Part 8

The dragging of the renovated tartane into the water was a great affair. Everybody in the hamlet, including the women, did a full day’s work and there was never so much coin passed from hand to hand in the hamlet in all the days of its obscure history. Swinging between his crutches on a low sand-ridge the cripple surveyed the whole of the beach. It was he that had persuaded the villagers to lend a hand and had arranged the terms for their assistance. It was he also who, through a very miserable-looking pedlar (the only one who frequented the peninsula), had got in touch with some rich persons in Fréjus who had changed for Peyrol a few of his gold pieces for current money. He had expedited the course of the most exciting and interesting experience of his life, and now planted on the sand on his two sticks in the manner of a beacon he watched the last operation. The rover, as if about to launch himself upon a track of a thousand miles, walked up to shake hands with him and look once more at the soft eyes and the ironic smile.

“There is no denying it--you are a man.”

“Don’t talk like this to me, citoyen,” said the cripple in a trembling voice. Till then, suspended between his two sticks and with his shoulders as high as his ears, he had not looked towards the approaching Peyrol. “This is too much of a compliment!”

“I tell you,” insisted the rover roughly, and as if the insignificance of mortal envelopes had presented itself to him for the first time at the end of his roving life, “I tell you that there is that in you which would make a chum one would like to have alongside one in a tight place.”

As he went away from the cripple towards the tartane, while the whole population of the hamlet disposed around her waited for his word, some on land and some waist-deep in the water holding ropes in their hands, Peyrol had a slight shudder at the thought: “Suppose I had been born like that.” Ever since he had put his foot on his native land such thoughts had haunted him. They would have been impossible anywhere else. He could not have been like any blackamoor, good, bad or indifferent, hale or crippled, king or slave; but here, on this Southern shore that had called to him irresistibly as he had approached the Straits of Gibraltar on what he had felt to be his last voyage, any woman, lean and old enough, might have been his mother; he might have been any Frenchman of them all, even one of those he pitied, even one of those he despised. He felt the grip of his origins from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet while he clambered on board the tartane as if for a long and distant voyage. As a matter of fact he knew very well that with a bit of luck it would be over in about an hour. When the tartane took the water the feeling of being afloat plucked at his very heart. Some Madrague fishermen had been persuaded by the cripple to help old Peyrol to sail the tartane round to the cove below the Escampobar Farm. A glorious sun shone upon that short passage and the cove itself was full of sparkling light when they arrived. The few Escampobar goats wandering on the hillside pretending to feed where no grass was visible to the naked eye never even raised their heads. A gentle breeze drove the tartane, as fresh as paint could make her, opposite a narrow crack in the cliff which gave admittance to a tiny basin, no bigger than a village pond, concealed at the foot of the southern hill. It was there that old Peyrol, aided by the Madrague men, who had their boat with them, towed his ship, the first really that he ever owned.

Once in, the tartane nearly filled the little basin, and the fishermen, getting into their boat, rowed away for home. Peyrol, by spending the afternoon in dragging ropes ashore and fastening them to various boulders and dwarf trees, moored her to his complete satisfaction. She was as safe from the tempests there as a house ashore.

After he had made everything fast on board and had furled the sails neatly, a matter of some time for one man, Peyrol contemplated his arrangements, which savoured of rest much more than of wandering, and found them good. Though he never meant to abandon his room at the farmhouse, he felt that his true home was in the tartane, and he rejoiced at the idea that it was concealed from all eyes except perhaps the eyes of the goats when their arduous feeding took them on the southern slope. He lingered on board, he even threw open the sliding door of the little cabin, which now smelt of fresh paint, not of stale blood. Before he started for the farm the sun had travelled far beyond Spain and all the sky to the west was yellow, while on the side of Italy it presented a sombre canopy pierced here and there with the light of stars. Catherine put a plate on the table, but nobody asked him any questions.

