A Tale of Brittany (Mon frère Yves)

A TALE OF
BRITTANY

A TALE OF
BRITTANY

(MON FRÈRE YVES)

BY

PIERRE LOTI

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY
W. P. BAINES

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

CONTENTS

[Chapter I]
[Chapter II]
[Chapter III]
[Chapter IV]
[Chapter V]
[Chapter VI]
[Chapter VII]
[Chapter VIII]
[Chapter IX]
[Chapter X]
[Chapter XI]
[Chapter XII]
[Chapter XIII]
[Chapter XIV]
[Chapter XV]
[Chapter XVI]
[Chapter XVII]
[Chapter XVIII]
[Chapter XIX]
[Chapter XX]
[Chapter XXI]
[Chapter XXII]
[Chapter XXIII]
[Chapter XXIV]
[Chapter XXV]
[Chapter XXVI]
[Chapter XXVII]
[Chapter XXVIII]
[Chapter XXIX]
[Chapter XXX]
[Chapter XXXI]
[Chapter XXXII]
[Chapter XXXIII]
[Chapter XXXIV]
[Chapter XXXV]
[Chapter XXXVI]
[Chapter XXXVII]
[Chapter XXXVIII]
[Chapter XXXIX]
[Chapter XL]
[Chapter XLI]
[Chapter XLII]
[Chapter XLIII]
[Chapter XLIV]
[Chapter XLV]
[Chapter XLVI]
[Chapter XLVII]
[Chapter XLVIII]
[Chapter XLIX]
[Chapter L]
[Chapter LI]
[Chapter LII]
[Chapter LIII]
[Chapter LIV]
[Chapter LV]
[Chapter LVI]
[Chapter LVII]
[Chapter LVIII]
[Chapter LIX]
[Chapter LX]
[Chapter LXI]
[Chapter LXII]
[Chapter LXIII]
[Chapter LXIV]
[Chapter LXV]
[Chapter LXVI]
[Chapter LXVII]
[Chapter LXVIII]
[Chapter LXIX]
[Chapter LXX]
[Chapter LXXI]
[Chapter LXXII]
[Chapter LXXIII]
[Chapter LXXIV]
[Chapter LXXV]
[Chapter LXXVI]
[Chapter LXXVII]
[Chapter LXXVIII]
[Chapter LXXIX]
[Chapter LXXX]
[Chapter LXXXI]
[Chapter LXXXII]
[Chapter LXXXIII]
[Chapter LXXXIV]
[Chapter LXXXV]
[Chapter LXXXVI]
[Chapter LXXXVII]
[Chapter LXXXVIII]
[Chapter LXXXIX]
[Chapter XC]
[Chapter XCI]
[Chapter XCII]
[Chapter XCIII]
[Chapter XCIV]
[Chapter XCV]
[Chapter XCVI]
[Chapter XCVII]
[Chapter XCVIII]
[Chapter XCIX]
[Chapter C]
[Chapter CI]
[Chapter CII]

DEDICATION

To ALPHONSE DAUDET

Here is a little tale which I wish to dedicate to you. Accept it, I pray, with my affection.

It has been urged against my books that there is always in them too much of the trouble of love. This time there is only a little love and that an honest love and it comes only towards the end.

It was you who gave me the idea of writing the life story of a sailor and of putting into it the immense monotony of the sea.

It may be that this book will make me enemies, although I have touched as lightly as possible on the regulations of the service. But you who love everything connected with the sea, even the wind and the fog and the great waves—yes, and the brave and simple sailors—you, assuredly, will understand me. And in that I shall find my recompense.

PIERRE LOTI.

A TALE OF BRITTANY

[CHAPTER I]

The pay-book of my brother Yves differs in no wise from the pay-book of all other sailors.

It is covered with a yellow-coloured parchment paper and, as it has travelled much about the sea, in many a ship's locker, it is absolutely wanting in freshness.

In large letters on the cover appears:

KERMADEC, 2091. P.

Kermadec is his family name; 2091, his number in the army of the sea; and P., the initial letter of Paimpol, the port at which he was enrolled.

Opening the book, one finds, on the first page, the following description:

"Kermadec (Yves-Marie), son of Yves-Marie and Jeanne Danveoch. Born 28 August, 1851, at Saint Pol-de-Léon (Finistère). Height 5 ft. 11 inches. Hair brown, eyebrows brown, eyes brown, nose ordinary, chin ordinary, forehead ordinary, face oval.

"Distinctive marks: tattooed on the left breast with an anchor and, on the right wrist, with a bracelet in the form of a fish."

These tattooings were still the fashion, some ten years ago, for your true sailor. Executed on board the Flore by a friend in an hour of idleness, they became an object of mortification for Yves, who many a time had tortured himself in an effort to obliterate them. The idea that he was marked in this indelible manner, and that he might be recognized always and everywhere by these little blue designs was to him absolutely insupportable.

Turning over the page one comes across a series of printed leaves setting out, in a clear and concise form, all the shortcomings to which sailors are subject, with, opposite them, the tariff of the penalties incurred—from insignificant irregularities which may be expiated by a few nights in irons to the dire rebellions which are punished by death.

Unhappily this quotidian reading has never sufficed to inspire the salutary awe which it should, either in sailors in general, or in my poor Yves in particular.

Follow several pages of manuscript containing the names of ships, with blue stamp impressions, figures and dates. The quartermasters, men of taste as they are, have decorated this part of the book with elegant flourishes. It is here that particulars of his voyages are set out and details of the pay he has received.

The first years, in which he earned fifteen francs a month, ten of which he saved for his mother; years passed in the onrush of the wind, in which he lived half naked at the top of those great oscillating shafts which are the masts of ships; years in which he wandered without a care in the world over the changing desert of the sea; then the more troubled years in which love was born and took shape in the virgin and untutored heart—to be translated into brutal orgies or into dreams naïvely pure according to the hazard of the places to which the wind drove him, according to the hazard of the women thrown into his arms; terrible awakenings of the heart and senses, wild excesses, and then the return to the ascetic life of the ocean, to the sequestration on the floating monastery; all this may be divined behind these figures and these names and dates which accumulate, year by year, in the poor little pay-book of a sailor. A whole poem of strange adventures and sufferings lies within its yellow pages.

