The Toilers of the Sea (22 page)

“You are good sailors.”

“I am a cattle dealer.”

“What other people came from Saint-Malo, then?”

“There was Surcouf.”
¹⁴³

“Anyone else?”

“Duguay-Trouin.”
¹⁴⁴

Here the commercial traveler from Paris intervened:

“Duguay-Trouin? He was captured by the English. He was a brave man and a good fellow. A young Englishwoman fell in love with him. It was she who struck off his fetters.”

At this moment a voice of thunder was heard:

“You're drunk!”

IV

IN WHICH CAPTAIN CLUBIN SHOWS ALL HIS QUALITIES

Everyone looked round.

It was the captain addressing the helmsman.

Unusually, Sieur Clubin was using the familiar
tu
form. Normally he never addressed anyone in that way, and his use of it now showed that he must be furiously angry, or at least wanted to appear so.

A well-timed outburst of anger is a way of throwing off responsibility, and sometimes of transferring it.

The captain, standing on the bridge between the paddle boxes, glared at the helmsman, spitting out the word
Drunkard!
Honest Tangrouille hung his head.

The blanket of fog had grown in size and now covered almost half the horizon. It was advancing in all directions at the same time, for fog has something of the quality of a patch of oil. It was expanding almost imperceptibly, driven noiselessly and without haste by the wind. It was gradually taking possession of the ocean. It was coming from the northwest and blowing straight toward the ship. It was like a vast, shapeless moving cliff, coming down on the sea like a wall. There was an exact spot at which the great waste of water entered the fog and disappeared.

The point of entry into the fog was still about half a league away. If the wind changed they might still avoid being caught in it; but it would have to change immediately. The gap of half a league was visibly lessening; the Durande was moving forward, and the fog, too, was advancing. The fog was approaching the ship and the ship was approaching the fog. Clubin gave orders to put on more steam and to bear east.

The Durande now skirted the fog for some time, but it was still advancing. The ship was still in clear sunlight.

Time was being lost in these maneuvers, which were unlikely to succeed. Night falls quickly in February.

The Guernsey man, watching the fog, remarked to the two Saint-Malo men:

“This is a right nasty fog.”

“A filthy bit of weather,” said one of them.

“A bad thing to happen when you're at sea,” said the other.

The Guernsey man went up to Clubin:

“Captain Clubin, I'm afraid we're going to be caught up in the fog.”

“I wanted to stay in Saint-Malo,” said Clubin, “but I was advised to go.”

“Who by?”

“By old sailors.”

“Well,” said the Guernsey man, “I think you were right to sail. Who knows but there may be a storm tomorrow? At this time of year you must always be prepared for the worst.”

A few minutes later the Durande entered the bank of fog.

It was a curious effect. Suddenly those who were in the after part of the vessel could no longer see those who were farther forward. A soft gray wall cut the Durande into two. Then the whole ship plunged into the fog. The sun was now like a great swollen moon.

Everyone shivered with cold. The passengers put on their great-coats, the sailors their oilskins. The sea, with hardly a ripple, had a cold, menacing tranquillity. An undue calm of this kind seems to hold a hidden threat. Everything had turned pale and wan. The black funnel and the black smoke that it emitted stood out boldly against the pallor in which the ship was enveloped.

There was no object now in making east. The captain turned the ship's head toward Guernsey and put on more steam.

The passenger from Guernsey, who had been standing near the engine room, heard the Negro called Imbrancam talking to his fellow stoker and listened. The Negro was saying:

“This morning, when we had sun, we were going slow; now, with this fog, we are going fast.”

The Guernsey man returned to Sieur Clubin.

“Captain Clubin,” he said, “are we taking enough care? Haven't we too much steam on?”

“What can I do, sir? We must make up for the time lost because of that drunkard of a helmsman.”

“True enough, Captain Clubin.”

And Clubin added:

“I want to make speed for harbor. It is bad enough having fog; it would be much worse with darkness as well.”

The Guernsey man returned to the two from Saint-Malo, saying:

“We have an excellent captain.”

