A Tale of Brittany (Mon frère Yves)

CHAPTER XLV

It seems odd to us to find ourselves performing the formal duties of citizens in the way of the world in general. At the Mairie, and at the parish priest's house, we feel very awkward and at moments are hard put to it not to laugh.

The little sea-gull is definitely registered in the records of Toulven under the Christian names of Yves-Pierre—his father's name and mine, in accordance with the custom of the country. And it is arranged with the priest that he will await us at nine o'clock to-morrow morning, at the church, and that there shall be a Te Deum.

"And now let us go straight home," says Yves. "The old man is probably in already and they will be waiting supper for us."

CHAPTER XLVI

The June night was falling slowly, bringing peace and silence over the Breton countryside. In the sunken lanes it was becoming difficult to see.

Old Corentin Keremenen had in fact returned from his work in the fields and was waiting for us at his door. He had had time even to change his clothes: he was wearing now his large silver-buckled hat and his feast-day jacket of blue cloth ornamented with metal spangles and, on the back, with an embroidery representing the Blessed Sacrament.

There is an air of joyous movement in the cottage, an air of celebration. The copper candlesticks are on the table which has been covered with a handsome cloth. The presses, the stools, the old oak woodwork shine like mirrors. One guesses that Yves has been busy.

The candles illumine only the centre of the room, leaving the rest in gloom. There are movements of large white things which are the wide-winged coifs and pleated collarettes of the women; but otherwise the backgrounds are dark; the light dies as it flickers on the granite of the walls, on the irregular and time-blackened beams which support the thatch of the roof. This thatch and this rough granite still preserve in the Breton villages a note of the primitive epoch.

Supper is served and we take our places, Yves on my left, Anne on my right.

It is a plenteous repast: chickens served with different sauces, wheaten cakes, savoury and sweet omelettes; and wine and golden cider which foams in our glasses.

Yves says to me aside in a low voice:

"He is a very good man, my father-in-law; and my mother-in-law Marianne, you cannot imagine what a good woman she is! I am very fond of them both."

During the evening a girl brings from the village clean starched things of voluminous dimensions. Anne hastens to conceal them in a press, while Yves, with a glance of intelligence, says:

"You see what preparations are being made in your honour!"

I had guessed what they were: the ceremonial head-dress and the immense, embroidered, thousand-pleated collarette, with which she was going to adorn herself for to-morrow's festival.

And I, on my side, have a number of little packets which I want to bring out, unperceived, with Yves' help from my trunk: sweets, sugar-plums, a gold cross for the godmother. But Anne has seen it all from the corner of her eye and starts to laugh. So much the worse! After all it is difficult to succeed in making mystery in a dwelling which has only one door and only one room for everybody.

Little Pierre, round as ever, a little bronze baby, continues to sleep in the same position, his closed fists under his chin. Never was a new-born baby so beautiful and so good.

When I take my leave of them, Yves gets up also in order to accompany me as far as the village, where I am going to sleep at the inn.

Outside, in the sunken lane, under the branches, it is now pitch dark; we are enveloped by a double obscurity, that of the trees and that of the night.

It is a kind of peace to which we are not accustomed, the peace of the woods. And there is no sea; the country of Toulven is far away from it. We listen; it seems to us still that we ought to hear in the distance its familiar sound. But no; all about is silence. Nothing but scarcely perceptible rustlings in the thick greenery, soft sounds of wings opening, slight quiverings of birds dreaming in their sleep.

There is still the perfume of honeysuckle; but, with the night, have come a penetrating freshness and odours of moss, of earth, of the dampness of Brittany.

All this sleeping countryside, all these wooded hills which surround us, all these slumbering trees, all these tranquillities oppress us. We feel rather like strangers in the midst of it all, and we miss the sea, the sea which, after all, is the great open space, the great unconfined field over which we are accustomed to run.

Yves suffers these impressions and tells me of them in a naïve way, a way peculiarly his own, which would scarcely be intelligible to anyone but me. In the midst of his happiness, an uneasiness troubles him this evening, almost a regret that he should unthinkingly have fixed his destiny in this remote little cottage.

And presently we come upon a calvary, stretching out in the darkness its two grey arms, and we think of all these old granite chapels which lie here and there around us, isolated in the beech woods . . . in which the souls of the dead keep vigil.

CHAPTER XLVII

On the following day, Thursday, the 16th of June, 1878, in radiant weather, the baptismal party gets ready in the cottage of the Keremenens.

Anne, her back turned towards me in a corner, adjusts her coif before a mirror, a little embarrassed to be obliged to do so in my presence; but the cottages of Brittany are not large, and they have no other separations within than the little cupboards in which one sleeps.

Anne is dressed in a costume of black cloth, the open corsage of which is embroidered with different coloured silks and silver spangles; she wears an apron of blue moire, and, overflowing her shoulders, a white thousand-pleated collarette which remains rigid like a ruff of the sixteenth century. For my part, I have put on a uniform with bright gold facings and, certainly, we shall make a pretty picture presently, arm in arm, in the green lane.

In attendance on the baby this morning is a new personage, a very ugly and very extraordinary old woman, who assumes an air of much importance and receives general obedience: she is the nurse, it appears.

"She looks rather like a witch," says Anne, who guesses my thought. "But she is really a very good woman."

"Oh! yes, a very good woman indeed," confirms old Corentin. "Her appearance is not attractive, it is true, but she is attentive to her religion and in fact, last year, obtained great blessings in the pilgrimage of Saint Anne."

Bent double like Hecate, with a nose hooked like the beak of an owl and little grey eyes rimmed with red, which blink very rapidly in the manner of those of fowls, she goes this way and that, very busily, in her large stiff ceremonial collarette; when she speaks, her voice startles like a sound of the night; you might imagine you heard the brown owl of the tombs.

Yves and I at first did not like this old woman's attentions to the newcomer; but we found consolation in the thought that, for fifty years, she had been presiding at the birth of children in this region of Toulven, without having brought harm to any one of them. Quite the contrary in fact. Besides, she observes conscientiously all the ancient rites, such as making the little one drink before the baptism a certain wine in which its mother's wedding ring has been dipped, and many others which must on no account be neglected.

In this little cottage, deep-sunken in the ground and very much in shadow, one sees just as much as is necessary and no more. A little daylight enters by the door; at the back there is also a dormer Window sparingly contrived in the thickness of the granite, but the ferns have invaded it. They are seen, in transparency, like the intricate figurings of a green curtain.

At last little Pierre's toilet is finished and without so much as a cry. I should have liked him better dressed as a little Breton; but no, this son of Yves is all in white, with a long embroidered robe and bows of ribbon, like a little gentleman of the town. He looks more vigorous and browner than ever in this doll's dress; the poor little town babies, who go to their baptism in similar attire, are not, as a rule, so strong and lusty.

