CHAPTER LXXIII

BREST, 9_th July_, 1881.

We reach port at last, however, and this is my last day of duty on board. I disembark to-morrow.

We are in the heart of the Brest docks, where the _Sèvre_ comes from time to time to rest between two high walls. High gloomy-looking buildings overlook us; around us courses of native rock support the ramparts, a roundway, a whole heavy pile of granite, oozing sadness and humidity. I know all these things by heart.

And as we are now in July there are foxgloves, and tufts of silenes clinging here and there to the grey stones. These red plants growing on the walls strike a note of summer in this sunless Brest.

I have a kind of pleasure, nevertheless, in going away. This Brittany always causes me, in spite of everything, a melancholy sense of oppression; I feel it now, and when I think of the novelty and the unknown which await me, it seems to me that I am about to awaken with the passing of a kind of night. . . . Whither shall I be sent? Who knows? In what particular corner of the earth shall I have to acclimatize myself to-morrow? No doubt in some country of the sun where I shall become another person altogether, with different senses, and where I shall forget, alas! the beloved things I am now about to leave behind me.

But my poor Yves and my little Pierre, I shall not part from either of them without a pang.

Poor Yves, who has so often himself had to be treated like a spoilt and capricious child, it is he now, at the hour of my departure, who surrounds me with a thousand kind attentions, almost childlike, at a loss to know what he can do to show sufficiently his affection. And this attitude in him has the greater charm, because it is not in his ordinary nature.

The time we have just passed together, in a daily fraternal intimacy, has not been without its storms. He still deserved in some degree, unfortunately, the epithets "undisciplined, uncontrollable," inscribed long ago in his sailor's pay-book; but he had improved very much, and, if I had been able to keep him near me, I should have saved him.

After dinner we came up on deck for our usual evening promenade.

I say for a last time:

"Yves, make me a cigarette."

And we begin our regular little walk up and down the wooden deck of the _Sèvre._ We know by heart all the little hollows where the water collects, all the angle blocks in which one's feet may be caught, all the rings over which one may stumble.

The sky is overcast for our last walk together, the moon hidden, and the air damp. In the distance, from the direction of Recouvrance, come as usual the eternal songs of the sailors.

We speak of many things. I give Yves much advice, and he, very submissive, makes many promises; and it is very late when he leaves me to seek his hammock.

At noon on the following day, my trunks scarcely packed and many visits unpaid, I am at the station with Yves and my friends of the wardroom who have come to see me off. I shake hands with them all, I think even that I embrace them, and then I depart.

A little before dark I reach Toulven, where I propose to stop for a couple of hours to make my adieux.

How green it is and decked with flowers, this Toulven, this fresh and shady region, the most delightful in Brittany!

There I find them waiting for me to cut little Pierre's hair. The idea that anyone would entrust me with such a task had never occurred to me. They told me "that I was the only one who could keep him quiet." The previous week, they had brought in the barber from Toulven, and little Pierre had made such a fuss that the first thing the scissors did was to cut his little ears; and it had been necessary to abandon the project. I made the attempt, however, in order to please them, hard put to it not to laugh.

Then when I had done, the notion came to me to keep one of the little brown curls which I had cut off, and I took it away with me, surprised that I should set so much store by it.