Part 10

The dawn had broken some time before Peyrol, on his way up to Escampobar happened to look round and had the luck to actually see with his own eyes the English man-of-war’s boat pulling out of the cove. This confirmed his surmises but did not enlighten him a bit as to the causes. Puzzled and uneasy, he approached the house through the farmyard. Catherine, always the first up, stood at the open kitchen door. She moved aside and would have let him pass without remark, if Peyrol himself had not asked in a whisper: “Anything new?” She answered him in the same tone: “She has taken to roaming at night.” Peyrol stole silently up to his bedroom, from which he descended an hour later as though he had spent all the night in his bed up there.

It was this nocturnal adventure which had affected the character of Peyrol’s forenoon talk with the lieutenant. What with one thing and another, he found it very trying. Now that he had got rid of Réal for several hours, the rover had to turn his attention to that other invader of the strained, questionable, and ominous in its origins, peace of the Escampobar Farm. As he sat on the flat rock with his eyes fixed idly on the few drops of blood betraying his last night’s work to the high heaven, and trying to get hold of something definite that he could think about, Peyrol became aware of a faint thundering noise. Faint as it was, it filled the whole basin. He soon guessed its nature, and his face lost its perplexity. He picked up his cudgel, got on his feet briskly, muttering to himself, “He’s anything but dead,” and hurried on board the tartane.

On the after-deck Michel was keeping a lookout. He had carried out the orders he had received by the well. Besides being secured by the very obvious padlock, the cabin door was shored up by a spar which made it stand as firm as a rock. The thundering noise seemed to issue from its immovable substance magically. It ceased for a moment, and a sort of distracted continuous growling could be heard. Then the thundering began again. Michel reported:

“This is the third time he starts this game.”

“Not much strength in this,” remarked Peyrol gravely.

“That he can do it at all is a miracle,” said Michel, showing a certain excitement. “He stands on the ladder and beats the door with his fists. He is getting better. He began about half an hour after I got back on board. He drummed for a bit and then fell off the ladder. I heard him. I had my ear against the scuttle. He lay there and talked to himself for a long time. Then he went at it again.” Peyrol approached the scuttle while Michel added his opinion: “He will go on like that for ever. You can’t stop him.”

“Easy there,” said Peyrol, in a deep authoritative voice. “Time you finish that noise.”

These words brought instantly a deathlike silence. Michel ceased to grin. He wondered at the power of these few words of a foreign language.

Peyrol himself smiled faintly. It was ages since he had uttered a sentence of English. He waited complacently until Michel had unbarred and unlocked the door of the cabin. After it was thrown open he boomed out a warning: “Stand clear!” and, turning about, went down with great deliberation, ordering Michel to go forward and keep a lookout.

Down there the man with the bandaged head was hanging on to the table and swearing feebly without intermission. Peyrol, after listening for a time with an air of interested recognition, as one would to a tune heard many years ago, stopped it by a deep-voiced:

“That will do.” After a short silence he added: “You look bien malade, hein? What you call sick,” in a tone which if not tender was certainly not hostile. “We will remedy that.”

“Who are you?” asked the prisoner, looking frightened and throwing his arm up quickly to guard his head against the coming blow. But Peyrol’s uplifted hand fell only on his shoulder in a hearty slap which made him sit down suddenly on a locker in a partly collapsed attitude and unable to speak. But though very much dazed, he was able to watch Peyrol open a cupboard and produce from there a small demijohn and two tin cups. He took heart to say plaintively: “My throat’s like tinder,” and then suspiciously: “Was it you who broke my head?”

“It was me,” admitted Peyrol, sitting down on the opposite side of the table and leaning back to look at his prisoner comfortably.

“What the devil did you do that for?” inquired the other with a sort of faint fierceness which left Peyrol unmoved.

“Because you put your nose where you no business. Understand? I see you there under the moon, penché, eating my tartane with your eyes. You never hear me, hein?”

“I believe you walked on air. Did you mean to kill me?”