Nevertheless, I am constrained to recognize that at present he is not a beauty; probably he will improve as time goes on; but at the moment he has the bloated look of a new-born kitten.

Outside, in the fern-clad lane, under the green vault, are moving already several large white coifs and embroidered cloth bodices similar to those of Anne. They belong to young women who have come out of neighbouring cottages and are waiting to watch us pass.

Anne and I set out, arm in arm. Little Pierre leads the way, in the arms of the old woman, with the birdlike beak, who hurries on with short quick steps, waddling strangely like some old hag. And big Yves brings up the rear, in his wedding clothes, very serious, a little surprised to find himself at such a ceremony, a little shy, too, at having to walk alone as custom, however, prescribes that he must.

In the fine June morning we make our way gaily down the Breton lane; above our heads the covering of the oaks and beeches sifts little rounds of light which fall in thousands, like a white rain, through the verdure. The hanging clematis is intertwined with honeysuckle, and the birds are singing a welcome to this little sea-gull who is making his first appearance in the sun.

We are now in Toulven which is almost a little town. The good people are at their doors and we pass slowly along the main street on our way to the church.

It is very old, is Toulven church. It stands up all grey in the blue sky, with its tall perforated granite steeple, which in places is yellowed by lichen. It overlooks a large pond, motionless and water-lilied, and a series of uniformly wooded hills which form, in the background, an immemorial horizon.

All around, an ancient enclosure: the cemetery. Crosses border the sacred pathway; they emerge from a carpet of flowers, carnations and white Easter daisies. And in the more neglected parts where time has levelled the little mounds of turf, there are still flowers for the dead: silenes, and the foxgloves of the fields of Brittany; the ground is pink with them. The tombs are thick near the door of the age-old church, as on the mysterious threshold of eternity; this tall grey thing rising up here, this steeple uplifted in eager aspiration, it seems as if it does in fact protest a little against annihilation; in raising itself into the sky, it appeals, it supplicates; it is like an eternal prayer immobilized in granite. And the poor tombs buried in the grass await there, with greater confidence, at this threshold of the church, the sound of the last trump and the voice of the Apocalypse.

There, also, no doubt, when I am dead or broken by old age, there also will they lay my brother Yves; he will give back to the Breton earth his unbelieving head and the body which he had taken from it. Later again little Pierre will find there his last resting-place—if the great sea shall not have kept him from us—and, on their tombs the pink flowers of the fields of Brittany, the wild foxgloves, the luxuriant grasses of June, will flourish as they do to-day, in the warm summer sunshine.

In the porch of the church were all the children of the village looking very solemn. And the parish priest was there too, awaiting us in his ceremonial vestments.

The architecture of the porch was very primitive, and the stones had been worn by many Breton generations; there were shapeless saints, carved in the granite, who were aligned like so many gnomes.

There was a protracted ceremony at the door. The owl-faced old woman had placed little Pierre in our hands and we held him between us, the godmother, according to prescribed usage, holding the feet and I the head. Yves, leaning against a granite pillar, watched us with an air of reverie, and indeed Anne looked very pretty, in this grey porch, with her handsome dress and her large ruff, caught in the full light of a ray of the sun.

Little Pierre made a slight grimace and passed the end of his tiny tongue over his lip with an air of distaste, when the salt, the emblem of the sorrows of life, was put in his mouth.

The priest recited long oremuses in Latin, after which he said in the same language to the little seagull: Ingredere, Petre, in domum Domini. And then we entered the church.

The saints there, in niches, dressed in the costume of the sixteenth century, watched little Pierre make his entry, with the same placid and mystic air with which they have seen born and die ten generations of men.

At the baptismal font there was again a very long ceremony and then Anne and I had to take our places before the screen of the choir, kneeling like a newly-wedded pair.

Finally it fell to me to take unaided this son of Yves, whom I was fearful of breaking in my unaccustomed hands, and, climbing the steps of the altar with this precious little burden, to make him kiss the white cloth on which the Blessed Sacrament rests. I felt very awkward in uniform; it seemed as if I were carrying a weight of great heaviness. I had not imagined that it would be so difficult to hold a new-born babe; and yet he was asleep: if he had been moving I should never have been able to manage it.

All the children of the village were waiting for us as we came out, little Bretons with shy looks, round cheeks and long hair.

The bells sounded joyously from the top of the old grey steeple and the Te Deum burst out behind us, sung lustily by little choir boys in red cassocks and white surplices.

We were allowed to pass, still tranquil and devout, along the flowered alley bordered by the tombs—but, afterwards, when we were outside!

Little Pierre, the cause of all this commotion, had gone on ahead, carried away more and more quickly by the hook-nosed beldam and sleeping still his innocent sleep. And the assault fell upon Anne and me: little boys and little girls surrounded us, shouting and jumping; there were some of these little girls who could be no more than five years old, and who yet wore already large collars and large head-dresses similar to those of their mothers; and they skipped around us like very comical little dolls.

It was a strange thing, the joy of these little Breton people, pink-cheeked with long curls of yellow silk; mere buds of life, and dressed already in the costume and fashion of olden times—bubbling over with a heedless joy—as once upon a time their forbears, and they are dead! Joy of a new overflowing life, joy such as kittens have, and kids, and, after ten years, they die; puppies and lambkins know this self-same joy and gambol as these children here—and time passes and they are killed!

We scattered among them handfuls of sugarplums, and our whole route was sown with sweets. The baptism of the little sea-gull will be remembered in Toulven for many a long year.

Afterwards, we found once more the quiet of the Breton lane, the long green alley, and, at the end of it, the primitive hamlet.

It was now near noon; butterflies and flies made merry in the air all along our road. The day was very warm for Brittany.

In broad daylight the roof of the cottage of the old Keremenens was a veritable garden: a quantity of little flowers, white, yellow and red, were installed there with a great variety of ferns, and the whole was sprinkled with sunlight, which filtered through the overhanging oaks.

Inside it was still cool, in the slightly green half-light, under the low black roof of the old beams.

Dinner was on the table, and Yves' wife, who had got up for the first time, was awaiting us, seated in her place, in her brave holiday dress. In the course of the last few days, her beauty had deserted her, and she was pale and thin. Yves looked at her with an air of disillusionment which did not escape her; and, realizing that this was not as it should be, he went over to her and kissed her affectionately with rather a lordly air. And I augured sad things from this glimpse of disenchantment.

Nevertheless this baptismal dinner was a gay affair. It consisted of a great number of Breton dishes and lasted a very long time.

During the dessert, we heard outside two voices murmuring a kind of litany very rapidly, in the language of lower Brittany. It was two old women, two old beggar-women, linked arm in arm and leaning on sticks, in the manner of the fairies when they take decrepit shape for the purpose of disguise.

They asked to be allowed to enter, having come to wish good luck to little Pierre. At the oaken cradle in which he was being gently rocked they predicted very fortunate things, and then withdrew with a blessing for everyone.

