The Toilers of the Sea (41 page)

I

THE HARBOR BELL

The St. Sampson of our day is almost a town; the St. Sampson of forty years ago was almost a village.

When the long nights of winter were over and spring had come, people cut their evenings short and went to bed when night fell. The parish of St. Sampson had formerly been subject to a curfew, and it still maintained the habit of blowing out its candles early. People went to bed and rose from bed with daylight. These old Norman villages tend to be like chicken roosts.

Apart from a few well-to-do families of townsfolk St. Sampson has a population of quarrymen and carpenters. The harbor is a boat repair yard. All day long the men of St. Sampson are engaged in extracting stone and shaping wood: here the pickax is at work, there the hammer. The day is spent working oak timber and granite. In the evening the men are dead tired and sleep like logs: heavy work makes for heavy slumbers.

One evening in early May, after briefly watching the crescent moon amid the trees and listening to Déruchette walking by herself in the garden of Les Bravées in the evening coolness, Mess Lethierry had withdrawn to his room overlooking the harbor and gone to bed. Douce and Grace were already in bed. Except for Déruchette the whole house was asleep. In St. Sampson, too, everyone was asleep. Everywhere doors and shutters were closed. No one was moving in the streets. A few lights, like winking eyes about to close, shone here and there through dormer windows, showing that the servants were going to bed. It was some time since nine o'clock had struck on the old ivy-covered Norman belfry that shares with St. Brelade's church on Jersey the peculiarity of having a date consisting of four ones (IIII), for the year eleven hundred and eleven.

Mess Lethierry's popularity in St. Sampson had depended on his success; and when his success was taken from him his popularity had declined. Bad luck seems to be contagious, and unlucky people seem to be stricken with plague, so quickly are they put into quarantine. The eligible sons of good families now avoided Déruchette. The isolation of Les Bravées was so complete that the household knew nothing of the great event—great by local standards—which that day had been the talk of St. Sampson. The rector of the parish, the Reverend Ebenezer Caudray, was now rich. His uncle, the magnificent dean of St. Asaph's, had died in London, and the news had been brought from England that very morning by the mail sloop, the
Cashmere,
whose mast could be seen in the anchorage at St. Peter Port. The
Cashmere
was due to leave for Southampton on the following day at noon, and, it was said, would have among its passengers the rector, recalled to England at short notice for the official reading of the will, to say nothing of other urgent matters concerned with the inheritance of a large estate. All day there had been much confused discussion of the event. The
Cashmere,
the Reverend Ebenezer, his late uncle, his wealth, his departure, his future prospects had kept the town in a buzz of interest. Only one house, Les Bravées, knew nothing of the news and remained silent.

Mess Lethierry had thrown himself down on his hammock, fully dressed. Since the catastrophe that had hit the Durande this was all he felt like doing. Prisoners regularly resort to their wretched pallet, and Lethierry was a prisoner of his chagrin. He went to bed each night: it was a truce, a breathing space, a suspension of thought. Did he sleep at night? No. Did he lie awake? No. It would be true to say that for the past two and a half months—it was two and a half months since the catastrophe—Mess Lethierry had been living like a sleepwalker. He had not yet regained possession of his faculties. He was in the cloudy and confused state of mind of those who have suffered great afflictions. His reflections did not amount to thought; his sleep did not bring him repose. During the day he was not a man in a waking state, and during the night he was not a man asleep. He was up, and then he was lying down: that was all. When he was in his hammock he had some moments of forgetfulness that he called sleep; chimeras floated over him and within him, and the cloud of night, filled with blurred faces, passed through his brain; the emperor Napoleon dictated his memoirs to him; there were several Déruchettes; strange birds perched in trees, the streets of Lons-le-Saunier turned into snakes. Nightmares offered a respite from despair. He spent his nights in dreaming, his days in daydreams.

Sometimes he would spend a whole afternoon, motionless, at the window of his bedroom overlooking the harbor, with his head held low, his elbows on the stone sill, his hands over his ears, turning his back on the world, his eyes fixed on the old iron ring in the wall of the house, a few feet below the window, where the Durande used to be moored—watching the rust gathering on the ring.

Mess Lethierry was now reduced to the mere mechanical habit of living.

The most valiant of men come to this when they are deprived of their ruling idea: it is the effect of an existence emptied of its substance. Life is a journey and an idea is the itinerary. Without an itinerary the journey comes to an end. The objective is lost, and the strength to pursue it has gone. Fate has a mysterious discretionary power. It can touch with its rod even our moral being. Despair is almost the destitution of the soul. Only the greatest spirits hold out against it; and perhaps not even they.

Mess Lethierry meditated continually, if absorption can be called meditation, in the depths of a kind of turbid abyss. Sometimes a few heartbroken words would escape him, like: “The only thing now is to ask
up there
for a ticket of leave.”

There was a contradiction in Lethierry's nature, a nature as complex as the sea, of which, as it were, he was the product. Mess Lethierry did not pray.

To be powerless is a strength. In the presence of those two blind forces, destiny and nature, man in his very powerlessness has found a support in prayer.

Man seeks help from his dread; he asks his fears for aid; anxiety bids him kneel.

Prayer is a tremendous force peculiar to the soul and of the same kind as mystery. Prayer appeals to the magnanimity of the world of shadows; it looks on the mystery of being with the eyes of darkness itself; and we feel it possible that, faced with the powerful fixity of this suppliant glance, the Unknown may be disarmed. Even the glimpse of this possibility is a consolation.

