Turning a rocky corner we find that the rain and the wind have suddenly ceased. And as if by magic the aspect of things is entirely changed.
We see before us as far as eye commands a great flat country, a barren moor, bare as a desert: the old country of Léon, in the background of which, far away, stands the granite shaft of the Creizker.
And yet this mournful country has a charm of its own, and Yves smiles as he perceives his tower towards which we are moving.
The gorse is in blossom and the whole plain has a colour of gold, varied in places by stretches pink with heather. A veil of pearl-grey mist, of a tint peculiar to the north, very soft and subtle, entirely covers the sky; and in the monotony of this pink and yellow country, on the extreme edge of the far horizon, nothing but these outstanding points: the silhouette of Saint Pol and the three dark towers.
Some little Breton girls are driving flocks of sheep before them through the heather; some young lads, caracoling on horses which they ride bareback, startle them; little traps pass laden with women in white coifs who are on their way to hear mass in the town. The bells are ringing, the road is gaily animated; we arrive.
CHAPTER X
After we had lunched together at the best inn, we found that the winter's morning had yielded place to a fine May day. In the empty little streets, branches of lilac, clusters of wistaria, pink foxgloves which no one had sown brightened the grey walls; the sun was really shining and all about was a savour of spring.
And Yves took in everything, marvelling that no recollection of his early childhood came back to him, seeking, seeking in the dim background of his memory, recognizing nothing, and then, little by little, becoming disillusioned.
On the grand'place of Saint Pol the crowd of the Sunday was assembled. It seemed a picture of the Middle Ages. The cathedral of the old bishops of Léon dominated the square, overwhelming it with its dark denticulated mass, throwing over it a great shadow of bygone times. Around were ancient houses with gables and little turrets; all the drinkers of the Sunday, wearing aslant their wide felt hats, were sitting at table before the doors. This crowd in its Breton dress, living and alert here, this, too, might have been a crowd of olden days; in the air, one heard vibrate only the harsh syllables, the northern ya of the Celtic tongue.
Yves passed rather distractedly into the church, over the memorial stones and over the old bishops asleep beneath.
But he stopped, suddenly thoughtful, at the door, before the baptismal font.
"Look!" he said. "They held me above this. And we must have lived quite near here; my poor mother has often told me that, on the day of my baptism, on the day, you know, when they so cruelly insulted us by not ringing the bell for me, she had heard, from her bed, the singing of the priests."
Unfortunately Yves had omitted to obtain from his mother, at Plouherzel, the information necessary to identify the house in which they used to live.
He had reckoned on his godmother, Yvonne Kergaoc by name, who, he understood, lived quite close to the church. And on our arrival we had asked for this Yvonne Kergaoc: "Kergaoc." . . . They remembered her well.
"But from where do you come, my good sirs? . . . She is dead these twelve years!"
As for the Kermadecs no one had any recollection of them. And it was scarcely to be wondered at: it was more than twenty years since they left the town.
We climbed the tower of Creizker; naturally it was high, it seemed never to end, this point in the air. We greatly disturbed the old crows who had their nests in the granite.
A marvellous lace-work of grey stone, which mounted, mounted endlessly, and was so slender it produced sensations of vertigo. We climbed within it by a narrow and steep spiral staircase, discovering through all the openings of the "open tower" infinite vistas.
At the top, isolated, the two of us, in the keen air and the blue sky, we saw things as a hovering bird might see them. First, below our feet, were the crows which whirled in a dark cloud, giving us a concert of mournful cries; much lower, the old town of Saint Pol, all flattened out, a Lilliputian crowd moving about in its little grey streets, like a swarm of ants; as far as eye could see, to the south, stretched the Breton country up to the Black Mountains; and, to the north, was the port of Roscoff, with thousands of strange little rocks riddling with their pointed tops the mirror of the sea—the mirror of the great pale blue sea which stretched away to mingle in the farthest distance with the similar blue of the sky.
It pleased us to have succeeded at last in climbing this Creizker, which had so many times watched us pass in the midst of that infinity of water; it was so calm, planted there, so permanent, so inaccessible and unchanging, while we, poor waifs of the sea, were at the mercy of every angry wind that blew.
This granite lace-work which supported us in the air had been smoothed and worn by the winds and rains of four hundred winters. It was of a grey deepened by warm pinkish tones; and over it, in patches, was that yellow lichen, that moss peculiar to granite, which takes centuries to grow and throws its golden tint over all the old Breton churches. The ugly-faced gargoyles, the little monsters with irregular features, who live high up there in the air, were making faces at our side in the sun, as if they resented being looked at from so near, as if they were surprised themselves to be so old, to have endured through so many tempests and to find themselves once more in the sunlight. It was these people who had presided from above over the birth of Yves; it was these people also who from afar watched us with friendliness as we passed by at sea, when we, for our part, saw only a vague black shaft. And now we were making their acquaintance.
Yves was still very disappointed, however, that he had discovered no trace of his old home nor of his father; no recollection, either in the memory of others or his own. And he continued to gaze upon the grey houses below, especially at those which were nearest the foot of the tower, awaiting some intuition of the place where he was born.
We had now only half an hour to spend in Saint Pol before catching the evening diligence. Tomorrow morning we should have to be back in Brest, where our ship was waiting to take us once more very far from Brittany.
We sat down to drink some cider in an inn on the Place de l'Église, and there again we questioned the hostess, who was a very old woman. And she, as chance would have it, started suddenly on hearing Yves' name.
"You are Yves Kermadec's son?" she said. "Oh! Did I know your parents! I should think so, indeed. We were neighbours in those days. Why, when you arrived in the world, they sent to fetch me. But you are like your father, you know! I watched you when you came in. But you are not so handsome as he, bless me, though, to be sure, you are a fine-looking man."
Yves, at this compliment, glanced at me, repressing a strong inclination to smile; and then the old woman, growing very talkative, began to tell him a multitude of things over which more than twenty years had passed, while he listened attentive and greatly moved.
Then she called some other old women, who also had been neighbours, and they all began to talk.
"Bless my soul!" they said. "How is it that no one was able to answer you sooner? Everybody remembers them, remembers your parents. But people are stupid in these parts; and then, when strangers come in this way, it isn't surprising that people should hesitate to talk."
Yves' father had left in the country round a reputation a little legendary of a kind of giant of rare beauty, who was never able to conform to the ways of others.
"What a pity, sir, that such a man should so often go astray! It was the tavern that ruined him, your poor father; for all that, he was very fond of his wife and children, he was very gentle with them, and in the country round everybody loved him except M. le Curé."