Generous alms were given them, and Anne cut them slices of bread and butter.

CHAPTER XLVIII

In the afternoon there was a scene: my poor brother Yves was tipsy and wanted to go to Bannalec and take train to rejoin his ship.

We had wandered some considerable distance and were in a wood, Anne, Yves, and I, when suddenly, without apparent cause, the idea seized him. He had turned back and left us, saying that he was going away for good; and we had followed him in some anxiety fearful of what he might do.

When, a few minutes after him, we reached the cottage of the old Keremenens, we found that he had thrown off his fine white shirt and his wedding clothes, and, stripped to the waist, in the usual style of sailors on board ship during the morning, he was looking everywhere for his jersey which had been hidden from him.

"Good Lord Jesus, have pity on us," Marie, his wife, was saying, joining her poor white invalid's hands. "How has this happened, Lord? For really he has drunk but little! Oh, sir, prevent him," she begged, turning to me. "What will people say in Toulven when he passes, when they see that my husband will not stay with me!"

It was a fact that Yves had drunk very little; happiness, no doubt, had turned his head at dinner, and, what made the matter worse, we had taken him for a walk in the heat of the sun: it was not altogether his fault.

Sometimes, though rarely, it was possible to arrest these moods of his by dint of kindness. I knew that, but I did not feel able to-day to use this means. For really, it was too bad of him! Even here, in this place of peace and on this happy day of festival, to introduce a scene of this kind!

I said simply:

"Yves shall not leave!"

And to bar his way, I stood before the door, buttressing myself against the old oak mullions which were massive and solid.

He did not dare to answer me. He moved this way and that, continuing to look for his sailor's clothes, turning about like a wild beast which is held captive. He muttered under his breath that nothing would prevent him from going, as soon as he should have found his sailor's bonnet. But all the same the idea that he would have to touch me before he could get out served also to restrain him.

I, too, was in no very amiable mood, and I felt nothing now of the affection which had lasted so many years and forgiven so many things. I saw before me the drunken sea-rover, ungrateful and in revolt, and that was all.

Deep down in every man there is always a hidden savage who keeps vigil—especially perhaps amongst us who have lived on the sea. And it was the savage in each of us who now confronted one another, who had just come into collision one with the other, as in our worst days in the past.

Outside, all round us, was still the peace of the countryside, the shade of the oaks, the tranquil green night.

Poor old Keremenen was quite helpless, and the affair came very near to being utterly odious and pitiful, when we heard Marie weeping; they were the first tears of her wifehood, urgent, bitter tears, the forerunners, no doubt, of many others; and sobs which were distressing to hear amid the silence which we all preserved.

And presently Yves was vanquished and drew near slowly to embrace her:

"Come, come! I am wrong," he said, "and I ask you to forgive me."

And then he came to me and used a name which he had sometimes written, but which until then he had never pronounced:

"You must forgive me again, brother!"

And he embraced me also.

Afterwards he begged forgiveness of the old Keremenens, who kissed him in a fatherly and motherly way; and forgiveness also of his son, the little sea-gull, as he pressed his lips against the little closed fists which peeped out of the cradle.

He was quite sobered and the evil hour had passed; the real Yves, my brother, had returned; there was as always in his repentance something simple and childlike which won forgiveness without reserve, so that all was forgotten.

He proceeded now to pick his clothes up from the floor, to brush them, and to dress himself again, without saying a word, miserable, exhausted, wiping his forehead which was beaded with a cold perspiration.

An hour later I watched Yves as he stooped, the very figure of an athlete, over the cradle of his son; he had been rocking him and had just succeeded in putting him to sleep; and now, little by little, progressively, with many precautions, he was stopping the movement of the little oak basket, to leave it at last motionless, seeing that sleep had indeed come. Then he stooped lower still and gazed intently at his son, examining him with much curiosity, as if he had never seen him before, touching his little closed fists, his growth of little mouse's hair which peeped still from beneath the little white bonnet.

And as he gazed his face assumed an expression of infinite tenderness; and the hope came to me that this little child might one day be his safeguard and salvation.

CHAPTER XLIX

In the evening after supper, we went for a walk, Anne, Yves and I, a walk much more peaceful than that of the day.

And, at nine o'clock, we sat down by the side of a wide road which traversed the woods.

It was not yet dark, so prolonged in Brittany are the evenings in the beautiful month of June; but we began, nevertheless, to talk of phantoms and the dead.

Anne said:

"In winter when the wolves come we can hear them from our home; but sometimes ghosts, too, utter cries like theirs."

On this particular evening, however, we only heard the passing of cockchafers and stagbeetles which flew through the warm air in eccentric curves, and the small buzzings of summer. And, also, from a distant part of the wood: "Hoot! . . . Hoot . . ." a mournful call, given out very softly in the voice of an owl.

And Yves said:

"Do you hear, brother? The parakeets of France are singing." (This was an allusion to the parakeet he had on the Sibylle.)

The slender grasses, with their flowers of grey dust, spread over the ground a deep, scarcely palpable covering into which the feet sank, and the last moths, at the end of their evening's exercise, plunged one after another into the thickness of this herbage, to take their sleeping posts on the slender stems.

And darkness came, slow and tranquil, with an air of mystery.

Passed a young Breton lad who carried a knapsack on his shoulder. He was returning rather tipsy from Lannildu, a peacock's feather in his hat. (I do not know what this has to do with the story of Yves: I relate at hazard things which have remained in my memory.) He stopped and began to address us. Finally, by way of peroration, he showed us his knapsack, saying:

"Look here! I have two cats in this." (This had no sort of relation to what he had been saying to us before.)

He placed his burden on the ground and threw his hat upon it. Thereupon the knapsack began to swear, with the strong voices of angry tom-cats, and to move in somersaults along the road.

When he had convinced us in this way that they were indeed cats, he put the whole on his shoulder again, saluted, and went his way.

CHAPTER L

17th June, 1878.

We rose early to go into the woods and gather "luzes" (little blue-black fruits which are found in the deepest of the thickets, on plants which resemble the mistletoe).

Anne no longer wore her gay festival attire: she had put on a large smooth collarette and a simpler head-dress. Her Breton dress of blue cloth was ornamented with yellow embroidery: on each side of her bodice were designs imitating rows of eyes such as butterflies have on their wings.

Along the sunken lanes, in the green night, we met women who were going into Toulven to hear the early morning mass. From the end of these long corridors of verdure, we saw them coming with their collarettes, their tall white head-dresses, the sides of which fell symmetrically over their ears, like the bonnets of the Egyptians. Their waists were tightly compressed in bodices of blue cloth which resembled the corselets of insects and on which were embroidered always the same designs, the same rows of butterfly eyes. As they passed they gave us good-day in Breton and their tranquil faces wore an expression of primitive times.

