CHAPTER XI

Breakfast on deck--Saint-Nazaire--A thing husbands never think of--Noirmontiers--Belle-Ile--I leave the two Paulines--The rope-ladder--The ship's boat--A total immersion--The inn at Saint-Nazaire--I throw money through the window--A batch of clothes--Return to Paris

While these manœuvres were being put into execution, I rejoined our young married couple.

"Well, monsieur," said the bride to me, "the moment has come for you to return to land and to leave us."

"Not yet, madame," I said.

She fixed her gaze on me.

"Not yet?" she repeated.

"No, madame; I have obtained permission from the captain not to leave you till the very last minute.... I am to lunch with you, and we shall still have several long hours to spend talking of France."

"Thank you, monsieur," the husband replied.

But now everybody who had come on board, either for business matters or for affairs of the heart, bade their adieux, got down into the boats, and went away from the ship. The anchor was drawn out of the water and catted, and _la Pauline_ began to obey the motion of the outgoing tide and the breeze. Slight as the movement was, it was enough to bring on a fresh paroxysm of grief in the case of the bride. I went back to the captain.

"Captain," I said, "I believe you would give very great pleasure to your passengers--to two, at least, among them--if you ordered lunch to be served on deck."

"Why so?"

"Because over there is a young wife who desires to take in every bit of France she can before she leaves it, which she cannot do if she is on the between-decks."

"It would be easy enough," said the captain, "for I only have five passengers at my table."

"Then you agree?"

"I agree."

We were now off Saint-Nazaire, which rises sadly out of sand and heather, with not even a tree to rest the eye. But the young woman's gaze hugged the bare landscape with as much eagerness as though she were looking upon some Swiss meadow or Scotch loch.

"Madame," I said to her, "I have come from the captain to tell you luncheon is ready."

"Oh! I cannot eat anything," she replied.

"Allow me, madame, to tell you that I am certain of the contrary."

She shook her head.

"Seeing," I continued, "that we are not going to have luncheon between-decks but here on deck."

"You asked the captain to do that!" she exclaimed, with as much fervour as though I had realised a desire which she had not even dared to let herself dwell upon.

"Why, yes, I did!" I answered, laughing.

"Oh!" she said, turning to her husband, "how good monsieur is, dear!"

"Upon my word," he said, "you should be most grateful to him; I had not even thought of such a thing."

How is it that even the most devotedly loving husbands, even those just married, never think of things that strangers do? I leave this reflection to the wisdom of any psychologists who may chance to peruse this book.

The table was set on deck; the young woman ate little, but she did not lose sight for an instant of the two banks of the Loire, which were now growing wider and wider apart. As we approached the sea the colour of the water changed from yellow to greenish; then waves began to foam on its surface. When we had doubled Saint-Nazaire, we found ourselves in the angle of a kind of gigantic V, which, at its widest end, displayed to our gaze the limitless horizon of the sea. This was the first time the young woman had seen the sea she was to cross; it was evident that the vision caused her profound terror. The sea was rough without being actually stormy; but it was not its roughness that impressed the melancholy voyager, nor was it the white-crested waves which made her turn pale--it was the idea of its infinity, the feeling of immensity of space that the sight of the ocean always gives. About two o'clock in the afternoon we reached the open sea. Then, on our left lay the isle of Noirmontiers (_nigrum monasteriuni_), which derives its name from a Benedictine monastery, founded there in the seventh century by Saint Philibert, and destroyed in the ninth century by those Normans whose appearance saddened the last years of Charlemagne; on the right lay Belle-Ile, the isle of Fouquet, which was to give its name later to the heroine of one of my comedies; and, later again, was to become the scene of action of my triple epic _The Musketeers_, and to provide a tomb worthy of my poor friend Porthos. At the time of which I am writing, these various names struck my ears indifferently; but they stayed in my memory none the less, and were to reappear one day decked in all the framework of the dream-fancies of my imagination; floating isles of Delos, which will stop in more or less advanced positions in the realms of the future. In front of us stretched the sea, with its indented crests, merging towards the horizon in a sky dark with clouds, in which the sun was beginning to enshroud itself. We were nearly three leagues from harbour, off the reef called les Pitiers; the bad channels were passed, the wind was south-south-west, and freshening. The pilot announced that his task was done, that he handed over the command to the captain, and that he should return to land. I must say I looked at the means of descent from the ship to the skiff with some disquietude. It was nothing more than a rope-ladder fixed to the round sides of the ship. And, moreover, the ship was making its seven knots an hour. For a moment I wished I need not get off before reaching Guadeloupe. Fortunately, the captain understood what was going on in my mind, and came to the conclusion that a short delay of ten minutes was of no account in a voyage of six weeks.