[CHAPTER II]

The 28th of August, 1851, was, it seems, a fine summer's day at Saint Pol-de-Léon, in Finistère.

The pale sun of Brittany smiled and made festival for this little newcomer, who later on was to love the sun so much, and to love Brittany so much.

Yves made his entrance into the world in the form of a large baby, very round and very brown. The good women present at his arrival gave him the name of Bugel-Du, which in English means: little black boy. This bronzed colouring was, for that matter, characteristic of the family, the Kermadecs from father to son, having been ocean-going sailors and men deeply bitten by the tan of the sea.

A fine summer's day in Saint Pol-de-Léon is a rare thing in this region of fogs: a kind of melancholy radiance is shed over everything; the old town of the Middle Ages is, as it were, awakened out of its mournful slumber in the mist and made young again; the old granite warms itself in the sun; the tower of Creizker, the giant of Breton towers, bathes in the blue sky, in the full light, its delicate grey fretwork marbled with yellow lichens. And all around is the wild moorland, with its pink heather, its golden gorse, exhaling a soft perfume of flowering broom.

At the baptism were a young girl, the godmother; a sailor, the godfather; and, behind, the two little brothers, Goulven and Gildas, holding by the hand the two little sisters, Yvonne and Marie, who carried flowers.

When the little company entered the old church of the bishops of Léon, the verger, hanging on the rope of a bell, made ready to start the joyous carillon called for by the occasion. But the Curé, coming on the scene, said to him harshly:

"Be quiet, Marie Bervrac'h, for the love of God! These Kermadecs are people who never give anything to the Church, and the father wastes all his substance in the tavern. We'll have no ringing, if you please, for people of that sort."

And that is how my brother Yves made his entrance into the world in the guise of poverty.

Jeanne Danveoch, from her bed, listened with uneasiness, waited with a foreboding of ill, for the vibrations of the bell which were so slow to begin. For a long time she listened and heard nothing. Then she understood the public affront and wept.

Her eyes were wet with tears when the party returned, crestfallen, to the house.

All his life this humiliation weighed upon the heart of Yves; he was never able to forgive this unkind reception at his entrance into the world, nor the cruel tears shed by his mother; and as a result he preserved for the Roman clergy an unforgetting rancour and closed his Breton heart to Our Mother the Church.

[CHAPTER III]

It was twenty-four years later, on an evening of December, at Brest.

A fine rain was falling, cold, penetrating, continuous; it streamed down the walls, rendering deeper in colour the high-pitched roofs of slate, and the tall houses of granite; it watered with calm indifference the noisy crowd of the Sunday, which swarmed nevertheless, wet and bedraggled, in the narrow streets, beneath the mournful grey of the twilight.

This Sunday crowd consisted of inebriated sailors singing, of soldiers who stumbled, making with their sabres a clatter of steel, of people of the lower class adrift—workers of the town looking drawn and miserable; women in little merino shawls and pointed muslin head-dresses, who walked along with shining eyes and reddened cheek bones, exhaling an odour of brandy; of old men and old women in a disgusting state of drunkenness, who had fallen and been picked up, and were lurching forward, on their way, with backs covered with mud.

The rain continued to fall, wetting everything, the silver-buckled hats of the Bretons, the tilted bonnets of the sailors, the laced shakos and the white head-dresses, and the umbrellas.

There was something so wan, so dead, about the air, that it was difficult to imagine that there could be anywhere a sun . . . the notion of it had gone. There was a feeling that you were imprisoned under layers and thicknesses of dense, humid clouds which were deluging you. It did not seem that they would ever be able to break, or that behind them there could be a sky. You breathed water. You were no longer conscious of the hour, and knew not whether the darkness was the darkness of all this rain or whether the real winter's night was closing in.

The sailors brought into the streets a certain rather surprising note of gaiety and youth, with their cheery faces and their songs, with their large bright collars and their red pompoms standing out in sharp contrast with the navy blue of their uniform. They went and came from one tavern to another, jostling the crowd, saying things which had no sense but which made them laugh. And sometimes they stopped on the footpath, before the stalls of the shops where were retailed the hundred and one things they needed for their use: red handkerchiefs, in the middle of which were imprinted designs of famous ships, Bretagne, Triomphante, Devastation; ribbons for their bonnets with handsome inscriptions in gold; cords of complicated workmanship destined to close securely those canvas sacks which they have on board for storing their kit; elegant attachments in plaited thread for suspending from the neck of the topmen their large knives; silver whistles for the petty-officers, and finally, red belts and little combs and little mirrors.

From time to time came heavy squalls which sent bonnets flying and made the drunken passers-by stagger. And then the rain came down more heavily, more torrentially, and whipped like hail.

The crowd of sailors steadily increased. They could be seen coming on in groups at the end of the Rue de Siam; they ascended from the port and from the lower town by the great granite stairways, and spread singing into the streets.

Those who came from the roadstead were wetter than the others, dripping with sea-water as well as with rain. The sailing cutters, bending to the cold squalls, leaping amid waves deep-edged with spray, had brought them quickly into port. And joyously they climbed the steps which led to the town, shaking themselves as cats do which have been sprinkled with water.

The wind rushed through the long drab streets, and the night promised to be a wild one.

In the roadstead—on board a ship which had arrived that very morning from South America—on the stroke of four o'clock, a petty officer had given a prolonged whistle, followed by cleverly executed trills, which signified in the language of the sea: "Man the launch!" Then a murmur of joy was heard in the ship, where the sailors were penned, on account of the rain, in the gloom of the spar-deck. For there had been a fear for a time that the sea might be too rough for communication with Brest, and the men had been waiting anxiously for this whistle which set their doubts at rest. For the first time, after three years of voyage, they were about to set foot on the land of France, and impatience was great.

