyrol looked at him searchingly. “Do you mean to say that in the whole fleet you couldn’t have found a man?”
“I never attempted to look for one there. My chief agreed with me that it isn’t a service for navy men.”
“Well, it must be something nasty for a naval man to admit that much. What is the order? I don’t suppose you came over here without being ready to show it to me.”
The lieutenant plunged his hand into the inside pocket of his naval jacket and then brought it out empty.
“Understand, Peyrol,” he said earnestly, “this is nota service of fighting. Good men are plentiful for that. The object is to play the enemy a trick.”
“Trick?” said Peyrol in a judicial tone, “that’s all right. I have seen in the Indian seas Monsieur Surcouf play tricks on the English ... seen them with my own eyes, deceptions, disguises, and such-like.... That’s quite sound in war.”
“Certainly. The order for this one comes from the First Consul himself, for it is no small matter. It’s to deceive the English Admiral.”
“What—that Nelson? Ah! but he is a cunning one.”
After expressing that opinion the old rover pulled out a red bandana handkerchief and after rubbing his face with it, repeated his opinion deliberately: “Celui-là est un malin.”
This time the lieutenant really brought out a paper from his pocket and saying, “I have copied the order for you to see,” handed it to the rover, who took it from him with a doubtful air.
Lieutenant Réal watched old Peyrol handling it at arm’s length, then with his arm bent trying to adjust the distance to his eyesight, and wondered whether he had copied it in a hand big enough to be read easily by the gunner Peyrol. The order ran like this: “You will make up a packet of dispatches and pretended private letters as if from officers, containing a clear statement besides hints calculated to convince the enemy that the destination of the fleet now fitting in Toulon is for Egypt and generally for the East. That packet you will send by sea in some small craft to Naples, taking care that the vessel should fall into the enemy’s hands.” The Préfet Maritime had called Réal, had shown him the paragraph of the letter fromParis, had turned the page over and laid his finger on the signature, “Bonaparte.” Then, after giving him a meaning glance, the admiral locked up the paper in a drawer and put the key in his pocket. Lieutenant Réal had written the passage down from memory directly the notion of consulting Peyrol had occurred to him.
The rover, screwing his eyes and pursing his lips, had come to the end of it. The lieutenant extended his hand negligently and took the paper away: “Well, what do you think?” he asked. “You understand that there can be no question of any ship of war being sacrificed to that dodge. What do you think of it?”
“Easier said than done,” opined Peyrol curtly.
“That’s what I told my admiral.”
“Is he a lubber, so that you had to explain it to him?”
“No, gunner, he is not. He listened to me, nodding his head.”
“And what did he say when you finished?”
“He said: ‘Parfaitement. Have you got any ideas about it?’ And I said—listen to me, gunner—I said: ‘Oui, mon Amiral, I think I’ve got a man,’ and the admiral interrupted me at once: ‘All right, you don’t want to talk to me about him, I put you in charge of that affair and give you a week to arrange it. When it’s done report to me. Meantime you may just as well take this packet.’ They were already prepared, Peyrol, all those faked letters and dispatches. I carried it out of the admiral’s room, a parcel done up in sail-cloth, properly corded and sealed. I have had it in my possession for three days. It’s upstairs in my valise.”
“That doesn’t advance you very much,” growled old Peyrol.
“No,” admitted the lieutenant. “I can also dispose of a few thousand francs.”
“Francs,” repeated Peyrol. “Well, you had better get back to Toulon and try to bribe some man to put his head into the jaws of the English lion.”
Réal reflected, then said slowly, “I wouldn’t tell any man that. Of course a service of danger, that would be understood.”
“It would be. And if you could get a fellow with some sense in his caboche, he would naturally try to slip past the English fleet and maybe do it, too. And then where’s your trick?”
“We could give him a course to steer.”
“Yes. And it may happen that your course would just take him clear of all Nelson’s fleet, for you never can tell what the English are doing. They might be watering in Sardinia.”
“Some cruisers are sure to be out and pick him up.”
“Maybe. But that’s not doing the job, that’s taking a chance. Do you think you are talking to a toothless baby—or what?”
“No, my gunner. It will take a strong man’s teeth to undo that knot.” A moment of silence followed. Then Peyrol assumed a dogmatic tone.
“I will tell you what it is, lieutenant. This seems to me just the sort of order that a land-lubber would give to good seamen. You daren’t deny that.”
“I don’t deny it,” the lieutenant admitted. “And look at the whole difficulty. For supposing even that the tartane blunders right into the English fleet, as if it had been indeed arranged, they would just look intoher hold or perhaps poke their noses here and there, but it would never occur to them to search for dispatches, would it? Our man, of course, would have them well hidden, wouldn’t he? He is not to know. And if he were ass enough to leave them lying about the decks, the English would at once smell a rat there. But what I think he would do would be to throw the dispatches overboard.”