"Come," he said to me, "go and pay your adieux whilst I lay to the ship."

Then he shouted--

"Down with the helm!"

Instantly the sails quivered: they were doing for me the same as is done when a man falls overboard.

"Clew up the mainsail," continued the captain, "and haul in the sails to the mainmast!"

The ship stopped, or very nearly so. The pilot was already in his boat.

I went up to the poor exile; tears were silently streaming down her cheeks.

"You will be sure and fulfil my commission, will you not, monsieur?" she said in a broken voice.

I bowed my acquiescence.

"You will embrace my mother for me?"

"I promise you I will do so, madame."

"But," said the husband, "if you want monsieur to kiss your mother for you, you ought first to give him the kiss."

"Oh yes, certainly!" exclaimed the young wife effusively; "with all my heart." And she flung her arms round my neck. Here was an unusual situation! That woman and I had never seen one another till the night before, and in the morning we were still strangers to one another; at starting we were merely acquaintances; by luncheon we had developed into friends; parting made us seem like brother and sister. Oh! mysteries of the heart, misunderstood by the crowd at large, but which turn those to whom God has revealed His secrets into beings destined for suffering. I had greater difficulty in leaving these friends of a day than it would have given me pleasure to see friends of twenty years' standing.

"You will not forget my name, will you, monsieur?" the young wife said.

"Try and read the next books that I shall write, madame, and I promise you you shall find that name in one of my very first novels."

There was also, perhaps, underlying the attraction for the ship, my anxiety at the prospect of the more or less perilous descent to which I was about to subject myself. Luckily, I had plenty of spectators to witness my gymnastic manœuvres, and you know how the feeling of being looked at redoubles one's courage. So I went bravely forward towards the ship's side; I caught hold of the main shrouds as well as the ladder, which the pilot, afraid, perhaps, of my falling into the sea before I had paid him his crown, had, to make my descent easier, held taut with one hand, while with his other, by help of a rope fastened through a port-hole, he kept the skiff within reach of the ship. I had not descended two rungs of the ladder before the wind blew my hat off. I did not even try to catch it, for I more than needed both hands to clutch fast hold of the ladder. At last, to my great satisfaction, and without displaying too much clumsiness, I reached the bottom of the skiff. That was one of the happiest moments of my life. I was scarcely seated on one of the seats in the boat before the pilot let go both ladder and rope, and we were thirty feet away from _la Pauline._ I could soon hear the captain's voice shouting--

"Let go the main-sails!"

And instantly the sails stopped quivering and the ship resumed her course. Our two young people stood astern, he waving his hat and she her handkerchief. Meanwhile, the pilot was trimming a little sail; I noticed that it was set by the skiff suddenly heeling over, so if I had not held on to the opposite side of the boat I should have been spilled right into the sea. The joke soon began to appear rather less funny to me--all the more so since the pilot, who could hardly speak any French, and who was chary of using what words he did know of our language, kept staring at the horizon with a fixedness that troubled me. The fact was that the nearer we approached the coast the rougher grew the sea. Night, too, was rapidly coming on. I could still see the three-master, because its pyramids of sails stood out against the purple horizon of the setting sun; but it was evident that they could no longer see us, or that, if they did see us, we must have looked like a gull hidden among the waves. Those who have ever found themselves in a frail boat over a watery abyss, with a moving wall to right and left, immensity of sea before and behind and a stormy sky over their heads, alone know what the wind has told them, as it drives through their hair soaked with foam. In half an hour's time the pilot was compelled to lower his sail. He took to the oars, but they did not grip the waves properly. Here and there we saw high white waves fling their broken crests up into the air, which the wind carried to us in fine, ice-cold rain. These were the places where the waves broke against the rocks. Luckily the flow was carrying us landwards; but at the same time that the flowing tide served us, the wind blew us past the mouth of the Loire and drove us along the coast of Croisic. I myself had no notion where we were. Night came on faster and faster, and the circle of darkness contracted more and more, until we only had about twenty paces of horizon.