Every now and then great waves of fog, like carded wool, swept over the Durande, concealing the sun, which then reappeared, seeming paler and sickly. What little could be seen of the sky resembled its dirty, blotchy representation on a theater backcloth.

The Durande passed close to a cutter that had prudently dropped anchor. It was the
Shealtiel
of Guernsey. The skipper noticed the Durande's speed. It seemed to him, too, that she was not on the right course; he thought that she was bearing too much to the west. He was surprised to see her going full steam ahead in the fog.

By two o'clock the fog was so thick that the captain had to leave the bridge and stand near the helmsman. The sun had disappeared, and there was now nothing but fog. The Durande was enveloped in a kind of white darkness, and was sailing through a diffused pallor. Neither the sky nor the sea could now be seen.

There was not a breath of wind. The can of turpentine hanging from a ring below the bridge did not even quiver.

The passengers had all fallen silent. The man, from Paris, however, was humming under his breath Béranger's song “
Un jour le bon Dieu
s'éveillant.
”

One of the men from Saint-Malo asked him: “You come from Paris, sir?”

“Yes, sir.
Il mit la tête à la fenêtre.
”

“What are things like in Paris?”

“
Leur planète a péri peut-être.—
Everything is going wrong in Paris, sir.”

“Then it's the same on land as it is at sea.”

“That's true. This is a terrible fog.”

“And it can lead to some calamity.”

“Why do we have all these calamities?” cried the man from Paris. “What's the point of them? What purpose do they serve? It's like the burning down of the Odéon,
¹⁴⁵
which made whole families penniless. Is that right? I don't know what your religious beliefs may be, but I can tell you that
I
am not happy with the way the world is.”

“Nor am I,” said the man from Saint-Malo.

“Everything in this world of ours,” said the Parisian, “seems to me to be out of order. My idea is that God isn't there anymore.”

The man from Saint-Malo scratched the top of his head, like someone trying to understand.

The Parisian went on:

“God is absent from our world. They ought to pass a decree compelling him to stay in residence. He's in his country house and doesn't care about us. And so everything is going askew. It is clear, my dear sir, that God is no longer in charge; he is on holiday, and the business is being run by some deputy, some angel trained in a seminary, some imbecile with the wings of a sparrow.” The word
sparrow
was pronounced in the manner of a Paris street urchin.

Captain Clubin, who had come up to the two men, put his hand on the Parisian's shoulder.

“Quiet, sir!” he said. “Take care what you are saying! We are at sea.”

The passengers were struck dumb.

After a silence of five minutes the Guernsey man, who had heard this exchange, whispered to the man from Saint-Malo:

“A religious man, our captain!”

It was not raining, but everyone on board felt wet. They measured the progress the Durande was making only by their increasing discomfort. A feeling of melancholy came over them.

Fog creates a silence over the ocean; it calms the waves and stills the wind. In this silence the churning of the Durande's engines had a troubled and plaintive sound.

They met no more ships. Even if, away toward Guernsey or Saint-Malo, out of the fog, there were still a few vessels at sea, the Durande, fog-shrouded, would be invisible to them and her long trail of smoke, emerging from nowhere, would look like a black comet in a white sky.

Suddenly Clubin shouted:

“
Faichien!
You've gone wrong again! You are going to wreck the ship! You ought to be put in irons. Get out of there, you drunkard!”

And he seized the tiller.

The helmsman, shamefaced, slunk forward among the men.

“We'll be all right now,” said the Guernsey man.

The Durande sailed on, full speed ahead.

About three o'clock the curtain of fog began to lift, and the sea could be seen again.

“I don't like the look of it,” said the Guernsey man.

Fog can only be dispersed either by the sun or by the wind. By the sun is good; by the wind is not so good. But it was now too late for the sun. At three in the afternoon, in February, the sun is losing its strength. And if the wind rises at this critical point in the day, that is not a good sign: it will then often blow up into a hurricane.

But if there was any wind at all it was barely perceptible.

Clubin, with his eye on the binnacle, was holding the tiller and steering, muttering under his breath. The passengers heard him say:

“No time to be lost. That drunkard has held us back.”

His face was completely expressionless.