"Except M. le Curé!" Yves repeated to me in a low voice, becoming serious. "You see it is what I told you, on the subject of my baptism."
"One day, there was a battle, here on the square, in 1848, for the revolution; your father withstood single-handed the market people and saved the life of the Mayor."
"He had a big horse," said the hostess, "which was so wild that no one dared to approach it. And people kept out of the way, I assure you, when he passed mounted on the beast."
"Ah!" said Yves, struck suddenly with a recollection which seemed to have come to him from a great distance. "I remember that horse, and I recall that my father used to lift me up and sit me on it when it was tied in the stable. It is the first recollection I have of my father and I can just picture a little his face. The horse was black, was it not, with white hoofs?"
"That's it! That's it," said the old woman. "Black with white hoofs. It was a wild beast, and, bless my soul! what an idea for a sailor to have a horse!"
The inn is full of men drinking cider. They make a cheerful noise of glasses and Breton conversations. And gradually they gather round and make a sort of circle about us.
The hostess has four granddaughters, all alike, and all ravishingly pretty in their white coifs. They do not look like daughters of an inn. They are the perfect type of the handsome Breton race of the north, and they have the calm, thoughtful expression of those women of olden times which the old portraits have preserved for us. They, too, gathered round us, looking and listening.
We are questioned in our turn. Yves replies: "My mother is still living at Plouherzel with my two sisters. My two brothers, Gildas and Goulven, are at sea, on American whalers. I myself have been for the last ten years in the Navy."
There is not much time to lose if we want to see before we go the old home of the Kermadecs. It is quite near, by the very side of the church. They show it to us from the door, and advise us to ask to be allowed to see the room on the left, on the first floor; that is the room in which Yves was born.
At the side of the house is the large abandoned park of the bishopric of Léon, where, it seems, Yves, when he was quite a little child, used to play every day in the grass with Goulven. It is very thick to-day, this grass of May, and full of Easter daisies and silenes. In the park roses and lilac are growing wild now, as in a wood.
We knock at the door of the house which the good women have pointed out to us, and those who live there are a little surprised at the request we make. But we do not inspire distrust, and they ask us only not to make a noise when we enter the first floor room, on account of the old grandmother who is sleeping there and is on the point of death. And then, considerately, they leave us alone.
We enter on tiptoe. It is a large room, poor and almost empty. The things in it seem to have a presentiment of the grim visitor who is expected; one is tempted almost to ask whether he has not already arrived, and our eyes glance uneasily at a bed, the curtains of which are drawn. Yves looks all round, trying to stretch his intelligence into the past, to force himself as it were to remember. But it is no use. It is finished; and even here he can find nothing.
We were descending preparatory to leaving, when suddenly something came back to him like a light in the distance.
"Ah!" he said, "I think now that I recognize this staircase. Wait! Below there should be a door on that side leading into a yard, and a well on the left with a large tree, and, at the back, the stable where we used to keep the horse with the white hoofs."
It was as if there had suddenly come a break in the clouds. Yves stood still on the stairs, gazing through this gap which had just been opened on the past; he was thrilled to feel himself at grips with that mysterious thing which men call memory.
Below, in the yard, we found everything as he had described it, the well on the left, the tree, the stable. And Yves said to me with an emotion of awe, removing his hat as if he were by a grave:
"Now I can see quite clearly my father's face."
It was high time to depart, and the diligence was waiting for us.
Throughout our journey over this golden-coloured moor, during the long May twilight, our eyes were fixed on the Creizker tower which was disappearing in the distance, and was lost at last in the depths of the limpid darkness. We were bidding it adieu, for we were going to leave to-morrow for very distant seas, where it would no longer be able to see us pass.
"To-morrow morning," said Yves, "you must let me come into your room on board very early, so that I may write at your desk. I want to tell all that we have found out to my mother before leaving France. And, you know, I am sure that tears will come into her eyes when my letter is read to her."
CHAPTER XI
June, 1875.
It was now the twentieth parallel of latitude, in the region of the trade winds. The hour was about six in the morning. On the deck of a ship which rode solitary in the midst of the immense blue, was a group of young men, stripped to the waist, in the warmth of the rising sun.
It was Yves' band, the topmen of the foremast and those of the bowsprit.
They had thrown over their shoulders, all of them, the handkerchiefs which they had just washed, and they stood there gravely with back to the sun to dry them. Their bronzed faces, their laughter, had still a youthful, almost childlike, grace, and in their movements, in the supple, flexible way in which they placed their bare feet there was something catlike.
And every morning, at this same hour, in this same sunshine, in this same costume, this group foregathered on these same boards which carried them along, all heedless, in the midst of the infinity of the sea.
This particular morning they were talking about the moon, about its human face, which had remained with them since the night as a pale, persistent image graven in their memory. Throughout their watch they had seen it on high, solitary and round, in the midst of the immense bluish void; they had even been obliged to cover their faces (as they slept on their backs in the open) on account of the maladies and evil spells it casts on the eyes of sailors, when they sleep under its gaze.
There were some amongst them who preserved still, and in spite of all, a great air of nobility, a something indescribably superb in their expression and general appearance; and the contrast between their aspect and the simple things they said was singular.
There was Jean Barrada, the sceptic of the company, who broke into the discussion from time to time with a sarcastic burst of laughter, showing his white teeth always and throwing back his handsome head. There was Clet Kerzulec, a Breton from the island of Ushant, who was preoccupied especially with the human features stamped on the pale disc. And then big Barazère, who posed as a thinker and scholar, assuring them that it was a world much larger than ours and inhabited by strange peoples.
They shook their heads, incredulous, at this, and Yves, very thoughtful, said:
"You know, Barazfère, there are things . . . there are things about which I don't believe you know very much."
And then he added, with an air which cut short the discussion, that in any case, he was going to find me and get me to explain to him what the moon really was.
There was no doubt in their minds that I should be well-informed about the moon as about everything else. For they had often seen me occupied in watching its progress through a copper instrument in company with a signalman who counted for me out loud, with the monotonous voice of a clock, the tranquil minutes and seconds of the night.
Meanwhile, the little handkerchiefs were drying on the bare backs of the men, and the sun was mounting in the wide blue sky.
Some of these little handkerchiefs were all uniformly white; others had pictures on them in many colours; and some even had great ships printed in the middle in a red frame.
I, whose watch it was, gave the order: "'Way aloft! Loose the topsail reef!" And the boat-swain appeared among the talkers blowing his silver whistle. Then suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, like a band of cats on whom a dog has been loosed, they all scattered, running, into the masting.