When the men appointed, clothed in little costumes of yellow oilskin, were all embarked in the launch and had taken their places in correct and symmetrical order, the same petty officer whistled again and said: "Liberty-men, fall in!"

The wind and the sea made a great noise; the distances of the roadstead were drowned in a whitish fog made of spray and rain.

The sailors who had received permission to go ashore ascended quickly, issued from the hatches and took their places in line, as their numbers and names were called, with faces beaming with the joy of seeing Brest again. They had put on their Sunday clothes; they completed, under the torrential downpour, the last details of their toilet, setting one another right with airs of coquetry.

When "218: Kermadec!" was called, Yves appeared, a strapping youngster of twenty-four, grave in mien, looking very well in his ribbed woollen jersey and his large blue collar.

Tall, lean with the leanness of the ancients, with the muscular arms and the neck and shoulders of an athlete, his whole appearance gave an impression of tranquil and slightly disdainful strength. His face, beneath its uniform coat of bronze, was colourless; in some subtle way impossible to define, a Breton face, with the complexion of an Arab. Curt in speech, with the accent of Finistère; a low voice curiously vibrant, recalling those instruments of very powerful sound, which one touches only very lightly for fear of making too much noise.

Hazel eyes, rather close together and very deep-set beneath the frontal bone, with the impassive expression of a regard turned inwards; the nose small and regular in shape; the lower lip protruding slightly as if in scorn.

The face immobile, marmorean, save in those rare moments when he smiles. Then the whole face is transformed, and one sees that Yves is very young. The smile itself is the smile of those who have suffered: it has a childlike gentleness and lights up the hardened features a little as the rays of the sun, falling by chance, light up the cliffs of Brittany.

When Yves appeared the other sailors who were there regarded him with good-humoured smiles and an unusual air of respect.

This was because he wore for the first time on his sleeve the two red stripes of a petty officer, which had just been awarded him. And on board ship a petty officer is a person of consequence. These poor woollen stripes, which, in the army, are given so quickly to the first comer, represent in the navy years of hardship; they represent the strength and the life of young men, expended at every hour of the day and night, high up in the crow's nest, that domain of the topmen which is shaken by all the winds of heaven.

The boatswain, coming up, held out his hand to Yves. Formerly he also had been a topmen inured to hardness, and he was a shrewd judge of strong and courageous men.

"Well, Kermadec," he said. "You are going to water those stripes of yours, I suppose?"

"Yes, bo'sun," replied Yves in a low voice, but preserving a grave and abstracted air.

It was not the rain from heaven that the old boatswain had in mind; for, as far as that went, the watering was assured. No, in the navy, to water your stripes means to get drunk in order to do them honour on the first day they are worn.

Yves remained thoughtful in the face of the necessity of this ceremony, because he had just sworn to me very solemnly that he would be sober, and he wanted to keep his promise.

And then he had had enough, at last, of these tavern scenes which had been repeated so many times in all the countries of the world. To spend one's nights in low pot-houses, at the head of the wildest and most drunken of the crew, and to be picked up in the gutter in the morning—one tires of these pleasures after a time, however good a sailor one may be. Besides the mornings following are painful and are always the same; and Yves knew that and wanted no more of them.

It was very gloomy, this December weather, for a day of return. Of no avail was it to be carefree and young, the weather cast over the joy of homecoming a kind of sinister night. Yves experienced this impression, which caused him, in spite of himself, a mournful surprise; for all this, in sum, was his own Brittany; he felt it in the air and recognised it despite this darkness of dreamland.

The launch moved off, carrying them all towards the shore. It travelled aslant under the west wind; it bounded over the waves with the hollow sound of a drum, and, at each leap that it made, a mass of water broke over them, as if it had been hurled by furious hands.

They made their way very rapidly in a kind of cloud of water, the large salt drops of which lashed their faces. They bowed their heads before this deluge, huddled close one against the other, like sheep in a storm.

They did not speak, all concentrated as they were on the prospect of the pleasure that awaited them. There were among them young men, who, for a year past, had not set foot on land; the pockets of all of them were well-lined with money, and fierce desires bubbled in their blood.

Yves himself thought a little of the women who were waiting for them in Brest, and from among whom presently they would be able to choose. But, nevertheless, he was gloomy, he alone of all the band. Never had so many thoughts at one time troubled the head of this poor simpleton.

It is true that he had had melancholy moods of this kind sometimes, during the silence of the nights at sea; but then the return had appeared to him from the distance in colours of rose and gold. And here, to-day, was the return and, on the contrary, his heart was sadder now than it had ever been before. And this he did not understand, for he had the habit, as the simple and as children have, of suffering his impressions without attempting to interpret them.

With head turned towards the wind, heedless of the water which streamed down his blue collar, he had remained standing, supported by the group of sailors who pressed close against him.

All this coast-line of Brest, which could be distinguished in vague contours through the veil of the rain, awoke in him memories of his years as ship-boy, passed here on this great misty roadstead, pining for his mother. . . . This past had been rough, and, for the first time in his life, his thoughts turned to what the future might be.

His mother! ... It was true indeed that for nearly two years he had not written to her. But that is the way with sailors; and, in spite of all, these mothers of theirs are very dear to them. What usually happens is this: they disappear for a few years, and then, one happy day, they return, without warning, to the village, with stripes on their sleeve and pockets full of hard-earned money, and bring back happiness and comfort to the old forsaken home.

They sped on through the freezing rain, leaping over the grey waves, pursued by the whistling of the wind and the roar of the water.

Yves was thinking of many things, and his fixed eyes now saw nothing. The image of his mother had all at once taken on an infinite tenderness; he felt that she was now quite near to him, in a little Breton village, under this same winter twilight which enveloped him; in two or three days from now, he would go, with an overmastering joy, to surprise her and take her in his arms.