And at the doors of old grey granite cottages which were almost hidden in the trees, we found old women sitting and minding little children; old women with long unkempt white hair, in tattered blue cloth cut in the fashion of long ago, with the remains of Breton embroideries and rows of eyes: the poverty and primitiveness of olden times.

Ferns, ferns, all along these lanes—ferns of the most elaborate kind, the finest, the rarest, which have flourished there in the damp shade, forming sheaves and carpets—and pink foxgloves, too, shooting up like pink rockets, and, pinker even than the foxgloves, the silenes of Brittany, scattering over all this fresh verdure their little carmine-coloured stars.

To us, maybe, the verdure seems greener, the woods more silent, the perfumes more penetrating, to us who live in wooden houses in the midst of the sound of the sea.

"It seems to me very pleasant here," said Yves. "A little later on when little Pierre is big enough for me to lead him by the hand, we will go together to pick all kinds of things in the woods—and, later again, we can shoot. To be sure! I will buy a gun, as soon as I have saved a little money, to kill the wolves. I don't think I shall ever be bored in this country here."

I knew well, alas! that sooner or later he would weary of it; but it served no purpose to tell him so and it was better to let him, as one lets children, cherish his illusion.

Besides, he also was about to depart; two days after me, he was due at Brest, to embark once more. This was only a very brief rest in our life, this sojourn at Toulven, only a little interlude of Brittany, after which we must resume once more our business of the sea.

We were in the heart of the woods. No pathways now, no cottages. Nothing but a succession of hills following one another into the distance, covered with beeches, with brushwood, with oaks and heather. And flowers, a profusion of flowers; the whole countryside was flowered like an Eden: honeysuckle, tall asphodels with white distaffs and foxgloves with pink distaffs.

In the distance, the song of cuckoos in the trees, and, around us, the humming of bees.

The berries grew thick here and there, on the stony soil, mingled with flowering heather. Anne always found the best and gave them to me in handfuls. And big Yves watched us with a grave smile, conscious that he was playing, for the first time, a kind of rôle of mentor, and finding it very surprising.

The place had a wild air. These wooded hills, these carpets of lichen, resembled a landscape of olden times, though bearing the mark of no precise epoch. But Anne's costume was clearly of the Middle Ages and the impression that one had was of that period.

Not the gloomy and twilight Middle Ages as understood by Gustave Doré, but the Middle Ages sunlit and full of flowers, of these same eternal flowers of the fields of Gaul, which bloomed as now for our ancestors.

It was eleven o'clock when we returned to the cottage of the old Keremenens for dinner. It was very warm that summer in Brittany; the ferns and the little red flowers of the roadside bowed down under the unaccustomed sun, which exhausted them, tempered though it was by the green branches.

One o'clock. For me, the hour of departure. I went first of all to kiss little Pierre, asleep still in his old oaken cradle, as if these four days had not sufficed him for recovering from the fatigue he had suffered in coming into the world.

I bade good-bye to all. Yves, thoughtful, leaning against the door, was waiting to accompany me as far as Toulven, whence the diligence would take me to the station at Bannalec. Anne and old Corentin also insisted on escorting me.

And, when I saw Toulven disappearing in the distance, its grey steeple and its mournful pond, my heart contracted. How many years would it be before I should return to Brittany? Once more we were separating, my brother and I, and both of us were going away into the unknown. I was uneasy about his future, over which I saw dark clouds gathering. . . . And I thought also of these Keremenens whose welcome had touched me. I asked myself whether my poor Yves, with his terrible failings and his uncontrollable character, was not going to bring unhappiness upon them, under their roof of thatch covered with little red flowers.

CHAPTER LI

November, 1880.

A little more than two years later.

Little Pierre was cold. He cried as he clasped his two little hands, which he tried to hide under his pinafore. He was in a street in Brest, before daybreak, on a November morning. A fine rain was falling. He pressed close to his mother who, also, was weeping.

There, at a street corner, Marie Kermadec was waiting, loitering in the darkness like some unfortunate. Would Yves come home? . . . Where was he? . . . Where had he spent the night? In what low tavern? Would he return to his ship at any rate, when the gun sounded, in time for the roll-call.

And other women were waiting also.

One passed with her husband, a petty officer like Yves; he came out of a tavern which had just been opened. He was drunk. He tried to walk, staggered a few steps and then fell heavily to the ground. His head made a sickening sound as it struck the hard granite.

"Oh! my God!" wailed his wife. "Jesus, Holy Virgin Mary, have pity on us! Never have I seen him like this before! . . ."

Marie Kermadec helped her to get him on his feet again. He was a good looking man, kindly and serious.

"Thank you, madam!"

And his wife contrived to make him walk, supporting him with all her strength.

Little Pierre was crying quietly, as if he understood already that something shameful overshadowed them and that it behoved him not to make a noise. He bowed his little head and continued to hide under his pinafore his little hands which were so cold. He was well enough wrapped up, but he had been standing for a long time, without moving, at this damp street corner. The gas lamps had just been extinguished and it was very dark. Poor little plant, healthy and fresh, born in the woods of Toulven, how came it, to be stranded in the misery of this town? For his part he saw no sense in the change; he could not understand why his mother had wanted to follow her husband to this Brest, and to live in a cold and dismal lodging, at the end of a court, in one of the low-lying streets abutting on the harbour.

Another passed; he was struggling with his wife, this one, he was not going to be taken home. It was a horrible sight. Marie uttered a cry as she heard the dull sound of a blow struck by a fist; and covered her face, unable to bear more. Yves at any rate had never done that! But would it come to that in time? Would it come to pass, one of these days, that they would sink to this last misery?

CHAPTER LII

Yves appeared at last, walking straight, carrying himself well, his head high, but his eye lustreless, bewildered. He saw his wife, but pretended that he did not, throwing on her as he passed an angry, troubled glance.

It was not he—as he used to say himself afterwards, in the good moments of repentance which still came to him.

In fact, it was not he: it was the savage beast within him which drunkenness awakened, when his real self was obscured and submerged.

Marie refrained from saying a word, not only from uttering a reproach, but even from an entreaty. It was better not to speak to Yves in these moments when his head was gone: he would go away again. She knew that; she was forced into this silence.

She followed, with downbent head, in the rain, dragging by the hand her little Pierre who was trying to cry even more quietly now since he had seen his father, and whose poor little feet were getting wet in the mud of the gutter.

How could she let him walk thus? How could she even have brought him out like this, before daybreak? What was she thinking of? Had she gone mad? . . . And she picked him up and hugged him to her breast, warming him against her body, kissing him in passionate affection.

Yves pretended to pass his door, by way of aggravation—a piteous piece of brutish foolery—and then looked back at his wife with a stupid smile which was not good to see, as one who should say: "That was a little joke of mine, but you see I am going in."