Yves lived aloft in his top. Looking up, one was sure to see his tall, slim silhouette against the sky. But one rarely met him below.
It was I who used to climb from time to time to visit him, although my duty no longer required me to do so, since I had been promoted from the rank of midshipman; but I was rather fond of this domain of Yves where one was fanned by a still purer air.
In this top, he had his little belongings; a pack of playing cards in a box, needles and thread for sewing, stolen bananas, greenstuffs taken during the night from the Commander's store, anything he was able to find in his nocturnal marauding that was fresh and green (sailors are partial to these rare things which soothe gums parched by salt). And then he had his "parrot" attached by a claw, its eyes blinking in the sun.
The "parrot" was a large-headed owl of the pampas which had fallen on board one day after a high wind.
There are some strange destinies on the earth, but few stranger than that of this owl making the tour of the world at the top of a mast. How unexpected a fate!
He knew his master and welcomed him with little joyous flappings of his wings. Yves fed him regularly with his own ration of meat, although he used to let him loose.
It amused him greatly to peer into its eyes from quite near, and to see how it shrank away, and arched its back with an air of offended dignity, nodding its head after the manner of a bear. Then he would burst out laughing, and say to it in his Breton accent:
"Oh! but you are a stupid little fool, my old parrot!"
From aloft one dominated as from a great height the deck of the Sibylle, a Sibylle flattened out and tapering, very strange to see from this domain of Yves, having the appearance of a long wooden fish, whose colour of new spruce contrasted with the deep and infinite blues of the sea.
And, through all these transparent blues, behind, in our wake, a little grey thing having the same shape as the ship which it followed unceasingly under water: the shark. It is always one shark which follows, rarely two; but if the one is caught, another comes. For days and nights it follows, follows without ever getting tired, waiting for what may fall from the ship: debris of any kind, living men or dead men.
And now and then a number of quite small swallows came also to bear us company, amusing themselves, for a while, in picking up the crumbs of biscuits which we scattered behind us in this watery desert, and then disappeared in the distance describing joyous curves. Little beasts of a rare kind, reddish in colour with a white tail, which live one knows not how, lost amid the great waters, always in the open sea.
Yves, who wanted one, set traps for them, but they were too shrewd to be caught.
We were approaching the Equator, and the regular breath of the trade wind began to die away. There were now erratic breezes which shifted suddenly, followed by times of calm in which everything became immobilized in a kind of immense blue splendour; and then the yards, the tops, and the great white sails were reflected in the water in the form of inverted pictures undulating and incomplete.
The Sibylle scarcely moved, she was slow and lazy, she had the movements of one half asleep. In the great moist heat, which even the nights did not diminish, things, as well as men, seemed to be taken with drowsiness. Gradually in the air a strange calm began to reign. And presently clouds, heavy and obscure, gathered over the warm sea like large dark curtains. The Equator was now quite near.
Sometimes flights of swallows, large ones these and strange in movement, rose suddenly from the sea, taking flight in startled fashion with long pointed wings of a glistening blue, and then settled again, and one saw them no more. These were shoals of flying-fish which had lain in our course and which we had disturbed.
The sails, the cordage hung limp, like dead things; we drifted lifeless like a wreck.
Aloft, in Yves' domain, might still be felt some slow movements which were no longer perceptible below. In this motionless air saturated with rays, the crow's nest continued to rock with a tranquil regularity which conduced to slumber. There were long slow oscillations accompanied always by the same flappings of drooping sails, the same creakings of dry wood.
It was intensely hot, and the light had a surprising splendour, and the mournful sea was of a milky blue, of the colour of melted turquoise.
But when the strange dense clouds, which travelled low so as almost to touch the water, passed over us, they brought us night and drenched us with a deluge of rain.
We were now directly under the Equator; and it seemed that there was no breath of air there to carry us forward.
They lasted for hours, sometimes for a whole day, this darkness and these tropical storms. Then Yves and his friends assumed a uniform which they called the "uniform of savages," and sat them down, all heedless, under the warm downpour and let it rain as it would.
And then suddenly the weather changed. The black curtain of clouds drew slowly away, continuing its sluggish progress, over the turquoise coloured sea; and the splendid light reappeared more astonishing than ever after the darkness; and the powerful equatorial sun proceeded to drink up very quickly all this water that had been poured upon us; the sails, the woodwork of the ship, the awnings recovered their whiteness in the sunshine; the Sibylle in its entirety took on once more its normal clear colour in the midst of the vast blue monotony which stretched everywhere around.
Looking down from the top in which Yves lived, one saw that this blue world was without limit, that its clear depths were without end. One felt that the horizon, the last line of the waters, was a great distance away, although it did not differ at all from the immediate surroundings, having always the same clearness, always the same colour, always the same mirror-like polish. And one realized then the roundness of the earth, which alone set a limit to the vision.
At the hour of sunset there were in the air kinds of vaults formed of successions of tiny golden clouds; they were repeated, in diminishing perspective, until they almost disappeared in the empty distance; one followed them to the point of vertigo; they were like the naves of Apocalyptic temples having no end. And the air was so clear that it needed the horizon of the sea to shut out the vista of these depths of the sky; the last little golden clouds formed as it were a tangent to the line of the waters, and seemed, in their remoteness, as delicate as the finest of hatching.
At other times there were simply long bands which traversed the sky, gold on gold: the clouds of a bright and as if incandescent gold, on a Byzantine background of dull and tarnished gold. The sea below took on a certain shade of peacock blue with reflections of molten metal. Afterwards all this faded very quickly into deep transparencies, into shadowy colours to which it was not possible to give a name.
And the nights which followed, even they were luminous; when everything slept in heavy immobility, in a silence of death, the stars appeared above more brilliant than in any other region of the world.
And the sea also was illumined in its depths. There was a kind of immense diffused light in the waters. The slightest movements—of the ship in its slow progress, of the shark as it turned about in our wake—disclosed in the warm eddies lights like that of the glow-worm. And, besides, on the great phosphorescent mirror of the sea, there were thousands of fleeting flames; it was as if there were myriads of little lamps which lit themselves everywhere, burnt for a few seconds and then went out. These nights were aswoon with heat, full of phosphorus, and all this dimmed immensity was pregnant with light, and all these waters were replete with latent life in its rudimentary state as formerly the mournful waters of the primitive world.
CHAPTER XII
It was some days now since we had left behind us the tranquillities of the Equator, and we were proceeding slowly towards the south, driven by the south trade wind. One morning Yves entered my room full of business, in order to prepare his lines for catching birds: "We have seen," he said, "the first 'draught-boards' behind us."