“Yes, in preference to letting you go and make a story of it on board your cursed corvette.”

“Well then, now’s your chance to finish me. I am as weak as a kitten.”

“How did you say that? Kitten? Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Peyrol. “You make a nice petit chat.” He seized the demijohn by the neck and filled the mugs. “There,” he went on, pushing one towards the prisoner--“it’s good drink--that.”

Symons’ state was as though the blow had robbed him of all power of resistance, of all faculty of surprise and generally of all the means by which a man may assert himself, except bitter resentment. His head was aching, it seemed to him enormous, too heavy for his neck and as if full of hot smoke. He took a drink under Peyrol’s fixed gaze and with uncertain movements put down the mug. He looked drowsy for a moment. Presently a little colour deepened his bronze; he hitched himself up on the locker and said in a strong voice:

“You played a damned dirty trick on me. Call yourself a man, walking on air behind a fellow’s back and felling him like a bullock.”

Peyrol nodded calmly and sipped from his mug.

“If I had met you anywhere else but looking at my tartane I would have done nothing to you. I would have permitted you to go back to your boat. Where was your damned boat?”

“How can I tell you? I can’t tell where I am. I’ve never been here before. How long have I been here?”

“Oh, about fourteen hours,” said Peyrol.

“My head feels as if it would fall off if I moved,” grumbled the other.... “You are a damned bungler, that’s what you are.”

“What for--bungler?”

“For not finishing me off at once.”

He seized the mug and emptied it down his throat. Peyrol drank too, observing him all the time. He put the mug down with extreme gentleness and said slowly:

“How could I know it was you? I hit hard enough to crack the skull of any other man.”

“What do you mean? What do you know about my skull? What are you driving at? I don’t know you, you white-headed villain, going about at night knocking people on the head from behind. Did you do for our officer, too?”

“Oh yes! Your officer. What was he up to? What trouble did you people come to make here, anyhow?”

“Do you think they tell a boat’s crew? Go and ask our officer. He went up the gully and our coxswain got the jumps. He says to me: ‘You are lightfooted, Sam,’ says he; ‘you just creep round the head of the cove and see if our boat can be seen across from the other side.’ Well, I couldn’t see anything. That was all right. But I thought I would climb a little higher amongst the rocks....”

He paused drowsily.

“That was a silly thing to do,” remarked Peyrol in an encouraging voice.

“I would’ve sooner expected to see an elephant inland than a craft lying in a pool that seemed no bigger than my hand. Could not understand how she got there. Couldn’t help going down to find out--and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back with my head tied up, in a bunk in this kennel of a cabin here. Why couldn’t you have given me a hail and engaged me properly, yardarm to yardarm? You would have got me all the same, because all I had in the way of weapons was the clasp-knife which you have looted off me.”

“Up on the shelf there,” said Peyrol, looking round. “No, my friend, I wasn’t going to take the risk of seeing you spread your wings and fly.”

“You need not have been afraid for your tartane. Our boat was after no tartane. We wouldn’t have taken your tartane for a gift. Why, we see them by dozens every day--those tartanes.”

Peyrol filled the two mugs again. “Ah,” he said, “I dare say you see many tartanes, but this one is not like the others. You a sailor--and you couldn’t see that she was something extraordinary.”

“Hellfire and gunpowder!” cried the other. “How can you expect me to have seen anything. I just noticed that her sails were bent before your club hit me on the head.” He raised his hands to his head and groaned. “Oh lord, I feel as though I had been drunk for a month.”