He spent a lot of his time on board, going down early, coming up at midday “pour manger la soupe,” and sleeping on board almost every night. He did not like to leave the tartane alone for so many hours. Often, having climbed a little way up to the house, he would turn round for a last look at her in the gathering dusk, and actually would go back again. After Michel had been enlisted for a crew and had taken his abode on board for good, Peyrol found it a much easier matter to spend his nights in the lantern-like room at the top of the farmhouse.

Often waking up at night he would get up to look at the starry sky out of all his three windows in succession, and think: “Now there is nothing in the world to prevent me getting out to sea in less than an hour.” As a matter of fact it was possible for two men to manage the tartane. Thus Peyrol’s thought was comfortingly true in every way, for he loved to feel himself free, and Michel of the lagoon, after the death of his depressed dog, had no tie on earth. It was a fine thought which somehow made it quite easy for Peyrol to go back to his four-poster and resume his slumbers.

VIII

Perched sideways on the circular wall bordering the well, in the full blaze of the midday sun, the rover of the distant seas and the fisherman of the lagoon, sharing between them a most surprising secret, had the air of two men conferring in the dark. The first word that Peyrol said was, “Well?”

“All quiet,” said the other.

“Have you fastened the cabin door properly?”

“You know what the fastenings are like.”

Peyrol could not deny that. It was a sufficient answer. It shifted the responsibility on to his shoulders, and all his life he had been accustomed to trust to the work of his own hands, in peace and in war. Yet he looked doubtfully at Michel before he remarked:

“Yes, but I know the man too.”

There could be no greater contrast than those two faces; Peyrol’s clean, like a carving of stone, and only very little softened by time, and that of the owner of the late dog, hirsute, with many silver threads, with something elusive in the features and the vagueness of expression of a baby in arms. “Yes, I know the man,” repeated Peyrol. Michel’s mouth fell open at this, a small oval set a little crookedly in the innocent face.

“He will never wake,” he suggested timidly.

The possession of a common and momentous secret draws men together. Peyrol condescended to explain.

“You don’t know the thickness of his skull. I do.”

He spoke as though he had made it himself. Michel, who in the face of that positive statement had forgotten to shut his mouth, had nothing to say.

“He breathes all right?” asked Peyrol.

“Yes. After I got out and locked the door I listened for a bit and I thought I heard him snore.”

Peyrol looked interested and also slightly anxious.

“I had to come up and show myself this morning as if nothing had happened,” he said. “The officer has been here for two days, and he might have taken it into his head to go down to the tartane. I have been on the stretch all the morning. A goat jumping up was enough to give me a turn. Fancy him running up here with his broken head all bandaged up, with you after him.”

This seemed to be too much for Michel. He said almost indignantly:

“The man’s half killed.”

“It takes a lot to even half kill a Brother of the Coast. There are men and men. You, for instance,” Peyrol continued placidly, “you would have been altogether killed if it had been your head that got in the way. And there are animals, beasts twice your size, regular monsters, that may be killed with nothing more than just a tap on the nose. That’s well known. I was really afraid he would overcome you in some way or other....”

“Come, maître! One isn’t a little child,” protested Michel against this accumulation of improbabilities. He did it, however, only in a whisper and with childlike shyness. Peyrol folded his arms on his breast:

“Go, finish your soup,” he commanded in a low voice, “and then go down to the tartane. You locked the cabin door properly, you said?”

“Yes, I have,” protested Michel, staggered by this display of anxiety. “He could sooner burst the deck above his head, as you know.”

“All the same, take a small spar and shore up that door against the heel of the mast. And then watch outside. Don’t you go in to him on any account. Stay on deck and keep a lookout for me. There is a tangle here that won’t be easily cleared and I must be very careful. I will try to slip away and get down as soon as I get rid of that officer.”