These "draught-boards" are birds of the open sea, near relatives of the sea-gull, and the most beautiful of all the tribe: snowy white, the plumage soft and silky, with a black draught-board finely designed on the wings.
The first "draught-boards!" Their appearance reminds us of the distance we have travelled; it is a sign that we have left well behind us our northern hemisphere, and that we are approaching the cold regions which lie on the other side of the earth, in the far south.
They were before their due time nevertheless, these "draught-boards"; for we were still in the blue zone of the trade winds. And all day long, and every day, and every night, was the same breeze, regular, warm, and exquisite to respire; and the same transparent sea, and the same little white fleecy clouds passing peacefully across the lofty heaven; and the same bands of flying fish rising up in foolish alarm with their long wet wings, and shining in the sun like birds of bluish steel.
There were quantities of these flying-fish; and when it happened that one of them was foolish enough to alight on board, the topmen quickly cut off its wings and ate it.
The time when Yves used to like to descend from his crow's nest and come to visit me in my room was in the evening, especially after the assembly at evening quarters. He would come very quietly, without making in his bare feet any more noise than a cat. He would drink some fresh water straight out of a water-cooler which hung at my port-hole, and then set to work putting in order divers things which belonged to me; or, maybe, he would read some novel. There was one especially of George Sand's which enthralled him, "Le Marquis de Villemer." At the first reading I had surprised him on the point of tears, towards the end.
Yves could sew very skilfully, as all good sailors can, and it was quaint to see him engaged in this work, given his size and aspect. During his evening visits he used to overhaul my uniform and do any repairs which he judged were beyond the skill of my servant to attend to properly.
CHAPTER XIII
We sailed steadily, fully rigged, towards the south. Now there were clouds of "draught-boards" and other sea-birds in attendance upon us. They followed us, wondering and confident, from morning until night, crying, throwing themselves about, flying in erratic curves—as if in welcome to us, another great bird with canvas wings, which was entering their distant and infinite domain, the Southern Pacific Ocean.
And their numbers increased daily in measure as we progressed. With the "draught-boards" there were pearl-grey petrels, the beak and claws lightly tinted with blue and pink; and black molly-mawks; and great, heavy albatrosses, dirty in colour, with their stupid sheepish air, with their immense rigid wings, cleaving the air, whining after us. There was one among them which the sailors pointed out to one another; an Admiral, a bird of a rare and enormous kind, with three stars marked in black on its long wings.
The weather had changed and become calm, misty, mournful. The south trade wind had died away in its turn, and the clearness of the tropics was no more. A great damp cold surprised our senses. We were in August and the winter of the southern hemisphere was beginning. When we looked round the empty horizon, it seemed that the north, the side of the sun and of living countries, was still blue and clear; while the south, the side of the Pole and of the watery deserts, was dark and gloomy.
As a favour to me, Yves had obtained for his parrot a reserved compartment in the Commander's hen coop, and he used to go every evening to cover it with a piece of sailcloth in order to protect it from the night air.
Every day the sailors used to "fish" with their lines for "draught-boards" and petrels. There were rows of these birds, skinned like rabbits, hanging all red in the foreshrouds, waiting their turn to be eaten. After two or three days, when they had rendered all the oil in their bodies, they were ready for cooking.
These foreshrouds were the larder of the topmen. By the side of the "draught-boards" and the petrels, even rats might sometimes be seen, stripped also of their skin, and hung by the tail.
One night we heard suddenly the rising of a great fearsome voice, and everybody bestirred himself and took to running.
At the same time the Sibylle leaned over, shuddering, as if in the grip of a tenebrous power.
Then even those who were not of the watch, even those who were sleeping on the spar deck, understood: it was the beginning of the great winds and the great swell; we had now entered the stormy latitudes of the south, amid which we should have to fight for our existence and at the same time make headway.
And the farther we advanced into this sullen ocean, the colder became the wind, and the more mountainous the swell.
The fall of the nights became sinister. We were in the neighbourhood of Cape Horn: desolation on the only land that was anywhere near, desolation on the sea, everywhere a desert. At this hour of the winter twilight, when one felt more particularly the need of a shelter, of getting near a fire, of covering under which to sleep—we had nothing, nothing—we kept vigil, for ever on the alert, lost amid all these moving things which made us dance in the darkness.
We tried hard to create an illusion of home in the little cabins rudely shaken, where swung the suspended lamps. But it was no use; there was no stability anywhere: we were in a little frail thing, lost, far from any land, in the midst of the immense desert of the southern waters. And, outside, we heard continuously the roar of the waves and the mournful moaning of the wind which smote the heart.
And Yves, for his part, had no more than his poor swinging hammock, in which, one night out of two, he was allowed the leisure to sleep a little warmly.
CHAPTER XIV
It was one morning, as we were entering the Celebean Sea, that the owl which was Yves' parrot died, a morning of high wind on which we took in the second reef of the topsail. It was accidentally crushed between the mast and the yard.
Yves, who heard its hoarse cry, rushed to its assistance, but too late. He came down from the crow's nest carrying the poor thing in his hand, dead, flattened out, having no longer the shape of a bird, a mash of blood and grey feathers, out of which emerged, moving still, one poor curled-up claw.
I could see that Yves was very much upset. But he did no more than show it to me without a word, biting his disdainful underlip. Then he threw it into the sea, and the shark which was following us swallowed it as if it had been an ablet.
CHAPTER XV
In Brittany, during the winter of 1876, the Sibylle had been back at Brest for two days—after having completed its voyage round the world—and I was with Yves, one evening in February, in a country diligence which was carrying us towards Plouherzel.
It was an out-of-the-way place, this village where Yves' mother lived. The diligence in which we sat was due to take us in four hours from Guincamp to Paimpol, where we counted on spending the night; and from there we should have a long way to go on foot.
On we went, jolted over a rough little road, plunging deeper and deeper into the silence of the mournful countryside. The winter's night descended on us slowly, and a fine rain obscured things in a grey mist. We passed trees and more trees, showing one after another their dead silhouette. At wide intervals we passed villages also—Breton villages, dark thatched cottages and old churches with slender granite steeples—little groups of homesteads, isolated and melancholy, which quickly disappeared behind us in the night.
"Do you know," said Yves, "I came this way, at night, eleven years ago—I was then fourteen—and I wept bitterly. It was the first time I had left home, and I was travelling alone to Brest to join the navy."
I was accompanying Yves on this journey to Plouherzel partly for want of something to do. The leave granted me was short, and I had not time, on this occasion, to visit my home, so I was going to visit his, and to see this village of his which he loved so well.