The tossing of the sea, the wind and speed, rendered his changing thoughts incoherent. At one moment he was disconcerted to find his country under a sky so gloomy. During his voyage he had become used to the heat and blue clearness of the tropics, and, here, it seemed that there was a shroud casting a sinister night over the world.

And a little later he was telling himself that he did not want to drink any more, not that there was any harm in it after all, and, in any case, it was the custom among Breton sailors; but, first of all, he had given me his word, and secondly, at twenty-four, one is a grown man and has had a full draught of pleasure, and it seems that one feels the need of becoming a little more steady.

Then he thought of the astonished looks of the others on board, especially of Barrada, his great friend, when they saw him return to-morrow morning, upright and walking straight. At this comical idea, a childlike smile passed suddenly over his grave and manly face.

They had now arrived almost under the Castle of Brest and, in the shelter of the enormous masses of granite, there was suddenly calm. The cutter no longer rocked; it proceeded tranquilly through the rain; its sails were hauled down, and the men in yellow oilskins took over its management with rhythmic strokes of their long oars.

Before them opened that deep and dismal bay which is the naval port; on the quays were alignments of cannon and of formidable-looking maritime things. All around nothing but high and interminable constructions of granite, all alike, overhanging the dark water and staged one above the other with rows of little doors and little windows. Above these again, the first houses of Brest and Recouvrance showed their wet roofs, from which issued little trails of white smoke. They proclaimed their damp and cold misery, and the wind rushed all about with a great dismal moaning.

It was now quite dark and the little gas flames began to pink with bright yellow dots these accumulations of dark things. The sailors could already hear the rumbling of the traffic and the noise of the town which came to them from above the deserted dockyard, mingled with the songs of drunken men.

Yves, out of prudence, had entrusted to his friend Barrada on board all his money, which he was saving for his mother, keeping in his pocket only fifty francs for his night ashore.

[CHAPTER IV]

"And my husband also, Madame Quéméneur, when he is drunk, sleeps all day long."

"So you have come out too, Madame Kervella?"

"Yes, I also am waiting for my husband, who arrived to-day on the Catinat."

"And my man, Madame Kerdoncuff, the day he returned from China, slept for two whole days; and I, you know, got drunk too, Madame Kerdoncuff. Oh! and how ashamed of myself I was! And my daughter, also, she fell down the stairs!"

And these things, spoken in the singing and musical accent of Brest, are exchanged under old umbrellas straining in the wind, between women in waterproofs and pointed muslin head-dresses, who are waiting above, at the top of the wide granite steps.

Their husbands have come on that same boat which has brought Yves, and their wives are waiting for them; fortified already by a little brandy, they are on the watch, their eyes half merry and half tender.

These old sailors whom they await were once perhaps gallant topmen inured to hardship; but demoralized by their sojourns in Brest and by drunkenness, they have married these creatures and sunk into the sordid slums of the town.

Behind these women there are other groups again on which the eye rests with pleasure; young women of quiet mien, real sailors' wives these, wrapt in the joy of seeing once more a sweetheart or a husband, and gazing with anxiety into the great yawning cavern of the port, out of which their beloved ones will come to them. And there are mothers, come from the villages, wearing their pretty Breton festival dresses, the wide coif and the gown of black silk embroidered cloth; the rain will spoil them to be sure, these fine trappings, which are renewed perhaps not more than twice in a lifetime; but it is necessary to do honour to this son whom presently they will embrace before the others.

"See there! The men from the Magicien are now entering the harbour, Madame Kerdoncuff!"

"And those from the Catinat also, do you see! They are following one another, Madame Quéméneur!"

Below, deep down, the launches come alongside the black quay, and those who are awaited are among the first to ascend.

First the husbands of these good ladies. Way for the seniors, let them pass out first! Tar, and wind and sun and brandy have given them the wrinkled physiognomies of monkeys. . . . And they go their way, arm in arm, in the direction of Recouvrance, to some gloomy old street of tall granite houses; presently they will climb to a damp room which smells of gutters and the mustiness of poverty, where on the furniture are shell ornaments covered with dust and bottles pell-mell with strange knick-knacks. And thanks to the alcohol bought at the tavern below, they will find oblivion of this cruel separation in a renewal of their youth.

Then come the others, the young men for whom sweethearts are waiting, and wives and old mothers, and, at last, four by four, climbing the granite steps, the whole band of wild lads, whom Yves is taking to celebrate his stripes.

And those who are waiting for them, for this little band of hot-blooded youth, are in the Rue de Sept Saints, already at their door and on the watch: women whose hair is worn with a fringe combed down to the eyebrows—with tipsy voices and horrible gestures.

Before the night is out, these women will have their strength, their restrained passions—and their money. For your sailormen pay well on the day of their return, and over and above what they give, there is what one may take afterwards, when by good luck they are quite drunk.

They look about them undecided, almost bewildered, drunk already merely from finding themselves on shore.

Where should they go? How should they begin their pleasures? This wind, this cold rain of winter and this sinister fall of the night—for those who have a home, a fireside, all that adds to the joy of the return. To these poor fellows it brought the need for a shelter, for somewhere where they could warm themselves; but they were without a home, these returning exiles.

At first they wandered at hazard, linked arm in arm, laughing at nothing, at everything, walking obliquely from right and left—with the movements of captive beasts which have just been set free.

Then they entered À la Descente des Navires, presided over by Madame Creachcadec.

À la Descente des Navires was a low tavern in the Rue de Siam.

The warm atmosphere savoured of alcohol. There was a coal fire in a brazier, and Yves sat down in front of it. This was the first time, for two or three years past, that he had sat in a chair. And a real fire! How he revelled in the quite unusual luxury of drying himself before glowing coals. On board ship, there was never a chance of it; not even in the great cold of Cape Horn or of Iceland; not even in the persistent, penetrating rains of the high latitudes were they ever able to dry themselves. For days and nights on end, they remained wet through; doing their best to keep on the move, until the sun should shine.