I made up my mind to hold on tight to the bottom of the boat, and to trouble about nothing else except preventing myself being pitched into the sea; but, seated at the bottom as I was, I was half soaked in the water we had shipped when we were sailing. Two hours went by in this fashion, and I must say they seemed the longest hours I ever lived. Once, when I rose to look about me, I saw the pilot make a quick movement, and next instant the barque bounded up as though it were gone crazy; we passed under a sort of cataract which came from the dark crest of a rock. I thought all was over that time; the water ran down the collar of my shirt and streamed right through to my gaiters. I shut my eyes and waited; at the end of five minutes, as I still felt I was in the boat, I opened them again. We were neither better nor worse off than before, and nothing had changed except that we could now hear the noise of the surf against the shore; we were evidently not farther off than the length of a couple of cables. The pilot held on to the helm and, driven by the flowing tide, left all the work to the sea; his sole task (and no easy one it seemed to me) being to steer us through the rocks. Suddenly he got up and shouted to me--

"Hold on tight!"

The advice was more than useless; I was holding on to the seat tightly enough to have left my finger-prints on it. I felt a violent shock, as if the bottom of the boat had raked a bed of shingle. The pilot passed rapidly across me and jumped into the sea. I did not in the least understand this evolution, but, on getting up, I caught sight of him standing up to his chest in the water, dragging the boat towards him by a rope. Fifteen paces from us was the cliff. I had a great mind to jump down beside my man, but he realised my intention and sang out--

"No, no; stay still!... We are just in."

Indeed, the first wave pushed the boat so near to the strand that it ran aground.

"Now," said the pilot, coming towards me, "get on to my back."

"What for?"

"To prevent your getting wet."

The precaution was good, but came a little too late in the day seeing I was already soaked through like a sponge.

"Thanks for your thoughtfulness," I said, "but you need not take the trouble." And I leapt into the sea.

At that moment came a wave which went right over my head.

"Capital!" I said, "now my bath is complete!... Oh! what a confounded idiot I am to take such trips as this when there is no occasion to do so at all! Oh!..."

The last exclamation was wrung from me by the satisfaction I felt at being once more on _terra firma._

We had landed in the little creek that lies between Saint-Nazaire and le Croisic, a league and a half nearly from either of these two towns. So I had my choice. But le Croisic was a league and a half out of my way, while Saint-Nazaire, on the other hand, was just so much nearer. There was no need for hesitation, and I decided immediately upon Saint-Nazaire. As to the pilot, he remained with his skiff. The wind was whistling as harshly as upon the Elsinore stage just when the ghost of the King of Denmark is to appear. I had only one way of warming myself, which was to keep moving as hard as I could. I held out five francs to the pilot, instead of three as I had promised him, and with bare head, my hands tucked into my pockets, with not a rag on me dry, soaked with that delightful sea-water which never does dry, I set off at a quick trot to follow the coast-line. I reached Saint-Nazaire an hour later, and knocked at the door of the only inn of the place, which made all kinds of difficulties in the way of opening its doors and receiving, at eleven o'clock at night, a man without a hat. The dialogue that took place with a view to my gaining an entrance being prolonged endlessly, and not promising to end to my satisfaction, I conceived the idea of throwing a five-franc piece through the window on the first storey, out of which the landlord was leaning to talk to me. The host would then be certain of payment for my bed. The coin rang on the wooden floor of the room, and the innkeeper picked it up, lit a lamp, and, making sure that my money was good metal, decided to let me in. Ten minutes later I stood quite naked in front of an immense fire of heather, which roasted me without warming me thoroughly; but I was so delighted to feel the earth under my feet that I forgot all about the extreme cold I had suffered, and paid no attention to the other extreme of heat. The host had now grown as amiable as at first he had been crusty. He offered me a shirt of his own, which I accepted; warmed my bed himself, and carried my clothes away to be baked in the oven. He had been baking bread and flat cakes that day, and the oven was still warm. My cast-off garments were put in it on an iron oven-plate, and, thanks to this idea, I found my clothes were as dry next day as tinder. At eleven o'clock I was back at Paimbœuf, by night I was at Nantes, and the next day I reached Tours, where I duly delivered to Madame M---- her daughter's messages.

The same day, I found a disengaged place in the mail coach and engaged it. I was sick of the Carlist language that I had heard for six weeks and wanted to see my July sunshine once more and my revolutionary Paris and my buildings all riddled with shot. When I arrived, it was pouring in torrents; M. Guizot had become Prime Minister and they were scraping the front of the Institut!