And, at the moment, I was rather sorry I had come. Yves, absorbed in the happiness of his return, kept up a conversation with me out of deference, but his thoughts were elsewhere. I felt that I was a stranger in this world for which we were bound, and this Brittany, which I had not yet learned to love, oppressed me with its sadness.
Paimpol! We roll over cobbles, between old dark houses, and the diligence stops. People are waiting there with lanterns. Breton words and French words are interchanged.
"Are there any travellers for the Hôtel Pendreff?" pipes a small boy's voice.
The Hôtel Pendreff! Surely the name is familiar to me. And now I remember that nine years before, during my first year in the navy, I had rested there for an hour, on a day in June, when my ship, by chance, had anchored in a bay near by. I recollect it well; an old manor house, turreted and gabled, presided over by two aged sisters named Le Pendreff, both alike, in large white bonnets, making a picture of bygone days. We will get down at the Hôtel Pendreff.
In the house itself nothing is changed. But one of the Le Pendreff sisters is dead. She who remains was already so old nine years ago that she can scarcely have grown older since. Her type, her bonnet, the placid dignity of her bearing, are of a past generation.
It is good to dine before the great roaring fire, and cheerfulness returns to us.
Afterwards, the good dame Le Pendreff, armed with a copper candlestick, leads the way up a stone staircase and ushers us into a very large room, where there are two beds of an old-fashioned type hung with white curtains.
Yves, however, undresses himself very slowly and without conviction.
"Ah!" he says, suddenly putting on his blue collar again. "I am going to continue the journey! In the first place, you understand, I should not be able to sleep. It's true, I shall get home very late, I shall awaken them after midnight, and that will startle them a little—I did that in the year when I returned from the war. But I am so anxious to see them, I cannot wait here."
And I, too, decided that I would follow his example.
Paimpol is asleep when we leave in the pale moonlight. I am accompanying him for a part of his way, to help to pass the hours of the night. We are now in the fields.
Yves walks very quickly; he is very excited, and goes over in his mind the memories of his earlier returns.
"Yes," he said. "After the war I returned like this, about two o'clock in the morning, and woke them up. I had walked from Saint Brieuc; I was returning, very weary, from the siege of Paris. You will realize I was quite young then. I had just become able seaman.
"And, I remember, I got a great fright that night: by the cross of Kergrist, which we shall see in a minute at the turning of this road, I came upon a little old man, very ugly, who stared at me with outstretched arms, but without moving. And I am sure he was a ghost; for he disappeared almost at once, beckoning with his finger as if he wanted me to follow him."
Presently we reached this cross of Kergrist. We saw it rise up before us as if it were someone approaching in the darkness. But there was no ghost at its foot.
It was there I said good-bye to Yves and retraced my steps, for I, for my part, was not going to Plouherzel. When we no longer heard the sound of each other's footsteps in the silence of the winter's night, the ghost of the little old man came back into our minds, and in spite of ourselves we took to peering into the darkness of the undergrowth.
CHAPTER XVI
On the following morning I opened my eyes in the large room of the good dame Le Pendreff. The Breton sun filtered gently through the windows. The day, apparently, was very fine.
After the first few moments which I always spend in asking myself in what corner of the world I am, I remembered Yves and I heard outside the tramping of a crowd in sabots. There was a great fair that day in Paimpol, and I dressed myself up in ordinary sailor's clothes in order that I might not intimidate the many friends to whom I was going to be presented as a south-country sailor. This had been arranged with Yves, both the dressing up and the story attached to it.
I descended the steps of the hotel. The sun was shining and the square was full of people: sailors, peasants, fishermen. Yves, too, was there; he had returned in the early morning for the fête with all his relations from Plouherzel; and he was waiting outside to conduct me to his mother.
She was a very old woman, this mother of Yves, holding herself very upright and rather proudly in her peasant dress. She resembled him a little about the eyes, but her expression was hard. I was surprised to find her so old. She looked over seventy. It is true, of course, that in the country people age very quickly, especially when grief is added to toil.
She did not understand a word of French and scarcely looked at me.
But there was a great number of cousins and friends who all welcomed me warmly and with an air of good humour. They had come from afar, from their little moss-grown cottages scattered about the wild countryside, to assist at the great fête of the town. And with them I needs must drink: cider, wine; there was no end to it.
The noise steadily increased and some hoarse-voiced pedlars of ballads were singing now in Breton, under red umbrellas, woeful and heartrending things.
Presently a personage arrived of whom Yves had often spoken to me, his childhood's friend, Jean; he lived in a neighbouring cottage, and Yves had come across him again in the service, a sailor like himself. He was of our own age, with an open and intelligent face. He embraced Yves affectionately and then introduced us to Jeannie, who, for the last fortnight, had been his wife.
Yves overwhelmed his mother with attentions and caresses; they had many things to tell one another, and they both spoke at once. He made apologies to us from time to time, but it was good to see them and to hear them. Her eyes lost their hard expression when she looked at him.
The good people of the country have always interminable business to transact with the notary; I left them as they all made their way to the one at Paimpol to wait their turn.
In any case I had decided not to establish myself with them until to-morrow, in order that I might not be in the way during their first day, and I went off alone for a long walk.
CHAPTER XVII
I walked for about an hour. By chance I had taken the same road as yesterday with Yves, and I had passed again the cross of Kergrist.
Now Paimpol and the sea, and the islands, and the headlands wooded with dark fir trees, had disappeared behind a fold of the ground; a more mournful country stretched before me.
This February day was calm and very dreary; the air was almost mild, and in places the sky was blue, but mainly it was overclouded, as this Breton sky always is.
I made my way along damp lanes, bordered, according to old usage, by high banks of earth, which shut out the view sadly. The short grass, the damp moss, the bare branches told of winter. At the corners of the road old calvaries stretched out their grey arms; they bore simple carvings, quaintly altered by the centuries: the instruments of the Passion, or perhaps a distorted figure of Christ.
At wide intervals were straw-thatched cottages, green with moss, half buried in the earth and the dead branches. The trees were stunted, stripped by the winter, twisted by the wind from the sea. Not a soul in sight and silence everywhere.
A chapel of grey granite with an enclosure of beeches and tombs. . . . Ah! yes, I recognize it without ever having seen it, the chapel of Plouherzel! Yves had often spoken of it to me on board during the night watch, during the clear nights at the other side of the world, when we used to dream of home. "When you reach the chapel," he used to say, "it is quite near; you have but to turn into the path on the left, and two hundred yards away is our home."
I turned to the left and, by the side of the little road, I saw the cottage.