She followed at a distance, hugging the wall of the dark staircase so as not to be seen, making herself small, lowly. Happily it was not yet daylight, and the neighbours no doubt would still be abed, and so would not be witnesses of this disgrace.

She followed him into their room and shut the door.

There was no fire and the room had an air of poverty which smote the heart.

When the candle was lit, Marie saw that Yves had again torn his new clothes, which once already she had mended with so much care; and his big blue collar was crumpled and stained and his jersey unravelled, the broken stitches gaping on his chest.

He walked up and down, turning about like a caged beast, making confusion, upsetting brusquely things which she had arranged, pieces of bread which she had saved up.

And she, having put their child in his cradle and covered him up, pretended to occupy herself with domestic duties. At times such as these it was necessary to appear as if nothing had happened; otherwise, if one seemed to be taking too much thought of him, he would become suddenly exasperated, like a wild beast which has scented blood; and he would want to go out again. And when once he had said: "I am going out! I am going out to join my friends!" out he would go with the obstinacy of a brute; not force, nor prayers, nor tears were able to restrain him.

CHAPTER LIII

Sometimes Yves would fall suddenly like a log and sleep for several hours; and then it would be over. This depended on the particular kind of liquor he had taken.

At other times he held out, somehow or other, and returned to his ship in the harbour.

On this particular morning, at seven o'clock, Yves, a little sobered, had the idea unprompted of bathing his head in cold water. Then he went out and took the road to the dockyard.

CHAPTER LIV

Then Marie sat down, broken, utterly powerless, beside the cradle in which their little son was sleeping.

Through the curtainless windows a whitish light began to enter, a pale, pale light which made one feel cold.

Another day! In the street below could be heard the characteristic sound of the lower quarters of Brest at the hour of the return to work: thousands of wooden sabots hammering on the hard granite pavé. The workers were returning to the dockyard, stopping on their way for one last drink, in the taverns but just now opened which mingled with the growing daylight the yellow light of their little lamps.

Marie remained there, motionless, perceiving with a painful acuteness all these already familiar sounds of the winter mornings which ascended from the street, voices husky with alcohol and the rumblings of sabots. It was in one of those old many-storeyed houses, tall, immense, with dark yards, rough granite walls as thick as ramparts, sheltering all sorts of people, workmen, pensioners, sailors; at least thirty families of drunkards. It was now four months since—on Yves' return from the Antilles—she had left Toulven to come and live there.

A growing light entered through the windows, fell on the dirty, dilapidated walls, penetrated little by little the whole of the large room in which their modest little household furniture, now in disorder, seemed lost. Clearly the day had come; and, out of thriftiness, she went and blew out the candle, and then returned to sit by the window.

What was she going to do with this new day; should she work? No, she had not the heart, and, then, what was the use?

Another day to be passed without a fire, with a heart that was dead, watching the rain falling, watching and waiting! Waiting, waiting in an anxiety that grew from hour to hour, waiting for the coming of the darkness, for the moment when the hammering of the sabots would begin once more in the grey street below, when the workers' day was done. For Yves and the other sailors whose ships were in the port were released at the same time as the workers in the dockyard; and then, every evening, leaning out of her window, she would watch the flood of humanity pass, searching, with anxious eyes, among all these groups, looking for him who had taken from her her life.

She could recognize him from afar, by his tall figure and his bearing; his blue collar towered over the others. When she had discovered him, walking quickly, hastening towards their lodging, it seemed to her that her poor heart overflowed, that she breathed better; and when she saw him at last beneath her, entering the old low doorway, she was almost happy. He had come—and when he was there and had embraced them both, her and little Pierre, the danger was past, he would not go out again.

But if he was late, gradually she felt herself wrung with anguish. . . . And when the hour was passed, and night came and the crowd had dispersed and he had not returned, oh! then began those sinister evenings she knew so well, those mortal evenings of waiting which she spent, the door open, seated in a chair, her hands joined, saying her prayers, her ear straining at all the sailors' songs which came from outside, trembling at every sound of footsteps which she heard on the dark staircase.

And then, very late, when others, her neighbours, were in bed and could no longer see her, she descended; in the cold, in the rain, she went out like one possessed to wait at street corners, listen at the doors of pot-houses where men were drinking still, press her pallid cheek against the window-panes of taverns.

CHAPTER LV

Little Pierre was still asleep in his cradle, making up for the sleep he had lost in the early morning. And this morning his mother also dozed near him in her chair, exhausted as she was by fatigue and watching.

It was broad daylight when she awoke, her limbs numb with cold. And with returning consciousness came once more the weight of her anxiety.

Why had she left Toulven? Why did she marry? Daughter of the country as she was what was she doing in this Brest where people stared at her peasant's dress? Why had she come to wear in the streets of the town her large white collarette, often soaked with rain, which in despair, in utter weariness, she allowed now to hang crumpled and limp on her shoulders.

She had done everything she could to reform Yves. He was still so kind, so good, he was so fond of his little Pierre in his sober hours, that often she was encouraged still to hope! He had moods of repentance that were quite sincere and lasted for several days; and those days were days of happiness.

"You must forgive me," he used to say, "for you can see that I was not myself!"

And she forgave him. Then he would stay at home, and when by chance the weather was reasonably fine, they dressed little Pierre in his new clothes, and went for a walk, the three of them, in Brest.

And then, one fine evening Yves would not return, and all was to be begun again, and she fell back into despair.

Things went from bad to worse; the stay at Brest exerted over him the same influence as it usually does over all sailors. Every week now almost, the dread thing happened; it was becoming a habit. What room was there for hope?

There was no money left in their drawer. What was to be done? Borrow from these women, her neighbours, who from time to time used to drink also, and whom she disdained to know! Of that she was ashamed! Nevertheless she was at her wits' end to know how to hide her distress from her parents, who knew nothing, and had taken Yves to their heart as if he had been their own son.

Very well then, she would tell them, tell them he was unworthy of them. She was in revolt at last. She would leave him; he had gone too far, and he had no heart.

CHAPTER LVI

And yet, yes!—something told her that he had a heart, but that he was just a big boy whom the life of the sea had spoilt. And with a great tenderness she recalled his handsome, gentle face, his voice, his smile in those hours when he was sober. . . .

Abandon him? . . . At the idea that he should go his ways alone, utterly lost then, and throwing care to the devil, delivered up to his vices and to the vices of others, to begin again his life of debauchery with other women, to sail distant seas, and then to grow old alone, forsaken, exhausted by alcohol! . . . Oh! at this idea of leaving him, she was seized with an anguish more terrible than all: she felt that she was bound to him now by a bond stronger than any reason, than any human will. She loved him passionately, without realizing the strength of her love. . . . No, rather than that, if she was not able to draw him back, she would let herself sink with him to the last degradation in order that she might still hold him in her arms, until the hour of death.

CHAPTER LVII

Little Pierre, for his part, did not like Brest at all. He found it a most uncomfortable place, ugly and dark.