Peyrol’s prisoner did look somewhat as though he had got his head broken in a drunken brawl. But to Peyrol his appearance was not repulsive. The rover preserved a tender memory of his freebooter’s life with its lawless spirit and its spacious scene of action, before the change in the state of affairs in the Indian Ocean, the astounding rumours from the outer world, made him reflect on its precarious character. It was true that he had deserted the French flag when quite a youngster; but at that time that flag was white; and now it was a flag of three colours. He had known the practice of liberty, equality and fraternity as understood in the haunts, open or secret, of the Brotherhood of the Coast. So the change, if one could believe what people talked about, could not be very great. The rover had also his own positive notions as to what these three words were worth. Liberty--to hold your own in the world if you could. Equality--yes! But no body of men ever accomplished anything without a chief. All this was worth what it was worth. He regarded fraternity somewhat differently. Of course brothers would quarrel amongst themselves; it was during a fierce quarrel that flamed up suddenly in a company of Brothers that he had received the most dangerous wound of his life. But for that Peyrol nursed no grudge against anybody. In his view the claim of the Brotherhood was a claim for help against the outside world. And here he was sitting opposite a Brother whose head he had broken on sufficient grounds. There he was across the table looking dishevelled and dazed, uncomprehending and aggrieved, and that head of his proved as hard as ages ago when the nickname of Testa Dura had been given to him by a Brother of Italian origin on some occasion or other, some butting match no doubt; just as he, Peyrol himself, was known for a time on both sides of the Mozambique Channel as Poigne-de-Fer, after an incident when in the presence of the Brothers he played at arm’s length with the windpipe of an obstreperous negro sorcerer with an enormous girth of chest. The villagers brought out food with alacrity, and the sorcerer was never the same man again. It had been a great display.

Yes, no doubt it was Testa Dura; the young neophyte of the order (where and how picked up Peyrol never heard), strange to the camp, simple-minded and much impressed by the swaggering cosmopolitan company in which he found himself. He had attached himself to Peyrol in preference to some of his own countrymen, of whom there were several in that band, and used to run after him like a little dog and certainly had acted a good shipmate’s part on the occasion of that wound, which had neither killed nor cowed Peyrol but merely had given him an opportunity to reflect at leisure on the conduct of his own life.

The first suspicion of that amazing fact had intruded on Peyrol while he was bandaging that head by the light of the smoky lamp. Since the fellow still lived, it was not in Peyrol to finish him off or let him lie unattended like a dog. And then this was a sailor. His being English was no obstacle to the development of Peyrol’s mixed feelings in which hatred certainly had no place. Amongst the members of the Brotherhood it was the Englishmen whom he preferred. He had also found amongst them that particular and loyal appreciation, which a Frenchman of character and ability will receive from Englishmen sooner than from any other nation. Peyrol had at times been a leader, without ever trying for it very much, for he was not ambitious. The lead used to fall to him mostly at a time of crisis of some sort; and when he had got the lead it was on the Englishmen that he used to depend most.

And so that youngster had turned into this English man-of-war’s man! In the fact itself there was nothing impossible. You found Brothers of the Coast in all sorts of ships and in all sorts of places. Peyrol had found one once in a very ancient and hopeless cripple practising the profession of a beggar on the steps of Manila cathedral, and had left him the richer by two broad gold pieces to add to his secret hoard. There was a tale of a Brother of the Coast having become a mandarin in China, and Peyrol believed it. One never knew where and in what position one would find a Brother of the Coast. The wonderful thing was that this one should have come to seek him out, to put himself in the way of his cudgel. Peyrol’s greatest concern had been all through that Sunday morning to conceal the whole adventure from Lieutenant Réal. As against a wearer of epaulettes, mutual protection was the first duty between Brothers of the Coast. The unexpectedness of that claim coming to him after twenty years invested it with an extraordinary strength. What he would do with the fellow he didn’t know. But since that morning the situation had changed. Peyrol had received the lieutenant’s confidence and had got on terms with him in a special way. He fell into profound thought.

“Sacrée tête dure,” he muttered without rousing himself. Peyrol was annoyed a little at not having been recognized. He could not conceive how difficult it would have been for Symons to identify this portly deliberate person with a white head of hair as the object of his youthful admiration, the black-ringletted French Brother in the prime of life of whom everybody thought so much. Peyrol was roused by hearing the other declare suddenly:

“I am an Englishman, I am. I am not going to knuckle under to anybody. What are you going to do with me?”