It was solitary, quite low and overshadowed by old beech trees.
It looked out upon a mournful expanse of country, the distances of which were shaded in dark grey. There were interminable, monotonous plains with phantoms of trees; a salt water lake at the hour of low water, an empty lake hollowed out of the granite strata, a deep meadow of seaweed, with an island in the middle.
A strange island, formed of a single piece of polished granite, like a back, having the shape of a large beast sitting. One looked about for the sea, the real sea which with the returning tide must come to fill these abandoned reservoirs, but there was no sign of it anywhere. A cold dark mist was rising on the horizon, and the winter sunshine was beginning to fade.
Poor Yves! So this is his home; a lonely cottage by the roadside; a poor little Breton cottage, in a turning off a remote lane, low-pitched, under a lowering sky, half buried in the earth, with ancient little granite walls overgrown with parietaries and moss.
All his memories of childhood are centred here; it was his cradle, his nest; a cherished home in which his mother lived, a home to which, in far-off countries, in the great cities of America and Asia, his imagination always brought him back. He thought of it with love, of this little corner of the world, during the fine calm nights at sea and during the riotous nights of brutal pleasure which made up his life of adventure. A poor, lonely cottage, at the turning of a road, and that was all.
In his dreams at sea it was this that he saw: under a threatening sky, amid the mournful country of this land of Goëlo, these old damp little walls overgrown with parietaries; and the neighbouring cottages in which kind old women in white Breton head-dresses used to spoil him when he was a child; and then, at the corner of the roads, the granite calvaries, corroded by the centuries. . . .
Merciful heavens! How dreary this country is! How dreary and how depressing!
I knocked at the door and a young girl who resembled Yves appeared on the threshold.
I asked her if this was indeed the house of the Kermadecs.
"Yes," she said, a little surprised and apprehensive. And then, suddenly:
"Ah! you, sir, are the friend of my brother who arrived with him at Brest yesterday evening?"
But she was rather concerned to see that I came alone.
I entered. I saw the cupboards, the Breton beds, the old plates in rows on the plate stand. Everything looked clean and respectable; but the cottage was very small and humble.
"All our relations are rich," Yves had often told me. "It is only we who are poor."
I was shown one of those beds in the form of a cupboard, with two places, which had been prepared for Yves and me. I was to occupy the upper shelf, which was decorated with thick hangings of reddish cloth, very clean and very stiff.
"Won't you sit down? They will be back from the town very soon now."
But no. I thanked her and went away.
Half-way to Paimpol, as night was falling, I perceived in the distance a large blue collar, in a little trap which was being driven briskly in the direction of Plouherzel: the little carriage of friend Jean bringing back Yves and his mother. I had just time to hide myself behind a hedge; if they had recognized me, there would have been no escape from them, of that I was certain.
It was quite dark when I reached Paimpol, and the little street lamps were lit. I tried to mingle in the crowd which moved about the square and consisted for the most part of those sailors who are known in these parts as Icelanders, men who exile themselves every summer, for six months, in the dangerous fishing expeditions to the cold northern seas.
None of these men was alone. They perambulated the streets, singing, with young women on their arm, sisters, sweethearts, mistresses. And these pictures of happiness and life made me feel my own utter loneliness. I walked about alone, miserable and unknown to them all, in my borrowed clothes which resembled theirs. People stared at me. "Who is that? A stranger in search of a ship? We have never seen him before."
I felt cold at heart and impulsively I turned away to take once more the road to Plouherzel. After all, perhaps I should not be greatly in the way of my simple friends there, if I went and warmed myself a little among them.
I had forgotten all about dinner and walked rapidly, fearful lest I should arrive too late, fearful lest I should find the cottage shut up for the night and my friends in bed.
CHAPTER XVIII
At the end of about an hour I was in the midst of fields, absolutely lost. Around me nothing but darkness, and the silence of a winter's night. I wandered along muddy lanes; not a soul of whom I could ask the way, not a hamlet, not a light. But always the dark silhouettes of trees, and, at intervals, calvaries; some of these calvaries were very large, and I had no recollection of having seen them in my walk during the day.
I retraced my steps hurriedly. For a long time I tried different directions, running. An icy rain began to fall, driven by the wind which had risen suddenly. It did not distress me much that I had lost my way, but I felt the need of seeing someone friendly, and I made haste in my efforts to find Yves.
It must have been very late when I recognized ahead of me the chapel of Plouherzel and the sea-water lake, on which the moonlight was now falling, and the dark mass of the granite isle on the pale water, the back of the great couchant beast.
Near the chapel I heard voices. In the darkness two men, one of athletic build, holding each other by the hand and talking to each other very affectionately, in the manner of men in the early stage of intoxication: Yves and Jean; and I hastened to them.
They were greatly surprised and pleased to see me. And Jean, taking each of us by the arm, insisted that we should both accompany him to his home.
Jean's cottage, isolated also, was in the neighbourhood of Yves', but it was much larger and better furnished.
You realized at once that you were in the home of people comfortably off: the presses and the beds had clasps of figured steel which shone like armour. At the farther end was a monumental fireplace, in which blazed a large oak log.
Two women were sitting before this fire, Jeannie, the young wife, and the old grandmother, in tall head-dress, busy at her spinning-wheel.
She would have made a fine study for an artist, this mother of Jean. She had also, in some measure, brought up Yves, whom she called in Breton "her other son," and whom she kissed very affectionately on both cheeks.
The women, for the past hour, had been sitting up anxiously for them. They received them with indulgence, although they were tipsy (it was what commonly happened when old friends met), scolded them just a little, and then set to work to make pancakes and soup for the three of us.
A wild wind, which had begun to blow from the sea, roared outside, in the darkness of the deserted countryside. From time to time, it rushed down the chimney, driving before it the bright flames of the fire; and then little flakes of ash, very light, began to dance a round-dance about the hearth, very low, skimming the floor, like those unhappy souls of dwarfs which circle the whole night long about the Great Rocks.
We were very comfortable before this fire which dried our clothes soaked with rain, and we waited eagerly for the hot soup which was being prepared for us.
CHAPTER XIX
The pancakes, which were being made for us, resembled the moon, so large were they; they were passed to us in turn, piping hot, at the end of a long oak spoon shaped like the oar of a cutter.
Yves let one fall on a large hen which we had not noticed on the floor. The hen retreated hurriedly to a dark corner, shaking its feathers with a peevish and offended air. I wanted to laugh and so did Jeannie, but we dared not, knowing as we both did that it was a sign of misfortune.