The conference in the sunshine being ended, Peyrol walked leisurely out of the yard gate, and protruding his head beyond the corner of the house, saw Lieutenant Réal sitting on the bench. This he had expected to see. But he had not expected to see him there alone. It was just like this: wherever Arlette happened to be, there were worrying possibilities. But she might have been helping her aunt in the kitchen with her sleeves rolled up on such white arms as Peyrol had never seen on any woman before. The way she had taken to dressing her hair in a plait with a broad black velvet ribbon and an Arlesian cap was very becoming. She was wearing now her mother’s clothes of which there were chestfuls, altered for her of course. The late mistress of the Escampobar Farm had been an Arlesienne. Well-to-do, too. Yes, even for women’s clothes the Escampobar natives could do without intercourse with the outer world. It was quite time that this confounded lieutenant went back to Toulon. This was the third day. His short leave must be up. Peyrol’s attitude towards naval officers had been always guarded and suspicious. His relations with them had been very mixed. They had been his enemies and his superiors. He had been chased by them. He had been trusted by them. The Revolution had made a clean cut across the consistency of his wild life--Brother of the Coast and gunner in the national Navy--and yet he was always the same man. It was like that, too, with them. Officers of the King, officers of the Republic, it was only changing the skin. All alike looked askance at a free rover. Even this one could not forget his epaulettes when talking to him. Scorn and mistrust of epaulettes were rooted deeply in old Peyrol. Yet he did not absolutely hate Lieutenant Réal. Only the fellow’s coming to the farm was generally a curse and his presence at that particular moment a confounded nuisance and to a certain extent even a danger. “I have no mind to be hauled to Toulon by the scruff of my neck,” Peyrol said to himself. There was no trusting those epaulette-wearers. Any one of them was capable of jumping on his best friend on account of some officer-like notion or other.

Peyrol, stepping round the corner, sat down by the side of Lieutenant Réal with the feeling somehow of coming to grips with a slippery customer. The lieutenant, as he sat there, unaware of Peyrol’s survey of his person, gave no notion of slipperiness. On the contrary, he looked rather immovably established. Very much at home. Too much at home. Even after Peyrol sat down by his side he continued to look immovable--or at least difficult to get rid of. In the still noonday heat the faint shrilling of cicadas was the only sound of life heard for quite a long time. Delicate, evanescent, cheerful, careless sort of life, yet not without passion. A sudden gloom seemed to be cast over the joy of the cicadas by the lieutenant’s voice though the words were the most perfunctory possible.

“Tiens! Vous voilà.”

In the stress of the situation Peyrol at once asked himself: Now why does he say that? Where did he expect me to be? The lieutenant need not have spoken at all. He had known him now for about two years off and on, and it had happened many times that they had sat side by side on that bench in a sort of “at arm’s length” equality without exchanging a single word. And why could he not have kept quiet now? That naval officer never spoke without an object, but what could one make of words like that? Peyrol achieved an insincere yawn and suggested mildly:

“A bit of siesta wouldn’t be amiss. What do you think, lieutenant?”

And to himself he thought: “No fear, he won’t go to his room.” He would stay there and thereby keep him, Peyrol, from going down to the cove. He turned his eyes on that naval officer and if extreme and concentrated desire and mere force of will could have had any effect Lieutenant Réal would certainly have been removed suddenly from that bench. But he didn’t move. And Peyrol was astonished to see that man smile, but what astonished him still more was to hear him say:

“The trouble is that you have never been frank with me, Peyrol.”

“Frank with you,” repeated the rover. “You want me to be frank with you? Well, I have wished you to the devil many times.”

“That’s better,” said Lieutenant Réal. “But why? I never tried to do you any harm.”

“Me harm,” cried Peyrol, “to me?”... But he faltered in his indignation as if frightened at it and ended in a very quiet tone: “You have been nosing in a lot of dirty papers to find something against a man who was not doing _you_ any harm and was a seaman before you were born.”

“Quite a mistake. There was no nosing amongst papers. I came on them quite by accident. I won’t deny I was intrigué finding a man of your sort living in this place. But don’t be uneasy. Nobody would trouble his head about you. It’s a long time since you have been forgotten. Have no fear.”

“You! You talk to me of fear ...? No,” cried the rover, “it’s enough to turn a fellow into a sans-culotte if it weren’t for the sight of that specimen sneaking around here.”