He had lived there only for four months, and already his round cheeks had paled a little under their bronze. Before, they were like those ripe nectarines of the south country which are of a warm golden colour, a red stained with sun.

His eyes were black and shone with the sparkle of jet, like those of his mother, from between beautiful long eyelashes. In his little eyebrows there was already a suggestion of seriousness, which came from Yves.

He would have made a pretty picture, with his thoughtful expression and the manly and forceful little air which he had already like a grown lad.

Now and then he had still his moments of noisy gaiety; he jumped and skipped about the gloomy room, making a great commotion.

But this did not happen so often as at Toulven. He missed, in his already vague baby memory, he missed the little playmates of the beech-bordered lane, and the petting of his grandparents, and the songs of his old great-grandmother. There, everybody took notice of him, while here he was nearly always alone.

No, he did not like the town. And then he was always cold, in this bare room and on these old stone staircases.

CHAPTER LVIII

"You must forgive me; you can see that I am not myself."

When once Yves had said that, the storm was finally over; but it was often a long time before he said it. When the fit of drunkenness had passed, for two or three days, he would remain gloomy, depressed, without speaking; until suddenly, at some quite negligible thing, his smile would appear once more with an expression of childlike embarrassment. Then the clouds would break for poor Marie and she would smile too, a smile of her own, without ever uttering a word of reproach; and that was the end of the ordeal.

Once she dared very softly to ask him:

"But what is the need for sulking for three days, when it is over."

And he, more softly still, with a naïve half-smile, looking at her sideways, in obvious embarrassment: "What is the need for sulking for three days, do you say? Why, Marie, do you think I am pleased with myself when I have these bouts. . . . Oh! but it's not against you, my poor Marie, I assure you." Then she came very close to him and leaned against his shoulder, and he, answering her silent appeal, kissed her.

"Oh! drink! drink!" he said slowly, averting his half-closed eyes with a savage expression. "My father! my brothers! Now it's my turn!"

He had never said anything like this before. He had never alluded to the terrible vice which possessed him, nor given any sign that he realized its consequences.

How was it possible not to have still brief moments of hope seeing him afterwards so sensible, so dutiful, playing at the fireside with his son; dropping then all his domineering ways, alert with a thousand kindly thoughts for his wife, in his effort to make her forget her suffering?

And how believe that this same Yves would presently and fatally become once more that other, the Yves of the bad days, the Yves of the vacant gaze, the Yves depressed and brutal, the beast bewildered by alcohol, whom nothing could move? Then Marie surrounded him with tenderness, concentrated on him all the force of her will, watched over him as over a child, trembling as she followed him with her eyes whenever he so much as descended into the street where his blue-collared comrades passed and where the taverns opened their doors.

On shore Yves was lost; he knew it well himself, and used to say sadly that he would have to try to get to sea again.

He had grown up on the sea, at random, as wild plants grow. It had been nobody's business to give him notions of duty or conduct, nor of anything in the world. I alone perhaps, whom fate and his mother's prayer had put in his way, had been able to speak to him of these new things, but too late no doubt, and too vaguely. The discipline of the ship, that was the great and only curb which had directed his material life, maintaining it in that rude and healthy austerity which makes sailors strong.

The shore had for long been for him but a place of passage, where for a time he was free from restraint and where there were women; he descended on it as on a conquered country, between long voyages; and he came well supplied with money and found, in the quarters of pleasure, everything compliant to his whim and will.

But to live a regular life in a little household, to reckon up each day's expenses, to behave himself and have thought for the morrow, his sailor's ways could no longer adapt themselves to these unexpected obligations. Besides, around him, in this corrupt, degenerate Brest, alcohol seemed to ooze from the walls with the unwholesome damp. And he sank to the depths like so many others, who also once had been good and brave; he became debased, slipping down little by little to the level of this population of drunkards; and his excesses became repulsive and vulgar like those of a workman.

CHAPTER LIX

One day, I received a letter which called me to his assistance.

It was very simple, very much like a letter from a child:

"MY DEAR BROTHER,—I do not know how to tell you, but it is true, I have taken to drink again. Also I do not want to remain in Brest, as you will understand, for I am afraid of this thing.

"I have already been punished three times with irons in the Reserve, and now I do not know how to get away from the ship, for I realize that if I remain on board some misfortune will happen to me.

"But it seems to me that if I could embark once more with you, that would be exactly what I need. My dear brother, since you will soon be going away again, if you would come to Brest and take me with you, it would be much better for me than here, and I feel sure that that would save me.

"You have done me a great wrong in saying in your letter that I did not love my wife or my son; because for her and little Pierre there is nothing I would not do.

"Yes, my dear brother, I have wept and I am weeping now as I write, and I cannot see for the tears that are in my eyes.

"I only hope that you will be able to come. I embrace you with all my heart, and beg you not to forget your brother, in spite of all the disappointments he has caused you.

"Ever yours,

"YVES KERMADEC."

CHAPTER LX

One Sunday in December I returned to Brest unannounced and made my way into the low-lying quarters of the Grand 'Rue, looking for Yves' house. Reading the numbers on the doors, I passed all those high granite buildings which once were houses of the rich and now are fallen into the hands of the people; below, everywhere open taverns; above, the curtained windows of poverty, with last sickly flowers on the sills; dead chrysanthemums in pots.

It was morning. Bands of sailors were about already, looking very smart in their clean clothes, singing, beginning already the Sunday holiday.

One breathed a white mist, a damp coldness—a first sensation of winter. Newly-arrived as I was from the Adriatic, where the sun was still shining, the colours of Brest seemed to me greyer than ever.

At number 154—above the sign: À la pensée du beau canonnier—I climbed three flights of stairs in an old wide staircase, and came upon the room of the Kermadecs.

I could hear through the door the regular sound of a cradle. Little Pierre, very spoilt in spite of all, had retained this habit of being rocked to sleep, and Yves, alone with his son, was sitting near him, rocking the cradle with one hand, very slowly.

He raised pathetic eyes, moved at seeing me, but hesitating to come to me, his expression saying:

"Ah, yes, brother, I know. You have come to take me away; it is true that this is what I asked of you; but . . . but I did not expect you perhaps so soon; and to go away . . . that will be very hard to bear. . . ."

Physically, Yves had greatly changed. He had become paler, sheltered as he had been from the tanning of the sea; his expression was different, less assured, almost mournful. It was plain that he had suffered; but on his face, marmorean still and colourless, vice had not succeeded yet in imprinting any trace.

I looked around with an impression of surprise, and a contraction of the heart. I had not, in fact, foreseen what the dwelling of my brother Yves, on shore and in a town, would be like. It was very different from that sea dwelling in which I had so long known him: the masthead, full of wind and sun. Here, now, amid this reality of poverty I felt as he no doubt felt himself, out of place and ill at ease.