"That old black one again!" said the old grandmother, letting go her spinning-wheel, and looking at Yves with an air of consternation. "Jeannie, you must remember to send it to market to-morrow morning; it is for ever wandering about when all the others are in bed; it will end by bringing unhappiness upon us."
We cut our pancakes in small pieces and put them in our soup-bowls, and then we eat them, well-soaked, with our wooden spoons. And Jeannie made us drink, all three out of the same large mug, some very good cider.
Afterwards, when we had eaten and drunk our fill, Jean began to sing, in a fine tenor voice, a sea chanty known to all Breton sailors. Yves and I sang bass, and the old grandmother beat time with her head and the pedal of her spinning-wheel. We no longer heard the mournful refrains which the wind sang, all alone, outside.
The ditty ran:
We were three sailor lads of Groix,
We were three sailor lads of Groix,
'A sailing on the Saint François.
How the wind blows!
The wind is the plague o' the sailor.
Heave to! There's a man overboard;
Heave to! There's a man overboard;
The others are in sore distress.
How the wind blows!
The wind is the plague o' the sailor.
The others are in sore distress,
The others are in sore distress,
They hoist the white flag on the mast.
How the wind blows!
The wind is the plague o' the sailor.
They hoist the white flag on the mast,
They hoist the white flag on the mast,
But all they find is his poor hat.
How the wind blows!
The wind is the plague o' the sailor.
But all they find is his poor hat,
But all they find is his poor hat,
His 'baccy pipe and his jack-knife.
How the wind blows!
The wind is the plague o' the sailor.
The mother dear he left behind,
The mother dear he left behind,
She prays Saint Anne of Auray.
How the wind blows!
The wind is the plague of the sailor.
O! good Saint Anne send back my son,
O! good Saint Anne send back my son,
The good Saint Anne she makes reply.
How the wind blows!
The wind is the plague o' the sailor.
The good Saint Anne she makes reply,
The good Saint Anne she makes reply,
"You'll find him again in Paradise!"
How the wind blows!
The wind is the plague o' the sailor.
Home she goes to her cottage lone,
Home she goes to her cottage lone,
And dies, poor soul, on the morrow.
How the wind blows!
The wind is the plague o' the sailor.
CHAPTER XX
When it was time to go, I found that Yves was much more tipsy than I could have believed. Outside he stumbled up to his knees in puddles of water, and reeled from side to side. To get him home I put my right arm round his waist and his left arm over my shoulder and almost carried him. We could see nothing but the intense blackness of the night; a strong wind lashed our faces, and, in the dark lanes, Yves no longer knew where he was.
They were uneasy in his cottage and were sitting up for him. His mother scolded him, in her stern way, speaking loud and angrily as one might to a naughty child; and he went very crestfallen and sat down in a corner.
However, we were forced to partake of a second supper; it is the custom and there was no escape. An omelette, more pancakes, and slices of brown bread and butter. Afterwards we proceeded to retire for the night, the men first and then, the light having first been extinguished, the women. Under our mattresses there were thick litters made of a mass of branches of oaks and beeches; these subsided with a crackle of dry leaves when we lay down, and we felt ourselves sink into a little hollow, which kept us warm.
"Hoo! hoo-oo-oo! Hoo! hoo-oo-oo!" sang the wind outside, with a voice like an owl's, as if it were angry, as if it were indignant, then as if it were complaining and dying.
When the candle was put out and the cottage was in darkness, came the sound of a small voice beginning a Breton prayer; it was the voice of a little girl of four who had been adopted by the family; she was in fact the child of Gildas by a girl in Plouherzel, begotten during his last visit to his home.
A very long prayer, broken by solemn responses of the old grandmother; all the Saints of Brittany: Saints Corentin and Allain, Saints Thénénan and Thégonnec, Saints Tuginal and Tugdual, Saints Clet and Gildas were invoked, and then there was silence.
Quite near me, the scarcely perceptible breathing of Yves, already sunk in deep sleep. At the foot of our bed the hens at roost dreaming on their high perch. A cricket giving out from time to time, in the still warm hearth, a mysterious little crystal note. And outside, around the solitary cottage, the continuous noise of the wind: an immense groaning which swept over all the Breton country: an unceasing pressure which came from the sea with the night and stirred the country to a monotonous dark movement, at the hour when the dead appear and ghosts walk.
CHAPTER XXI
"Good morning, Yves!"
"Good morning, Pierre!"
And we throw open to the light of the morning the shutters of our cupboard.
This "Good morning, Pierre!" preceded by a little smile of intelligence, is said with hesitation, in a shy voice; it is "Good morning, Captain!" that Yves is accustomed to say, and he is rather disconcerted at finding himself on awakening, so near me and under the necessity of calling me by my name. To impose upon the good people of Plouherzel and preserve the character given me by my borrowed clothes, we had concerted this show of intimacy.
The sunshine of yesterday had departed and the high wind of the night was no more. It was typical Brittany weather and the whole country was enveloped in the same immense grey cloud. The light was the light of twilight, and was so pale and wan that it seemed that it had not strength enough to enter through the little windows of the cottages. Of distant things one could distinguish nothing; a fine drizzle, like a watery dust, filled the air.
We had to make the promised round of visits to uncles, cousins, old friends of boyhood; and these little homesteads were very scattered, for Plouherzel is not a village, but a region around a chapel.
Often we had far to walk, along muddy lanes, between moss-covered banks, under the vault of old dead beech trees and under the veil of the grey sky.
And all these cottages were alike, low, sunk in the earth, gloomy; their thatched roof, their rough granite walls, made green with scurvy grass, with lichen and the fresh moss of winter. Within, dark, primitive, with press-beds protected by pictures of the saints or statues of the Blessed Virgin.
We were received everywhere in most cordial fashion, and everywhere we needs must eat and drink. There were long conversations in Breton, with which, in my honour, was mingled, with indifferent success, a little French. It was of the childhood of Yves that these good people loved most to talk. Dear old men and dear old women recounted with glee the pranks he used to play; and, by all accounts, they were very numerous.
"Oh! he was a terrible fellow, you may take our word for it!"
Yves received these compliments with his big, placid air and drank at every opportunity.
The devil-may-care sea-rover was taking shape already, it seemed, in the heart of the little wild boy; the little Yves, who ran barefoot about these lanes of Plouherzel, was the unconscious germ of the sailor of later days, wild, truant, uncontrollable.
Towards evening, at low tide, we descended, Yves and I, into the bed of the salt-water lake, into the meadow of brown seaweed. We carried, each of us, a slice of black bread well buttered, and a large knife for opening shell-fish. A feast of his boyhood which he wanted to renew with me: shell-fish eaten raw with bread and butter.