The lieutenant turned his head sharply, and for a moment the naval officer and the free sea rover looked at each other gloomily. When Peyrol spoke again he had changed his mood.

“Why should I fear anybody? I owe nothing to anybody. I have given them up the prize ship in order and everything else, except my luck; and for that I account to nobody,” he added darkly.

“I don’t know what you are driving at,” the lieutenant said after a moment of thought. “All I know is that you seem to have given up your share of the prize money. There is no record of you ever claiming it.”

Peyrol did not like the sarcastic tone. “You have a nasty tongue,” he said, “with your damned trick of talking as if you were made of different clay.”

“No offence,” said the lieutenant, grave but a little puzzled. “Nobody will drag out that against you. It has been paid years ago to the Invalides’ fund. All this is buried and forgotten.”

Peyrol was grumbling and swearing to himself with such concentration that the lieutenant stopped and waited till he had finished.

“And there is no record of desertion or anything like that,” he continued then. “You stand there as _disparu_. I believe that after searching for you a little they came to the conclusion that you had come by your death somehow or other.”

“Did they? Well, perhaps old Peyrol is dead. At any rate he has buried himself here.” The rover suffered from great instability of feelings, for he passed in a flash from melancholy into fierceness. “And he was quiet enough till you came sniffing around this hole. More than once in my life I had occasion to wonder how soon the jackals would have a chance to dig up my carcass; but to have a naval officer come scratching round here was the last thing....” Again a change came over him. “What can you want here?” he whispered, suddenly depressed.

The lieutenant fell into the humour of that discourse. “I don’t want to disturb the dead,” he said, turning full to the rover, who, after his last words, had fixed his eyes on the ground. “I want to talk to the gunner Peyrol.”

Peyrol, without raising his eyes from the ground, growled: “He isn’t there. He is _disparu_. Go and look at the papers again. Vanished. Nobody here.”

“That,” said Lieutenant Réal in a conversational tone, “that is a lie. He was talking to me this morning on the hill-side as we were looking at the English ship. He knows all about her. He told me he spent nights making plans for her capture. He seemed to be a fellow with his heart in the right place. _Un homme de cœur._ You know him.”

Peyrol raised his big head slowly and looked at the lieutenant.

“Humph,” he grunted. A heavy, non-committal grunt. His old heart was stirred, but the tangle was such that he had to be on his guard with any man who wore epaulettes. His profile preserved the immobility of a head struck on a medal while he listened to the lieutenant assuring him that this time he had come to Escampobar on purpose to speak with the gunner Peyrol. That he had not done so before was because it was a very confidential matter. At this point the lieutenant stopped and Peyrol made no sign. Inwardly he was asking himself what the lieutenant was driving at. But the lieutenant seemed to have shifted his ground. His tone, too, was slightly different. More practical.

“You say you have made a study of that English ship’s movements. Well, for instance, suppose a breeze springs up, as it very likely will towards the evening, could you tell me where she will be to-night? I mean, what her captain is likely to do.”

“No, I couldn’t,” said Peyrol.

“But you said you have been observing him minutely for weeks. There aren’t so many alternatives, and taking the weather and everything into consideration, you can judge almost with certainty.”

“No,” said Peyrol again. “It so happens that I can’t.”

“Can’t you? Then you are worse than any of the old admirals that you think so little of. Why can’t you?”

“I will tell you why,” said Peyrol after a pause and with a face more like a carving than ever. “It’s because the fellow has never come so far this way before. Therefore I don’t know what he has got in his mind, and in consequence I can’t guess what he will do next. I may be able to tell you some other day but not to-day. Next time when you come ... to see the old gunner.”

“No, it must be this time.”

“Do you mean you are going to stay here to-night?”

“Did you think I was here on leave? I tell you I am on service. Don’t you believe me?”

Peyrol let out a heavy sigh. “Yes, I believe you. And so they are thinking of catching her alive. And you are sent on service. Well, that doesn’t make it any easier for me to see you here.”

“You are a strange man, Peyrol,” said the lieutenant, “I believe you wish me dead.”

