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.