She was a real mother to the sailors, was this Madame Creachcadec; all who knew her could vouch for it. And she was very exact, too, in the prices she charged for their dinners and their feastings.

Besides, she knew them. Her large red face flushed already with alcohol, she tried to repeat their names, which she heard them saying among themselves; she remembered quite well having seen them when they were boatmen on board the Bretagne; she even thought she could recall their boyhood, when they were ship-boys on the Inflexible. But what tall, fine fellows they had grown since those days! Truly it was only an eye like hers that could recognize them, altered as they were. . . .

And, at the back of the tavern, the dinner was cooking, on stoves which already sent out an appetising odour of soup.

From the street came sounds of a great uproar. A band of sailors was approaching, singing, scanning at the top of their voices, to a frivolous air, these words of the Church: 'Kyrie Christe, Dominum nostrum; Kyrie eleison. . . .

They entered, upsetting the chairs, and at the same time a gust of wind laid low the flame of the lamps.

Kyrie Christe, Dominum nostrum. . . . The Bretons did not like this kind of song, brought no doubt from the back streets of some great city. But the discordance between the words and the music was so droll, it made them laugh.

The newcomers, however, were from the Gauloise, and recognized, and were recognized by, the others; they had all been ship-boys together. One of them hastened to embrace Yves: it was Kerboul who had slept in the next hammock to him on board the Inflexible. He, too, had become tall and strong; he was on the flagship, and, as he was a steady sort of fellow, he had for a long time worn red stripes on his sleeve.

The air in the tavern was oppressive and there was a great deal of noise. Madame Creachcadec brought hot wine all steaming, the preliminary to the dinner that had been ordered, and heads began to swim.

There was commotion this night in Brest: the patrols were kept busy.

In the Rue de Sept Saints and in the Rue de Saint Yves, singing and shouting went on until the morning; it was as if barbarians had been loosed there, bands escaped from ancient Gaul; there were scenes of rejoicing that recalled the boisterousness of primitive times.

The sailors sang. And the women, their fingers itching for the pieces of gold—agitated, dishevelled in this great excitation of the sailors' homecoming—mingled their shrill voices with the deep voices of the men.

The latest arrivals from the sea might be recognized by their deeper tint of bronze, by their freer carriage; and then they carried with them objects of foreign origin; some of them passed with bedraggled parakeets in cages; others with monkeys.

They sang, these sailors, at the top of their voices, with a kind of naïve expression, things that made one shudder, or perhaps little airs of the south, songs of the Basque country, and, above all, they sang mournful Breton melodies which seemed like old bagpipe airs bequeathed from Celtic antiquity.

The simple, the good, sang part songs together; they remained grouped by village, and repeated in their native tongue the long laments of the country, preserving even in their drunkenness their fine resonant young voices. Others stuttered like little children and embraced one another; unconscious of their strength they smashed doors and knocked down passers-by.

The night was advancing; only places of ill-repute remained open; and in the streets the rain continued to fall on the exuberance of these wild rejoicings.

[CHAPTER V]

Six o'clock on the following morning. A dark mass having the form of a man in the gutter—by the side of a kind of deserted street overhung by ramparts. It is still dark. The rain still falls, fine and cold; and the winter wind continues to roar. It had "watched," as they say in the navy, and passed the night in groaning.

It was in the lower part of the town, a little below the bridge of Brest, at the foot of the great walls, in that locality where sailors commonly find themselves, who are without a home and who have had the vague intention, blind drunk as they were, of returning to their ship and have fallen en route.

There is already a kind of half light in the air; a wan, pallid light, the light of a winter's day rising on granite. Water was streaming over this human form which lay on the ground, and, right at its side, poured in a cascade into the opening of a drain.

It began to get a little brighter; a sort of light made up its mind to descend along the high granite walls. The dark thing in the gutter was now clearly seen to be the body of a tall man, a sailor, lying with arms outstretched in the form of a cross.

A first passer-by made a sound of wooden sabots on the hard pavé, as of someone staggering. Then another, then many. They followed all the same direction in a lower street which led to the gate of the naval dockyard.

Soon this tapping of sabots became a thing extraordinary; a fatiguing, continuous noise, hammering the silence like a nightmare music.

Hundreds and hundreds of sabots, tramping before daylight, coming from everywhere, and passing along the street below; a kind of early morning procession of evil import: it was the workers returning to the dockyard, still staggering from having drank so much the night before, the gait unsteady, the eyes lustreless.

And there were women also, ugly, pale, and wet, who went to right and left as if seeking someone: in the half light they peered into the faces of the men—waiting and watching there, to see if the husband, or the son, had at last come out of the taverns, if he was going to do his day's work.

The man lying in the gutter was also examined by them; two or three bent over him so that they might better distinguish his face. They saw features youthful but weatherbeaten, and set now in a corpse-like fixity, the lips contracted, the teeth clenched. No, they did not know him. And in any case he was not a workman, this man; he wore the large blue collar of a sailor.

One of them, nevertheless, who had a son a sailor, tried, out of kindness of heart, to drag him from the water. He was too heavy.

"What a big corpse!" she said as she let his arms drop.

This body on which had fallen all the rain of the night was Yves.

A little later, when it was full daylight, his comrades, who were passing, recognized him and carried him away.

They laid him, all soaked with the water of the gutter, at the bottom of the cutter, itself wet from the spray of the sea, and quickly they put off with canvas spread.

The sea was rough; there was a head wind. They beat to windward for a long time, and were hard put to it to reach their ship.

[CHAPTER VI]

Yves awoke slowly towards evening. He had first of all sensations of suffering, which came one by one, as after a kind of death. He was cold, cold to the marrow of his bones.

Above all he was bruised and battered and benumbed—stretched for some hours now on a hard bed: and he made a first effort, scarcely conscious, to turn over. But his left foot, in which suddenly he felt a sharp pain, was caught in a rigid thing against which he realized at once it was vain to struggle. And he recognized the sensation: he understood now: he was in irons.