“No. Only out of this. But you are right. Peyrol is no friend either to your face or to your voice. They have done harm enough already.”

They had never attained to such intimate terms before. There was no need for them to look at each other. The lieutenant thought: “Ah! he can’t keep his jealousy in.” There was no scorn or malice in that thought. It was much more like despair. He said mildly:

“You snarl like an old dog, Peyrol.”

“I have felt sometimes as if I could fly at your throat,” said Peyrol in a sort of calm whisper. “And it amuses you the more.”

“Amuses me. Do I look light-hearted?”

Again Peyrol turned his head slowly for a long, steady stare. And again the naval officer and the rover gazed at each other with a searching and sombre frankness. This new-born intimacy could go no further.

“Listen to me, Peyrol....”

“No,” said the other. “If you want to talk, talk to the gunner.”

Though he seemed to have adopted the notion of a double personality, the rover did not seem to be much easier in one character than in the other. Furrows of perplexity appeared on his brow, and as the lieutenant did not speak at once, Peyrol the gunner asked impatiently:

“So they are thinking of catching her alive.” It did not please him to hear the lieutenant say that it was not exactly this that the chiefs in Toulon had in their minds. Peyrol at once expressed the opinion that of all the naval chiefs that ever were, Citizen Renaud was the only one that was worth anything. Lieutenant Réal, disregarding the challenging tone, kept to the point.

“What they want to know is whether that English corvette interferes much with the coast traffic.”

“No, she doesn’t,” said Peyrol, “she leaves poor people alone unless, I suppose, some craft acts suspiciously. I have seen her give chase to one or two. But even those she did not detain. Michel--you know Michel?--has heard from the mainland people that she has captured several at various times. Of course, strictly speaking, nobody is safe.”

“Well, no. I wonder now what that Englishman would call ‘acting suspiciously.’”

“Ah, now you are asking something. Don’t you know what an Englishman is? One day easy and casual, next day ready to pounce on you like a tiger. Hard in the morning, careless in the afternoon, and only reliable in a fight, whether with or against you, but for the rest perfectly fantastic. You might think a little touched in the head, and there again it would not do to trust to that notion either.”

The lieutenant lending an attentive ear, Peyrol smoothed his brow and discoursed with gusto of Englishmen as if they had been a strange, very little-known tribe. “In a manner of speaking,” he concluded, “the oldest bird of them all can be caught with chaff, but not every day.” He shook his head, smiling to himself faintly, as if remembering a quaint passage or two.

“You didn’t get all that knowledge of the English while you were a gunner,” observed the lieutenant dryly.

“There you go again,” said Peyrol. “And what’s that to you where I learned it all? Suppose I learned it all from a man who is dead now. Put it down to that.”

“I see. It amounts to this, that one can’t get at the back of their minds very easily.”

“No,” said Peyrol, then added grumpily, “and some Frenchmen are not much better. I wish I could get at the back of your mind.”

“You would find a service matter there, gunner, that’s what you would find there, and a matter that seems nothing much at first sight, but when you look into it, is about as difficult to manage properly as anything you ever undertook in your life. It puzzled all the big-wigs. It must have, since I was called in. Of course I work on shore at the Admiralty, and I was in the way. They showed me the order from Paris and I could see at once the difficulty of it. I pointed it out and I was told....”

“To come here,” struck in Peyrol.

“No. To make arrangements to carry it out.”

“And you began by coming here. You are always coming here.”

“I began by looking for a man,” said the naval officer with emphasis.

Peyrol looked at him searchingly. “Do you mean to say that in the whole fleet you couldn’t have found a man?”

“I never attempted to look for one there. My chief agreed with me that it isn’t a service for navy men.”

“Well, it must be something nasty for a naval man to admit that much. What is the order? I don’t suppose you came over here without being ready to show it to me.”

The lieutenant plunged his hand into the inside pocket of his naval jacket and then brought it out empty.

“Understand, Peyrol,” he said earnestly, “this is not a service of fighting. Good men are plentiful for that. The object is to play the enemy a trick.”