The sea had receded for many miles, laying bare the vast fields of seaweed, the deep meadow in which the herbage was brown and briny, with strange living flowers. All around, granite walls enclosed this immense pond, and the isle shaped like a couchant beast, stripped to its feet, disclosed the bottom of its black base. There were many other granite blocks also, which had been hidden under water at high tide and now were visible, rising up, with their long trimmings of seaweed hanging like wet bedraggled hair. On the mournful plain many of them might be seen scattered all about, in strange attitudes of awakening.
The cold air was impregnated with the acrid odour of sea-wrack. Night came on slowly, with silent stealth, and all these large backs of stone began to take on the appearance of herds of monsters. We took the shell-fish on the end of our knives and ate them as they were, all living, with our slices of bread, being both hungry and in haste to be done before the light should fail.
"It's not so good as it used to be," said Yves when he had finished eating. "And somehow it seems to me melancholy here. . . . When I was little, I remember, there were times when I had the same feeling, but not so strongly as to-night. Let us go, shall we?"
Rather surprised by what he said, I replied to him:
"My poor Yves, I think you are becoming like me!"
"Like you, do you say?"
And he looked at me with a long melancholy smile, which revealed to me new things in him, new and indefinable things. And I realized that evening that he had in fact, much more than I should have thought, ways of thinking, ideas, sensations, similar to mine.
"And do you know," he continued, as if following still the same train of thought, "do you know there is one thing which troubles me often when we are far away, at sea or in countries overseas? I scarcely dare to tell you. . . . It is the idea that I might die perhaps and not be buried in our cemetery here."
And he pointed to the steeple of Plouherzel Church, which could be seen above the granite cliffs in the far distance, like a grey arrow.
"It is not from any religious feeling, as you will understand; for you know that I have no love for the clergy. No, it is just an idea that comes to me, I cannot tell you why. And when I am unhappy enough to think of this thing, I cease somehow to be brave."
CHAPTER XXII
It was in the evening, after supper, that Yves' mother solemnly recommended her son to my care. It was a trust that has endured until now.
She had understood, with her mother's instinct, that I was not what I appeared to be, and that I should be able to exercise over the destiny of her last son a very important influence.
"She says," translated her daughter, "that you are deceiving us, sir, and that Yves, too, is deceiving us to please you; that you are not one like ourselves. . . . And she asks, since you voyage together, if you will look after him."
Then the old woman began to tell me the story of Yves' father, a story which I had heard long before from Yves himself. I listened to it willingly, nevertheless, recited by this young girl, before the wide Breton fireplace where the flames danced over a beech log.
"She says that our father was a very handsome sailor, so handsome that no one in the country had ever seen so handsome a man walk the earth. He died, leaving thirteen of us, thirteen children. He died as many sailors of our country die. One Sunday when he had been drinking he put to sea at night in his boat, in spite of a strong wind that blew from the north-west, and he never returned. Like his sons, he was a man without fear; but his head was not good. . . ."
And the poor mother looked at her son Yves.
"She says," continued the daughter, "that my parents lived at Saint Pol-de-Léon, in Finistère, that Yves was one year old, and that I was not yet born when our father died, that she then left Saint Pol and returned to Plouherzel in Goëlo, her native country. My father left his affairs in great disorder; almost all the money that at one time we had had been spent in the tavern, and my mother had no longer wherewithal to feed us. It was then that my two elder brothers, Gildas and Goulven, left to become ship-boys on ocean-going ships.
"We have not seen much of them in the country here since their departure, and yet it cannot be said that they have ceased to care about us. They many times surrendered their sailors' pay in order to help my mother to bring us up, us younger ones, Yves, my sister who is here, and me.
"But Goulven deserted, sir, more than fifteen years ago, in a fit of temper."
"They, too," said the old woman, "are handsome and brave sailors, their heart is true as gold. . . . But they have their father's head, and already they have taken to drinking heavily."
"My brother Gildas," the daughter went on, "served for seven years on board an American ship engaged in whale fishing in the great ocean. That voyage made him very rich; but it seems that it is a hard calling, is it not, sir?"
"Yes, a hard calling indeed. . . ." I have seen them at work in the great ocean, these sailors in question, half whale fishers and half pirates, who pass years in the great swell of the southern seas without ever touching inhabited land.
"He was so rich, my brother Gildas, when he returned from this fishing, that he had a large sack filled full with pieces of gold."
"He poured them here on to my knees," said the old woman, holding out the skirt of her dress as if to receive them again, "and my apron was filled with them. Large golden coins of other countries, marked with all sorts of heads of kings and birds.[1] There were some of them quite new, with the portrait of a woman wearing a crown of feathers,[2] a single one of which was worth more than a hundred francs. Never had we seen so much gold. He gave a thousand francs to each of his sisters and a thousand to me, his mother, and bought me this little house in which we live. He squandered the rest in amusing himself at Paimpol and in doing things which, certainly, were not good. But they are all like that, sir, you know it better than I. For two months they spoke of none but him in the town.
"Then he left us again and we have not seen him since. He is a brave sailor, sir, is my son Gildas, but he has been ruined as his father was by his fondness for liquor."
And the old woman bowed her head sadly as she spoke of this incurable plague which destroys the families of Breton sailors.
There was silence for a time, and then she spoke again to her daughter in an earnest voice, looking at me the while.
"She asks, sir, if you will make her this promise . . . about my brother. . . ."
Her anxious, searching gaze, fixed on me, affected me strangely. It is no doubt true that all mothers, however far apart in station they may be, have, in certain hours, the same expression. . . . And now it seemed to me that this mother of Yves had some resemblance to mine.
"Tell her that I swear to look after him all my life, as if he were my brother."
And the daughter repeated, translating slowly into Breton:
"He swears that he will look after him all his life as if he were his brother."
The old mother had risen, upright as ever, stern and brusque; she had taken from the wall a picture of Christ and had advanced towards me, addressing me as if she wished to take me at my word, there and then, with naïve, impulsive simplicity:
"It is on this, sir, that she asks you to swear."
"No, mother, no!" said Yves, in confusion, trying to interpose, to stop her.
But I held out my arm towards this picture of Christ, a little surprised, a little moved, perhaps, and I repeated:
"I swear to do what I have said."
But my arm trembled a little because I foresaw that my responsibility would be a heavy one in the future.
And then I took Yves' hand. His head was bowed in thought:
"And you will do what I tell you, you will follow me . . . brother?"
And he replied, in a low voice, hesitating, his eyes turned away, but with the smile of a child:
"Why, yes . . . of course I will."