Marie was outside, at the pump, and little Pierre was sound asleep, his long baby's eyelashes resting on his cheeks. We were alone together and as he was uncomfortable in my presence, he began hurriedly to talk of embarking, of departure.

A change in the list had called me to Brest prepared for immediate departure: two or three ships were about to be put into commission—for the China station, for the Southern Seas, for the Levant—and it was necessary to hold myself in readiness, from hour to hour, for one of these destinations.

The week which followed was one of those agitated periods which are common enough in a sailor's life: living at the hotel as in a flying camp, amid the disorder of half-unpacked trunks, not knowing to-morrow's destination; busy with a number of things, official business at the port and preparations for the voyage;—and then these comings and goings, applications on Yves' behalf, in order to secure his withdrawal from the Reserve, and to keep him near me, ready to depart with me.

The December days, very short, very gloomy, sped quickly. I climbed often, three steps at a time, the sordid old staircase of the Kermadecs; and Marie, anxious always about the first words I might say, smiled at me sadly, with a respectful and resigned confidence, awaiting the decision I should bring.

CHAPTER LXI

IN THE ROADSTEAD OF BREST,

23rd December, 1880.

A night in December, clear and cold; a great calm over the sea, a great silence on board.

In a little ship's cabin, which is painted white and has iron walls, Yves is sitting near me amid open trunks and cases. We are still in the disarray of arrival; we have yet to instal ourselves, to make a little home, in this iron box which presently is going to carry us through the waves and storms of winter.

All the embarcations we had foreseen, all the long voyages we had projected, had come to nothing. And I find myself simply on board this Sèvre which is not going to leave the Brittany coast. Yves is among the crew and we shall be together again, in all human probability, for a year. Given our calling it is a stroke of good luck; it might have happened to us at any moment to be separated for ever. And Yves has very gladly given a hundred francs out of his purse to the sailor who consented to give up his place to him.

Let us make the best of this Sèvre, since fate will have it so. It will remind us at any rate of the times already distant when we sailed together over the misty northern sea under the protecting eye of the Creizker tower.

But I should have liked it better if we had been sent elsewhere, to somewhere in the sun; for Yves' sake especially, I should have preferred to be going farther from Brest, farther from his evil companions and the taverns of the coast.

CHAPTER LXII

AT SEA 25th December, Christmas Day.

It was the second day following, very early, at daybreak. I came up on deck, having scarcely slept a moment, after a very trying watch from midnight to four o'clock: we had been buffeted throughout the night by a gale of wind and a heavy sea.

Yves was there, wet through, but in his element and very much at ease; and, as soon as he saw me appear, he pointed out to me, smiling, a singular country which we were approaching.

Grey cliffs walled the distant horizon like a long rampart. A kind of calm fell upon the waters, although the wind continued to buffet us furiously. In the sky, dark heavy clouds slid one over the other, very rapidly: a leaden vault in movement; immense, dark things, which changed shape, which seemed in haste to pass, to reach a goal elsewhere, as if seized with the vertigo of some impending and formidable convulsion. Around us, thousands of reefs, dark heads which rose up everywhere amid this other silvered commotion made by the waves; they seemed like immense herds of sea monsters. They stretched as far as eye could see, these dangerous dark heads, the sea was covered with them. And then, beyond, on the distant cliff, the silhouettes of three very old towers, looking as if they had been planted alone there in the midst of a desert of granite, one of them greatly overtopping the two others, and rearing its tall figure like a giant who watches and presides. . . .

Yes! I recognize it well, and, like Yves, salute it with a smile; somewhat puzzled, nevertheless, to see it reappear so close to us, and in the midst of this festival of shadows, on a morning when I was not expecting it. . . . What were we going to do there, in its neighbourhood? This was no part of our original plan and I could not understand it.

It was a sudden decision of the captain, taken during my hour of sleep: to make for the entrance to the roadstead of Taureau, hard by Saint Pol, and seek a shelter there from the south wind, the open sea being now too rough for us.

And that was how it came about that, on his return to the northern waters, Yves' first visit was to the Creizker tower.

CHAPTER LXIII

CHERBOURG, 27th December, 1880.

At seven o'clock in the morning word is brought to me that Yves, dead-drunk, is in a boat alongside. Some old friends of his, topmen on the Vénus, have kept him drinking through the night in low taverns—to celebrate their return from the Antilles.

I am of the watch. There is no one yet on deck, save some sailors busy with their furbishing—but devoted fellows these, known for many a day and to be counted on. Four men get him aboard, and furtively carry him down a hatch and hide him in my room.

A bad beginning, truly, on board this Sèvre, where I had taken him under my charge as on a kind of probation, and where he had promised to be exemplary. And the black thought came to me for the first time that he was lost, beyond redemption, no matter what I might do to save him from himself. And also this other thought, more desolating still, that perhaps he was deficient in certain qualities of heart.

Throughout the day Yves was like a dead man.

He had lost his bonnet, his purse, his silver whistle, and there was a dent in his head.

It was not until about six o'clock in the evening that he showed sign of life. Then, like a child awakening, he smiled—a sign this that he was still drunk, for otherwise he would not smile—and asked for food.

Then I said to Jean-Marie, my faithful servant, a fisherman from Audierne:

"Go to the ward-room kitchen and see if you can get him some soup."

Jean-Marie brought the soup, and Yves began to turn his spoon this way and that, as if he did not remember which way to hold it:

"Come on, Jean-Marie, make him eat it!"

"It is too salty!" said Yves suddenly, lying back, making a wry face, his accent very Breton, his eyes again half-closed.

"Too salty! Too salty!" . . .

Then he fell asleep again, and Jean-Marie and I burst out laughing.

I was in no frame of mind for laughter, but this notion and this spoilt child's air were too comical. . . .

Later, at ten o'clock, Yves came round, got up furtively, and disappeared.

For two days he remained hidden in the crews' quarters in the bow of the ship, only showing himself for his watch and for drill, hanging his head, not daring to look at me.

Oh! these resolutions taken twenty times and as many times broken. . . . We dare not take them again or at any rate dare not say that we have taken them. The will flags, and the days slip by while we wait inert for the return of courage and self-respect.

Slowly, however, we came back to our normal manner of existence. I used to call him in the evenings and we would walk up and down the deck together for hours on end, talking almost in the old way, in the mournful wind and the fine rain. He had still the same fashion of thinking and speaking as before, very naïve and at the same time very profound; it was the same, but with just the least suggestion of constraint; there was something frigid between us which would not thaw. I waited for a word of repentance which did not come.

Winter was advancing, the winter of the Channel, which envelopes everything—thoughts, and men, and things—in the same grey twilight. The cold dark days had come, and our evening walk was taken at a quicker pace in the damp wind of the sea.