He was already familiar with the inevitable morrow of wild nights of pleasure: to be shackled by a ring to an iron bar for days on end! And this place in which he must be, he divined it without taking the trouble to open his eyes, this recess narrow as a cupboard, and dark, and damp, with its fusty smell, and its dim pale light falling from an opening above: the hold of the Magicien.

But he confused this to-morrow with others which had been spent elsewhere—far away, at the other side of the earth, in America, or in the ports of China. . . . Was this for thrashing the alguazils of Buenos Ayres? Or was it that sanguinary fight at Rosario which had brought him to this? Or, again, the affair with the Russian sailors at Hong-Kong? He was not very clear, to a thousand miles or so, having forgotten in what part of the world he was.

All the winds and all the waves of the sea had carried the Magicien to all the countries of the world; they had shaken it, rolled it, battered it from without, but without succeeding in disturbing the various things which were within this hold—without displacing the diver's dress which must be there hanging behind him, with its great eyes and morse-like head, and without changing the smell of rats, of damp, and tar.

He still felt very cold, so horribly cold that it was like a pain in his bones. And he realized that his clothes were wet and his body also. The pitiless rain of the preceding night, the wind, the darkling sky, returned vaguely to his memory. . . . He was not after all in the blue countries of the Equator! He remembered now. He was in France, in Brittany. This was the return of which he had so long dreamed.

But what had he done to be in irons already, almost before he had set foot on his native land? He tried to remember but could not. Then suddenly a recollection came to him, as of a dream: when they were hoisting him on board, he pulled himself together a little, and said that he would climb unaided, and then, as ill-luck would have it, he found himself face to face with a certain old warrant officer whom he held in aversion. And straightway he had fallen to abusing him most vilely; then there had been some sort of scuffle and what happened afterwards he did not know, for at that moment he had fallen inert again and lost consciousness.

But then ... the leave that had been promised him to go to his village of Plouherzel would not now be given him! . . . All the things for which he had hoped, for which he had longed, during three years of misery, were lost! He thought of his mother and his heart smote him sorely; his eyes opened bewildered, seeing only what was within, dilated in a strange fixity by a tumult of interior things. And, in the hope that it was only an evil dream, he tried to shake his tortured foot in its iron ring.

Then a burst of laughter, deep and resonant, went off like a firework in the dark hold: a man, clothed in a woollen jersey fitting close to his body, was standing beside Yves and looking at him. As he laughed he threw back his handsome head and showed his white teeth with a feline expression.

"Hello! so you are waking up?" asked the man in a sarcastic voice, which vibrated with the accent of Bordeaux.

Yves recognized his friend Jean Barrada, the gunner, and looking up at him he asked if I knew.

"Tut! Tut!" said Barrada in his chaffing Gascon way. "Does he know? He has been down three times and even brought the doctor here to have a look at you; you were like a log and we were frightened about you. And I am on duty here to let him know if you move."

"What for? I don't want him or anyone. Don't go, Barrada, do you understand, I forbid you!"

And so it had happened again. He had come to grief once more, and once more through his old failing. And, on every one of the rare occasions on which he set foot on shore, it fell out thus and it seemed that he could not help it. It must be true, what had been said to him, that this habit was a terrible and a fatal one, and that a man was lost indeed when once it had taken hold of him. In rage against himself he twisted his muscular arms until they cracked; he half raised himself, grinding his teeth; and then he fell back striking his head against the hard planks. Oh! his poor mother, she was now quite near to him and he would not see her, despite his longing of the last three years! . . . And this was his return to France! What anguish and what misery!

"At least you must change your clothes," said Barrada. "To remain wet through as you are won't do you any good. You will be ill."

"So much the better, Barrada! Leave me alone."

He spoke harshly, his eyes dark and menacing; and Barrada, who knew him well, realized that the best thing to do was to leave him.

Yves turned his head and for a time buried his face in his upraised arms. Then, fearful lest Barrada should imagine he was weeping, out of pride he altered his position and gazed straight in front of him. His eyes, in their wearied atony, kept a fierce fixity, and his lower lip, protruded more than usual, expressed the savage defiance which in his heart he was hurling at all the world. He was forming evil projects in his head; ideas which he had already conceived in former days, in hours of rebellion and despair, returned to him.

Yes, he would go away, like his brother Goulven, like both his brothers. This time he had made up his mind, irrevocably. The life of those sea-rovers whom he had encountered on the whale-boats of Oceania, or in places of pleasure in the towns of La Plata, that life lived in the hazard of the sea without law and without restraint, had for a long time attracted him. It was in his blood for that matter; it was a thing inherited.

To desert and sail the sea in a trading ship abroad, or to take part in the ocean fishing, that is ever the dream which obsesses sailors, and the best of them especially, in their moments of revolt.

There are good times in America for deserters. He would not be successful, of that, in his bitterness, he felt sure; for he was ordained to toil and misfortune; but, if poverty must be his lot, out there at least he would be free!

His mother! Yes, in his dash for freedom, he would steal as far as Plouherzel, in the night, and embrace her. In this again like his brother Goulven, who had done the same thing many years before. He remembered having seen him arrive one night, like a fugitive; he had remained concealed during the day of farewell which he had spent at his home. Their poor mother had wept bitterly, it is true. But what was there to do? It was fate. And this brother Goulven, how forceful he looked and how manly!

Except his mother, Yves at this moment held all the world in hate. He thought of those years of his life spent in the service, in the confinement of ships of war, under the whip of discipline; he asked himself for whose profit and why. His heart overflowed with the bitterness of despair, with desire for vengeance, with a rage to be free. . . . And, as I was the cause of his re-engaging for five years in the navy, he fumed against me and included me in his resentment against the world in general.

Barrada had left him and the darkness of a December night came on. Through the hatch of the hold the grey light of day was no longer to be seen; only a damp mist now descended, which was icy cold.