“I will do what I please,” said Peyrol, who had been asking himself exactly the same question.

“Well, then, be quick about it, whatever it is. I don’t care a damn what you do, but--be--quick--about it.”

He tried to be emphatic; but as a matter of fact the last words came out in a faltering tone. And old Peyrol was touched. He thought that if he were to let him drink the mugful standing there, it would make him dead drunk. But he took the risk. So he said only:

“Allons--drink!” The other did not wait for a second invitation but could not control very well the movements of his arm extended towards the mug. Peyrol raised his on high.

“Trinquons, eh?” he proposed. But in his precarious condition the Englishman remained unforgiving.

“I’m damned if I do,” he said indignantly, but so low that Peyrol had to turn his ear to catch the words. “You will have to explain to me first what you meant by knocking me on the head.”

He drank, staring all the time at Peyrol in a manner which was meant to give offence but which struck Peyrol as so childlike that he burst into a laugh.

“Sacré imbécile, va! Did I not tell you it was because of the tartane? If it hadn’t been for the tartane I would have hidden from you. I would have crouched behind a bush like a--what do you call them?--lièvre.”

The other, who was feeling the effect of the drink, stared with frank incredulity.

“You are of no account,” continued Peyrol. “Ah! if you had been an officer I would have gone for you anywhere. Did you say your officer went up the gully?”

Symons sighed deeply and easily. “That’s the way he went. We had heard on board of a house thereabouts.”

“Oh, he went to the house!” said Peyrol. “Well, if he did get there he must be very sorry for himself. There is half a company of infantry billeted in the farm.”

This inspired fib went down easily with the English sailor. Soldiers were stationed in many parts of the coast as any seaman of the blockading fleet knew very well. To the many expressions which had passed over the face of that man recovering from a long period of unconsciousness there was added the shade of dismay.

“What the devil have they stuck soldiers on this piece of rock for?” he asked.

“Oh, signalling post and things like that. I am not likely to tell you everything. Why! you might escape.”

That phrase reached the soberest spot in the whole of Symons’ individuality. Things were happening, then. Mr. Bolt was a prisoner. But the main idea evoked in his confused mind was that he would be given up to those soldiers before very long. The prospect of captivity made his heart sink, and he resolved to give as much trouble as he could.

“You will have to get some of these soldiers to carry me up. I won’t walk. I won’t. Not after having had my brains nearly knocked out from behind. I tell you straight! I won’t walk. Not a step. They will have to carry me ashore.”

Peyrol only shook his head deprecatingly.

“Now you go and get a corporal with a file of men,” insisted Symons obstinately. “I want to be made a proper prisoner of. Who the devil are you? You had no right to interfere. I believe you are a civilian. A common marinero, whatever you may call yourself. You look to me a pretty fishy marinero at that. Where did you learn English? In prison--eh? You ain’t going to keep me in this damned dog-hole, on board your rubbishy tartane. Go and get that corporal, I tell you.”

He looked suddenly very tired and only murmured: “I am an Englishman, I am.”

Peyrol’s patience was positively angelic.

“Don’t you talk about the tartane,” he said impressively, making his words as distinct as possible. “I told you she was not like the other tartanes. That is because she is a courier boat. Every time she goes to sea she makes a pied-de-nez, what you call thumb to the nose, to all your English cruisers. I do not mind telling you because you are my prisoner. You will soon learn French now.”

“Who are you? The caretaker of this thing or what?” asked the undaunted Symons. But Peyrol’s mysterious silence seemed to intimidate him at last. He became dejected and began to curse in a languid tone all boat expeditions, the coxswain of the gig and his own infernal luck.

Peyrol sat alert and attentive like a man interested in an experiment, while after a moment Symons’ face began to look as if he had been hit with a club again, but not as hard as before. A film came over his round eyes and the words “fishy marinero” made their way out of his lips in a sort of death-bed voice. Yet such was the hardness of his head that he actually rallied enough to address Peyrol in an ingratiating tone.