There were times when I wanted to grip his hand and say to him: "Come, brother, I have forgiven you; let us forget all about it." But I checked the words on my lips; after all it was for him to ask forgiveness; and there remained a kind of haughty coldness in my manner which kept him at a distance from me.

This Sèvre was not a success for us at all, that was clear.

CHAPTER LXIV

Little Pierre is at Plouherzel, trying to play in front of his grandmother's door—quite lost as he looks at the motionless sheet of water before him, with the large beastlike shape which seems to be asleep in the centre, behind a veil of mist. There is free air and open sky here, to be sure, but the wind is keener than at Toulven, and the country more desolate; and children feel these things by instinct; in the presence of things forlorn, they have involuntary melancholies and silences—as birds have.

Here now are two little comrades who have come from a neighbouring cottage to take stock of him, the little new-comer. But they are not those of Toulven; they do not know the same games; the few little words which they are able to speak are not of the same Breton. And, therefore, not venturing much on one side or the other, they remain all three at gaze, with shy smiles and comical little airs.

It was yesterday that little Pierre arrived at Plouherzel with Marie Kermadec. Yves had written to his wife bidding her make this journey as soon as she could; the thought had come to him suddenly, the hope indeed, that this might reconcile them with his mother. For the old woman, always hard and headstrong, after having in the first instance flatly refused her consent to their marriage, had accepted it subsequently with bad grace, and, since, had not even troubled to answer their letters.

Poor forsaken old woman! Of thirteen children whom God had given her, three had died in infancy. Of the eight sons who had reached manhood, all of them sailors, the sea had taken seven—seven who had been lost in shipwreck, or else had disappeared abroad, like Gildas and Goulven.

Her daughters, too, had left her. One of them had married an Icelander, who had taken her away to Tréquier; the other, her head turned by religion, had entered the convent of the Sisters of Saint Gildas du Secours.

There remained only the little grandchild, the forsaken little daughter of Goulven. And all the old woman's love was centred in her—an illegitimate child, it is true, but the last survivor of that long shipwreck which had bereft her, one after another, of the others. This little child loved to watch the incoming tide from the shore of the sea water lake. She had been forbidden to do it, but one day she went thither alone and did not return. The next tide brought in a stiff little corpse, a little body of white wax, which was laid to rest near the chapel, under a wooden cross and a mound of green turf.

She still cherished a hope in her son Yves, the last, the best beloved, because he had remained the longest at home. . . . Perhaps he, at least, would return one day to live near her!

But it was not to be. This Marie Keremenen had stolen him from her; and, at the same time—a thing which counted in her rancour—she had taken from her also the money which this son had previously sent to help her to live.

And for two years now, she had been alone, quite alone, and would be alone to her last day.

In obedience to Yves, Marie had come yesterday, after two days' journeying, and knocked at this door with her child. An old, hard-featured woman, whom she recognized at once without ever having seen her, had opened to her.

"I am Marie, Yves' wife. . . . How do you do, mother?"

"Yves' wife! Yves' wife! So this then is little Pierre? This is my little grandson?"

Her eye had softened as she looked at the little grandson. She had made them enter, given them to eat, seen that they were warm and comfortable, and prepared for them her best bed. But for all that there was a coldness, an ice which nothing could thaw.

In the corner, surreptitiously, the grandmother embraced her grandchild with affection. But before Marie she gave no sign and remained always stiff and hard.

Now and then they spoke of Yves, and Marie said timidly that, since their marriage, he had reformed greatly.

"Tra la la! . . . Reformed!" repeated the old woman, assuming her ill-tempered air. "Tra la la! my child! . . . Reformed! . . . He has his father's head, they are all the same, they are all alike, and you have not seen the last of it in him; mark my words!"

Then poor Marie, her heart heavy, not knowing what to reply, nor what else to say during the long day, nor what to do with herself, waited impatiently for the time fixed by Yves for their departure. Very surely she would not return.

CHAPTER LXV

At Paimpol Marie, with her son, has climbed into the diligence which moves off and is bearing them away. Through the door she watches her mother-in-law who has had the grace to accompany them from Plouherzel to see them off, but who has said good-bye briefly and coldly, a good-bye to chill the heart.

She watches her and is puzzled; for the old woman is running now, running after the diligence—and her face, too, is working; she seems to be making some kind of grimace. What can she want of them? And as she watches Marie becomes almost afraid. For she is grimacing still. And see! now she is crying! Her poor features are quite contorted, and her tears fall fast. . . . And now she understands!

"For the love of heaven! stop the diligence, sir, if you please," says Marie to an Icelander, who is sitting near her and who, too, has understood; for he passes his arm through the little window in front and pulls the conductor by the sleeve.

The diligence stops. The grandmother, who has continued to run, is at the back, almost on the step; she stretches out her hands to them, and her face is bathed in tears.

Marie gets down and the old woman throws her arms round her, embraces her, embraces little Pierre.

"My dear child! may God in His goodness be with you."

And she weeps and sobs.

"My child, with Yves, you know, you must be very gentle, you must take him by the heart; you will see that you can be happy with him. Perhaps I was too hard with his poor father. God bless you, my dear daughter!"

And there they stand, united in the same love for Yves, and weeping together.

"Now then, my good women!" cries the conductor, "when will you have finished rubbing noses?"

They had to drag them apart. And Marie, seated once more in her corner, watches as she draws away, with eyes filled with tears, the old woman, who has sunk down, sobbing, on a milestone, while little Pierre waves good-bye with his plump little hand from the window.

CHAPTER LXVI

1st January, 1881.

In the heart of the docks at Brest, a little before dawn, on the first morning of the year 1881. A mournful place, these docks; the Sèvre has been moored there now for a week.

Above, the sky has begun to brighten between the high granite walls which enclose us. The lamps, few and far between, shed in the mist their last meagre yellow light. And already one may discern the silhouettes of formidable things which are taking shape, awakening ideas of a grim and cruel rigidity; machines high perched, enormous anchors upturning their black arms; all sorts of vague and ugly shapes; and, in addition, laid-up ships, with their outline of gigantic fishes, motionless on their chains, like large dead monsters.

A great silence prevails and a deadly cold. There is no solitude comparable with that of a naval dockyard at night, especially on a night of holiday. As the time approaches for the gun to sound the signal to cease work, everybody flees as from a place of pestilence; thousands of men issue from every point, swarming like ants, hastening towards the gates. The last of them run, actuated by a fear lest they should arrive too late and find the iron gates closed. Then calm descends. Then night. And there is no longer a soul, no longer a sound.

From time to time a patrol passes on his round, challenged by the sentries, giving in a low voice the password. And then the silent population of rats debouches from all the holes, takes possession of the deserted ships, the empty yards.

On duty on board since the previous day I had got to sleep very late, in my icy, iron-walled room. I was worried about Yves, and the songs, the shoutings of sailors which came to me in the night from the distance, from the low quarters of the town, filled me with foreboding.