A patrol had come and lit a lantern in a wire cage, and the objects in the hold were illumined confusedly. Yves heard above him the evening assembly, the slinging of the hammocks, and then the first cry of the men of the watch marking the half-hours of the night.

Outside the wind was still blowing, and as gradually silence overtook the business of men, the great unconscious voices of things became more perceptible. High up there was a continuous roaring in the rigging; and one heard the sea which lay all about us and which, from time to time, shook everything, as if in impatience. At every shock, it rolled Yves' head on the damp wood, and he put his hands underneath so that he might suffer less.

Even the sea, this night, was angry and vicious; it beat against the sides of the ship with a continuous noise.

At this hour no one, surely, would descend again into the hold. Yves was alone, stretched on the floor, fettered, his foot in the iron ring, and his teeth now were chattering.

[CHAPTER VII]

Nevertheless, an hour afterwards, Jean Barrada reappeared, ostensibly to arrange one of those tackles which are used for the guns.

And this time, Yves called him in a low voice:

"Barrada, you might, like a good fellow, get me a drink of water."

Barrada went quickly to fetch his little mug, which during the day he carried on his belt and which he put away at night in a gun; he poured into it some water which was of the colour of rust, having been brought from La Plata in an iron tank, and a little wine stolen from the steward's room, and a little sugar stolen from the Commander's office.

And then with much kindness and very gently, he raised Yves' head and gave him to drink.

"And now," he said, "won't you change your clothes?"

"Yes," replied Yves, in a meek voice, which had become almost childlike, and sounded odd by contrast with his manner of a short time before.

He helped him to undress, humouring him as one might a child. He dried his chest, his shoulders and his arms, put him on dry clothes, and made him lie down again, first placing a sack under his head so that he might be able to sleep easier.

When Yves murmured his thanks, an amiable smile, the first, passed over his face, changing its whole expression. It was over now. His heart was softened and he was himself again. To-day the change had come more quickly than usual.

He felt an infinite tenderness as he thought of his mother, and he wanted to cry; something like a tear even came into his eyes, which were not used to yield to this weakness. . . . Perhaps after all a little indulgence would again be shown him, on account of his good conduct on board, on account of his endurance in hardship, and of his arduous work in rough weather. If it were possible—if he was not given too harsh a punishment, it was certain he would not repeat his offence and that he would earn forgiveness.

It was a strong resolution this time. It needed but a single glass of brandy, after the long abstinences of the sea, to make him lose his head at once; and then the devil in him drove him to drink another, and another again. But if he did not begin, if he never drank again, he would have a sure means of keeping steady.

His repentance had the sincerity of the repentance of a child, and he persuaded himself that, if he escaped this time from the dread court martial which consigns sailors to prison, this would be his last great fault.

He hoped also in me and, above all, wanted earnestly to see me. He begged Barrada to go up and fetch me.

[CHAPTER VIII]

Yves had been my friend for seven years when he celebrated in this way his return to his native land.

We had entered the navy by different doors: he two years before I did, although he was some months younger.

The day on which I arrived at Brest, to don there that first naval uniform, which I see still, I met Yves Kermadec by chance at the house of a patron of his, an old Commander who had known his father. Yves was then a boy of sixteen. I was told that he was about to become a probationer after two years as a ship-boy. He had just returned from his home, on the expiration of eight days' leave which had been given him; his heart seemed to be very full of the good-byes he had lately bidden his mother. This and our age, which was almost the same, were two points we had in common.

A little later, having become a midshipman, I came across him again on my first ship. He was then grown into a man and serving as a topman. And I chose him for my hammock man.

For a midshipman, the hammock man is the sailor allotted to hang each evening his little suspended bed and to take it down in the morning.

Before removing the hammock, it is naturally necessary to awaken the sleeper within it and to ask him to get out. This is usually done by saying to him:

"It is réveillé, captain."

This phrase has to be repeated many times before it produces its effect. Afterwards, the hammock man carefully rolls up the little bed and takes it away.

Yves performed this service very tactfully. I used also to meet him daily for the drill, aloft on the main top.

There was a solidarity at that time between the midshipmen and the topmen; and, during the long voyages especially, such as those we were making, the relations between us became very cordial. On shore, in the strange places in which sometimes, at night, we came across our topmen, we were used to call them to our aid when there was danger or an adventure took an ugly look, and then, thus united, we could lay down the law.

In such cases, Yves was our most valuable ally.

His service records, however, were not excellent. "Exemplary on board; a most capable and sailor-like man; but his conduct on shore is impossible." Or: "Has shown admirable pluck and devotion," and then: "Undisciplined, uncontrollable." Elsewhere: "Zeal, honour, and fidelity," with "Incorrigible" in regard, etc. His nights in irons, his days in prison were beyond counting.

Morally as well as physically, large, strong, and handsome, but with some irregularities in details.

On board he was an indefatigable topman, always at work, always vigilant, always quick, always clean.

On shore, if there was a sailor out of hand, riotous, drunk, it was always he; if a sailor was picked up in the morning in the gutter, half naked, stripped of his clothes as one might strip a corpse, by negroes sometimes, at other times by Indians or Chinese, again it was always he. The sailor absent without leave, who fought with the police, or used his knife against the alguazils, again and always it was he. ... All kinds of mad escapades were familiar to him.

At first I was amused at the things this Kermadec did. When he went ashore with his friends it would be asked in the midshipmen's quarters: "What fresh tale shall we hear to-morrow morning? In what condition will they return?" And I used to say to myself: "My hammock will not be fixed for me for two days at least."

It did not matter about the hammock. But this fellow Kermadec was so devoted, he seemed so good-hearted, that I began to be genuinely attached to him, rough sea-rover as he seemed to be and tipsy as he so often was. I no longer laughed at his more serious misdeeds, and would gladly have prevented them.