“Come, grandfather!” He tried to push the mug across the table and upset it. “Come! Let us finish what’s in that tiny bottle of yours.”

“No,” said Peyrol, drawing the demijohn to his side of the table and putting the cork in.

“No?” repeated Symons in an unbelieving voice and looking at the demijohn fixedly ... “you must be a tinker.”... He tried to say something more under Peyrol’s watchful eyes, failed once or twice, and suddenly pronounced the word “cochon” so correctly as to make old Peyrol start. After that it was no use looking at him any more. Peyrol busied himself in locking up the demijohn and the mugs. When he turned round most of the prisoner’s body was extended over the table and no sound came from it, not even a snore.

When Peyrol got outside, pulling to the door of the cuddy behind him, Michel hastened from forward to receive the master’s orders. But Peyrol stood so long on the after-deck meditating profoundly with his hand over his mouth that Michel became fidgety and ventured a cheerful: “It looks as if he were not going to die.”

“He is dead,” said Peyrol with grim jocularity. “Dead drunk. And you very likely will not see me till to-morrow sometime.”

“But what am I to do?” asked Michel timidly.

“Nothing,” said Peyrol. “Of course you must not let him set fire to the tartane.”

“But suppose,” insisted Michel, “he should give signs of escaping.”

“If you see him trying to escape,” said Peyrol with mock solemnity, “then, Michel, it will be a sign for you to get out of his way as quickly as you can. A man who would try to escape with a head like this on him would just swallow you at one mouthful.”

He picked up his cudgel and, stepping ashore, went off without as much as a look at his faithful henchman. Michel listened to him scrambling amongst the stones, and his habitual amiably vacant face acquired a sort of dignity from the utter and absolute blankness that came over it.

X

It was only after reaching the level ground in front of the farmhouse that Peyrol took time to pause and resume his contact with the exterior world.

While he had been closeted with his prisoner the sky had got covered with a thin layer of cloud, in one of those swift changes of weather that are not unusual in the Mediterranean. This grey vapour, drifting high up, close against the disc of the sun, seemed to enlarge the space behind its veil, add to the vastness of a shadowless world no longer hard and brilliant but all softened in the contours of its masses and in the faint line of the horizon, as if ready to dissolve in the immensity of the infinite.

Familiar and indifferent to his eyes, material and shadowy, the extent of the changeable sea had gone pale under the pale sun in a mysterious and emotional response. Mysterious too was the great oval patch of dark water to the west; and also a broad blue lane traced on the dull silver of the waters in a parabolic curve described magistrally by an invisible finger for a symbol of endless wandering. The face of the farmhouse might have been the face of a house from which all the inhabitants had fled suddenly. In the high part of the building the window of the lieutenant’s room remained open, both glass and shutter. By the door of the salle the stable fork leaning against the wall seemed to have been forgotten by the sans-culotte. This aspect of abandonment struck Peyrol with more force than usual. He had been thinking so hard of all these people, that to find no one about seemed unnatural and even depressing. He had seen many abandoned places in his life, grass huts, mud forts, kings’ palaces--temples from which every white-robed soul had fled. Temples, however, never looked quite empty. The gods clung to their own. Peyrol’s eyes rested on the bench against the wall of the salle. In the usual course of things it should have been occupied by the lieutenant, who had the habit of sitting there with hardly a movement, for hours, like a spider watching for the coming of a fly. This paralysing comparison held Peyrol motionless with a twisted mouth and a frown on his brow, before the evoked vision, coloured and precise, of the man, more troubling than the reality had ever been.

He came to himself with a start. What sort of occupation was this, ‘cré nom de nom, staring at a silly bench with no one on it. Was he going wrong in his head? Or was it that he was getting really old? He had noticed old men losing themselves like that. But he had something to do. First of all he had to go and see what the English sloop in the Passe was doing.