The sea under the fog was now less calm, and there was something of a swell. There were patches of cold light on the surface of the sea. Seamen are concerned when they see light patches of this kind: they show where the winds at higher levels have gouged out holes in the ceiling of fog. The fog lifted from time to time and then came down again thicker than before. Sometimes it was completely opaque. The Durande was caught up in a veritable ice floe of fog. Now and again this fearful circle opened up like pincers, revealing a little bit of the horizon, and then closed again.

The Guernsey man, with his telescope, was now standing in the bow of the vessel like a lookout.

The fog lifted, then came down again.

The Guernsey man turned around in alarm:

“Captain Clubin!”

“What's the matter?”

“We're heading straight for the Hanois.”

“You are wrong,” said Clubin coldly.

The Guernsey man persisted. “I'm sure we are.”

“We cannot be.”

“I've just seen a rock on the horizon.”

“Where?”

“There.”

“That is the open sea. There can't be anything there.”

And Clubin continued on his course toward the point indicated by the passenger.

The Guernsey man took up his telescope again.

A moment later he came rushing aft:

“Captain!”

“Well?”

“You must go about.”

“Why?”

“I'm sure I saw high rocks, quite close. It's the Great Hanois.”

“What you saw was a thicker patch of fog.”

“It
is
the Great Hanois. For God's sake, go about!”

Clubin gave a pull on the tiller.

V

CLUBIN AT HIS MOST ADMIRED

There was a sharp grating sound. The rending of a ship's side on a sunken rock in the open sea is one of the most sinister sounds that can be imagined. The Durande stopped short. Some of the passengers were thrown sprawling on the deck.

The Guernsey man threw up his hands.

“We're on the Hanois! Just as I said!”

There was a general cry: “We're lost!”

Clubin's voice, sharp and decided, dominated the clamor:

“No one is lost! Keep quiet!”

The black figure of Imbrancam, naked to the waist, emerged from the engine-room hatch and said calmly:

“Captain, we're taking in water. The engine is about to stop.”

It was a moment of dread.

The crash had been like a suicide. Had it been brought about on purpose it could not have been more terrible. The Durande had thrown itself against the reef as if attacking it. A jagged point of rock had been driven into the vessel like a nail. More than a square toise
¹⁴⁶
of the inside planking had been shattered, the stem was broken, the rake damaged, the bow stove in; and water was pouring into the hull with a dreadful bubbling sound. The ship had suffered a wound that had brought her to shipwreck. The shock had been so violent that it had broken the pendants of the rudder, which now hung loose, beating against the hull. The bottom had been knocked out of the vessel by the reef, and nothing could be seen around her but the dense, compact fog, now almost black. Night was falling.

The Durande was down by the head. She was like a bullfighter's horse that had been gored by the bull. She was dead.

The sea was at half-tide and rising.

Tangrouille had now sobered up: no one is drunk in a shipwreck. He went down between decks and, coming up again, reported to Clubin:

“Captain, the water is filling the hold. In ten minutes it will be up to the scuppers.”

The passengers were running frantically around the deck, wringing their hands, leaning overboard, looking at the engine, going through all the pointless motions of terror. The tourist had fainted.

Clubin held up his hand and they all fell quiet. He asked Imbrancam:

“How long can the engines go on working?”

“Five or six minutes.”

Then he asked the Guernsey man:

“I was at the tiller. You were looking at the rocks. Which of the Hanois are we on?”

“We are on the Mauve. A few minutes ago, when the fog lifted, I had a clear view of the Mauve.”

“Since we are on the Mauve,” said Clubin, “we have the Great Hanois to port and the Little Hanois to starboard. We are a mile from land.”

The crew and the passengers listened anxiously and intently, their eyes fixed on the captain.

There was nothing to be gained by lightening the ship, and in any case it would have been impossible: in order to get rid of the cargo it would have been necessary to open the ports and allow more water to get in. Nor would it have helped to drop the anchor, for the vessel was already firmly attached to the rock. Besides, on a bottom on which it would be difficult to get a purchase, the chain would probably have fouled. The engines were not damaged and could have been used to work the ship until the fire was extinguished—that is, for a few minutes more. It would thus have been possible to reverse the paddle wheels and back off the rock; but the Durande would then have sunk immediately. The rock was partly stopping up the holes in the ship's hull and reducing the inflow of water. It served as an obstacle to the invading sea. If the gash in the hull had been cleared of the obstruction it would have been impossible to stem the rush of water and work the pumps. If you pull out the dagger that has been plunged into a man's heart, you will kill him at once. Getting clear of the rock would have meant sinking to the bottom.