“Yes—unless he is told the nature of the job,” said Peyrol.
“Evidently. But where’s the bribe big enough to induce a man to taste of the English pontoons?”
“The man will take the bribe all right and then will do his best not to be caught; and if he can’t avoid that, he will take jolly good care that the English should find nothing on board his tartane. Oh no, lieutenant, any damn scallywag that owns a tartane will take a couple of thousand francs from your hand as tame as can be; but as to deceiving the English Admiral, it’s the very devil of an affair. Didn’t you think of all that before you spoke to the big epaulettes that gave you the job?”
“I did see it, and I put it all before him,” the lieutenant said, lowering his voice still more, for their conversation had been carried on in undertones though the house behind them was silent and solitude reigned round the approaches of Escampobar Farm. It was the hour of siesta—for those that could sleep. The lieutenant, edging closer towards the old man, almost breathed the words in his ear.
“What I wanted was to hear you say all those things. Do you understand now what I meant this morning on the lookout? Don’t you remember what I said?”
Peyrol, gazing into space, spoke in a level murmur.
“I remember a naval officer trying to shake old Peyrol off his feet and not managing to do it. I may bedisparubut I am too solid yet for any blancbec that loses his temper, devil only knows why. And it’s a good thing that you didn’t manage it, else I would have taken you down with me, and we would have made our last somersault together for the amusement of an English ship’s company. A pretty end that!”
“Don’t you remember me saying, when you mentioned that the English would have sent a boat to go through our pockets, that this would have been the perfect way?” In his stony immobility, with the other man leaning towards his ear, Peyrol seemed a mere insensible receptacle for whispers, and the lieutenant went on forcibly: “Well, it was in allusion to this affair, for, look here, gunner, what could be more convincing, if they had found the packet of dispatches on me! What would have been their surprise, their wonder! Not the slightest doubt could enter their heads. Could it, gunner? Of course it couldn’t. I can imagine the captain of that corvette crowding sail on her to get this packet into the admiral’s hands. The secret of the Toulon fleet’s destination found on the body of a dead officer. Wouldn’t they have exulted at their enormous piece of luck! But they wouldn’t have called it accidental. Oh no! They would have called it providential. I know the English a little too. They like to have God on their side—the only ally they never need pay a subsidy to. Come, gunner, would it not have been a perfect way?”
Lieutenant Réal threw himself back, and Peyrol, still like a carven image of grim dreaminess, growled softly:
“Time yet. The English ship is still in the Passe.” He waited a little in his uncanny living-statue manner before he added viciously: “You don’t seem in a hurry to go and take that leap.”
“Upon my word, I am almost sick enough of life to do it,” the lieutenant said in a conversational tone.
“Well, don’t forget to run upstairs and take that packet with you before you go,” said Peyrol as before. “But don’t wait for me, I am not sick of life. I amdisparu, and that’s good enough. There’s no need for me to die.”
And at last he moved in his seat, swung his head from side to side as if to make sure that his neck had not been turned to stone, emitted a short laugh, and grumbled: “Disparu!Hein! Well, I am damned!” as if the word “vanished” had been a gross insult to enter against a man’s name in a register. It seemed to rankle, as Lieutenant Réal observed with some surprise; or else it was something inarticulate that rankled, manifesting itself in that funny way. The lieutenant, too, had a moment of anger which flamed and went out at once in the deadly cold philosophic reflection: “We are victims of the destiny which has brought us together.” Then again his resentment flamed. Why should he have stumbled against that girl or that woman, he didn’t know how he must think of her, and suffer so horribly for it? He who had endeavoured almost from a boy to destroy all the softer feelings within himself. His changing moods of distaste, of wonder at himself and at the unexpected turns of life,wore the aspect of profound abstraction, from which he was recalled by an outburst of Peyrol’s, not loud but fierce enough.
“No,” cried Peyrol, “I am too old to break my bones for the sake of a lubberly soldier in Paris who fancies he has invented something clever.”
“I don’t ask you to,” the lieutenant said, with extreme severity, in what Peyrol would call an epaulette-wearer’s voice. “You old sea-bandit. And it wouldn’t be for the sake of a soldier anyhow. You and I are Frenchmen after all.”
“You have discovered that, have you?”
“Yes,” said Réal. “This morning, listening to your talk on the hillside with that English corvette within one might say a stone’s throw.”
“Yes,” groaned Peyrol. “A French-built ship!” He struck his breast a resounding blow. “It hurts one there to see her. It seemed to me I could jump down on her deck single-handed.”
“Yes, there you and I understood each other,” said the lieutenant. “But look here, this affair is a much bigger thing than getting back a captured corvette. In reality it is much more than merely playing a trick on an admiral. It’s a part of a deep plan, Peyrol! It’s another stroke to help us on the way towards a great victory at sea.”