When this first voyage together was ended and we separated, it happened that chance brought us together again on another ship. And then I grew almost to love him.

There were, moreover, two circumstances in this second voyage which helped greatly to unite us.

The first was at Montevideo one morning before daybreak. Yves had been on shore since the previous evening, and I was approaching the quay in a pinnace manned by sixteen men, for the purpose of laying in a supply of fresh water.

I can recall the bleak half light of the dawn, the sky already luminous but still starry, the deserted quay, alongside which we rowed slowly, looking for the watering place; the large town, which had a false air of Europe, with I know not what of primitive civilization.

As we passed we saw the long straight streets, immensely wide, opening one after the other on the whitening sky. At this uncertain hour when the night was gradually being dissipated, not a light, not a sound; here and there, some straggler without a home, moving with aimless hesitation; along the sea front, evil-looking taverns, large wooden buildings, smelling of spices and alcohol, but closed and dark as tombs.

We stopped before one called the tavern de la Independancia.

A Spanish song coming from within, more or less stifled; a door, half-opened on the street; two men outside fighting with knives; a drunken woman, who could be heard vomiting against the wall. On the quay, heaps of bullock skins freshly flayed, infecting the sweet pure air with an odour of venison. . . .

A singular convoy came out of the tavern; four men carrying another, who seemed to be very drunk, unconscious. They hurried towards the ships, as if they were afraid of us.

We knew this game, which is common enough in the evil places along this coast; to ply sailors with liquor, to make them sign some preposterous engagement, and then to carry them on board by force when they can no longer keep their legs. Then the ship puts to sea as quickly as may be, and when the man comes to his senses he is far from shore; he is fairly caught, under a yoke of iron, and borne away, like a slave, to the whale fisheries, far from any inhabited land. And once there, his escape need no longer be feared, for he is a deserter from his country's service, lost. . . .

And so this convoy passing along the quay excited our suspicion. They pressed on like thieves, and I said to the sailors: "Let us follow them!" Seeing our intention the men dropped their burden, which fell heavily to the ground, and made off as fast as their legs would carry them.

And the burden was Kermadec. While we were occupied in picking him up and establishing his identity, the others had made good their escape and were now locked in the tavern. The sailors wanted to batter in the doors, to take the place by assault, but that would have led to diplomatic complications with Uruguay.

Besides, Yves was saved, and that was the essential thing. I brought him back to the ship, wrapt in a cloak and lying on the goatskins which contained our provision of fresh water.

And to have rendered him this service increased my attachment to him.

The second time was when we were at Pernambuco. I had given a promissory note to some Portuguese in a gambling den. The next day I had to find the money, and as I had none, and as my friends had none either, I was in a difficulty.

Yves took the situation very tragically, and at once offered me the money of his own which he had entrusted to my care, and which I kept in a drawer of my desk.

"It would give me much pleasure. Captain, if you would take it! I have no further need to go ashore and, as you know well, it would be better for me if I could not go."

"Yves, my good fellow, I would accept your money gladly for a few days, since you wish to lend it me; but, you know, it is short of what I want by a hundred francs. So you see it's hardly worth while."

"Another hundred francs? I think I have that below in my kit-bag."

And he went away, leaving me very much astonished. That he should have another hundred francs in his kit-bag seemed very unlikely.

He was a long time in returning. He had not found them. I had anticipated that.

At length he reappeared.

"Here you are!" he said, handing me his poor sailor's purse, with a happy smile.

Then a doubt came to me and, to resolve it, I said to him:

"Yves, lend me your watch, too, like a good fellow; I left mine in pledge."

He was very confused, and said it was broken. I had guessed right: to get these hundred francs he had just sold it with the chain, for half its value, to a petty officer on board.

And so Yves knew that he could call on me in any circumstances. And when Barrada came for me on his behalf, I went down to him where he lay, in irons, in the hold.

But this time, by striking this old warrant officer, he had got himself in a very serious position; my intercession for him was in vain, and his punishment was heavy. Four months afterwards he had to put to sea again without having seen his mother.

When we were on the point of embarking together on the Sibylle for a voyage round the world in three hundred days, I took him on a Sunday to Saint Pol-de-Léon, in order to console him.

It was all I could do for him, for his Plouherzel was a long way from Brest, in the Côtes-du-Nord, in the depth of a remote part of the country, and at that time there was no railway which could take us there in a single day.

[CHAPTER IX]

5th May, 1875.

For many years Yves had been looking forward to seeing this Saint Pol-de-Léon, the little town where he was born.

In the days when we sailed the misty northern waters together, often as we passed in the offing, rocked in the grey swell, we had seen the legendary tower of Creizker upreared in the dark distance, above the mournful and monotonous stretch of land which, beyond, represented Brittany, the country of Léon.

And in the night watch we used to sing together the Breton song:

Oh! I was born in Finistère,
And in Saint Pol first saw the day:
My bell tower is beyond compare
And I love my native land O.

. . . . .

Give me back my heather
And my old bell tower.

But there was as it were a fatality, a throw of the dice against us: we had never succeeded in getting there, to this Saint Pol. At the last moment when we were on the point of starting out, something interfered to prevent us; our ship received unexpected orders and it was necessary to leave at once. And at the end we had come to regard with a kind of superstition this tower of Creizker, glimpsed only and always from a distance, in silhouette, on the edge of the mournful horizon.

This time, however, the position seems assured, and we start off in good earnest.

In the coupé of the old country diligence, we take our places next to a Breton Curé. The horses set off at a good pace towards Saint Pol, and all looks very real.

It is early in the morning, in the first days of May; but it is raining, a fine grey rain like a rain of winter. Ambling along the winding road, ascending steep hills, descending into damp valleys, we make our way in the midst of woods and rocks. The high ground is covered with dark fir trees. In the valleys are oaks and beeches, the foliage of which, new and wet, is of a tender green. By the roadside there are carpets of Easter daisies and Breton flowers: the first pink silenes and the first foxgloves.

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.