The water had now reached the cattle in the hold and they were beginning to bellow.

Clubin snapped out an order:

“Lower the longboat.”

Imbrancam and Tangrouille hastened to obey and undid the lashings on the boat. The rest of the crew looked on as if petrified.

“All hands to the work!” shouted Clubin.

This time they all obeyed.

Clubin continued, impassively, to issue orders in the old language of command that the seamen of the present day would not understand:

“Haul taut!—Use a voyal if the capstan won't work.—Stop heaving!—Slack there!—Keep the blocks clear!—Lower away!—Slack away at both ends, smartly, now!—All together!—Take care she doesn't go down stern first.—It's catching on there!—Get hold of the mast tackle falls!—Watch out!”

The longboat was launched.

At that moment the Durande's wheels stopped turning and the funnel ceased belching smoke. The fires had been extinguished.

The passengers fell rather than climbed down into the boat, sliding down the ladder or clinging to the rigging. Imbrancam picked up the unconscious tourist, carried him into the boat, and returned to the ship.

After the passengers, the crew made a rush for the boat, knocking down the cabin boy and trampling on him. Imbrancam barred their way, saying: “The
moço
goes first.”

He thrust the seamen aside, picked up the boy, and handed him down to the passenger from Guernsey, standing in the boat.

Seeing the cabin boy safe, Imbrancam stood aside and said to the rest of the crew: “Now you can go.”

Meanwhile Clubin had gone to his cabin and gathered up the ship's papers and instruments. He then took the compass from the binnacle, handed the papers and instruments to Imbrancam and the compass to Tangrouille, and told them to get into the boat.

They went down into the boat, following the other seamen. The longboat was now full, with water almost up to the gunwale.

“Now,” shouted Clubin, “off you go.”

There was a general cry from the boat:

“What about you, Captain?”

“I am staying here.”

People who suffer shipwreck have little time for thinking and still less time for sentiment; but those who were in the boat, and at least relatively safe, had feelings that were not entirely selfish. All of them joined in the cry:

“Come with us, Captain.”

“I am staying here.”

The Guernsey man, who was familiar with ships and the sea, replied:

“No, no, Captain. You are on the Hanois. From here it is only a mile's swim to Pleinmont. But for a boat the only landing is in Rocquaine Bay, and that is two miles away. We have heavy waves and fog. It will take us at least two hours to get to Rocquaine in the boat. It will be a pitch-black night. The tide is rising and the wind is freshening. There is going to be a squall. We want nothing better than to come back and fetch you, but if dirty weather blows up we shan't be able to. You are done for if you stay here. Come with us.”

The man from Paris intervened:

“The boat is full—too full—and one man more will be one man too many. But there are thirteen of us, and that's unlucky for the boat. It's better to overload it with one man than one figure too many. Come along with us, Captain.”

Tangrouille added:

“It is all my fault, not yours. It's not right that you should stay.”

“I am staying here,” said Clubin. “The ship will be torn to pieces by the storm tonight. I will not leave it. When a ship is lost the captain is dead. People will say of me, He did his duty to the end. I forgive you, Tangrouille.”

Folding his arms, he cried:

“Carry out my orders. Cast off. Off you go!”

The longboat got under way. Imbrancam was at the tiller. All the hands that were not pulling an oar were raised toward the captain. From every mouth came the cry, “Hurrah for Captain Clubin!”

“There goes a brave man!” said the American.

“The finest man that sails the seas,” said the Guernsey man.

Tangrouille was weeping. “If I had had the courage,” he muttered to himself, “I would have stayed with him.”

The boat disappeared into the fog and was lost to sight.

Nothing more was to be seen.

The sound of oars grew fainter and finally died away.

Clubin remained alone.