But Lethierry did not pray.

In happier days God had existed for him—almost, as it were, in flesh and blood. He spoke to Him, pledged his word to Him, from time to time almost shook His hand. But in his hours of trouble, which occurred fairly often, God was eclipsed. This is what happens when we have made ourselves a good God, a friendly personal God.

In Lethierry's present state of mind there was only one clear vision—Déruchette's smile. Beyond that everything was black.

For some time now, no doubt because of the loss of the Durande, Déruchette's charming smile had been seen more rarely. She seemed preoccupied. Her birdlike and childlike little ways had gone. She was no longer to be seen curtseying to welcome the rising sun when the cannon fired at daybreak: “Good morning, day! Do come in!” At times she had a very serious air—a sad change in this sweet creature. She tried, however, to laugh with Mess Lethierry and to divert him; but day by day her gaiety was increasingly tarnished and covered with dust, like the wings of a butterfly with a pin through its body. Moreover, whether from chagrin at her uncle's chagrin—for there are griefs that are the reflection of other griefs—or for some other reason, she seemed now to be much inclined toward religion. In the time of the old rector, Mr. Jaquemin Hérode, she had been accustomed to go to church no more than four times a year, but now she was assiduous in her attendance. She never missed a service either on Sunday or Thursday. The pious souls of the parish were pleased to see this improvement; for it is a great happiness when a young girl, who is exposed to so many dangers in the world of men, turns to God. This at least sets the minds of her parents at rest in the matter of love affairs.

In the evening, whenever the weather allowed, she would walk for an hour or two in the garden of Les Bravées. At these times she was almost as thoughtful as Mess Lethierry, and was always alone. She was always the last to go to bed. This did not prevent Douce and Grace from always to some extent keeping an eye on her, with the instinctive watchfulness that goes with domestic service, as some relief from the dullness of service.

In his present abstracted state of mind Mess Lethierry failed to observe these little changes in Déruchette's habits. In any case he was not a born duenna. He did not even notice her punctuality in attending church. Tenacious as he was in his prejudice against the clergy and all their doings, he would not have looked with pleasure on her churchgoing.

Nevertheless, his own moral situation was in the process of changing. Chagrin is a cloud that changes its form.

As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune. Virile characters like Lethierry recover after a time. Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy.

Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad.

Such elegiac consolations were not for Lethierry; neither the nature of his temperament nor the circumstances of his misfortune left any room for such subtle nuances. But at the present time the dreamy contemplation of his first despair had been tending for the last week or so to dissipate. Though still sad, he was less inert; he was still somber, but he was no longer totally overwhelmed; he was beginning to take some notice of facts and events; and he was beginning to feel something of the phenomenon that might be called a return to reality.

Thus during the day, in the ground-floor room of his house, he did not listen to what people were saying, but he heard them. One morning Grace came, quite triumphant, to tell Déruchette that Mess Lethierry had opened a newspaper.

This half-acceptance of reality is in itself a favorable symptom, a sign of convalescence. Great misfortunes have a deadening effect. It is by such little acts that a man recovers from his stupor. But this improvement seems at first to aggravate his condition. His earlier dreamlike condition of mind dulled the pain; his sight was blurred and he was insensitive to feeling; but now that he can see clearly, nothing escapes him and everything draws blood. The wound reopens. The pain is increased by all the details that he now apprehends. He sees it all again in memory, and memory brings regret. This return to reality is accompanied by all kinds of bitter aftertastes. You are better, and yet worse. This was what Lethierry was now experiencing: his suffering had become more distinct.

What had brought him back to reality was a shock he had received. One afternoon about the fifteenth or twentieth of April, the postman's double knock had been heard on the door of the ground-floor room in Les Bravées. Douce had opened the door and a letter was delivered. It was a sea letter addressed to Mess Lethierry, bearing the postmark
Lisboa.
Douce had taken the letter to Mess Lethierry, who was shut up in his room. He had taken the letter, laid it down mechanically on the table, and left it unopened. It had then remained on the table for a full week, still unopened.

One morning, however, Douce asked Mess Lethierry: “Shall I brush off the dust from the letter lying on your table, sir?” Lethierry seemed to rouse himself. “Yes, do,” he said, and opened the letter. It was in the following terms:

AT SEA, 10TH MARCH.
MESS LETHIERRY, ST. SAMPSON.

You will no doubt be glad to hear from me.

I am on board the
Tamaulipas,
heading for Never-Come-Back. One of the crew is a sailor from Guernsey named Ahier-Tostevin who is on his way home and will be able to give you some news. We have fallen in with the
Hernán Cortés,
making for Lisbon, and I am taking advantage of the chance to send you this letter.

You will be surprised to learn that I am an honest man. As honest as Sieur Clubin.

I think you may already know about certain recent occurrences, but perhaps I should still tell you about them.

This is the position:

I have returned your money to you.

I had borrowed from you, somewhat improperly, fifty thousand francs. Before leaving Saint-Malo I handed over to Sieur Clubin, your trustworthy agent, three banknotes, each for a thousand pounds, amounting to seventy-five thousand francs. No doubt you will regard this reimbursement as sufficient.

Sieur Clubin looked after your interests and accepted your money with some energy. He seemed, indeed, remarkably zealous. That is why I tell you this.

YOUR OTHER TRUSTWORTHY AGENT,
RANTAINE.

P.S. Sieur Clubin had a revolver, which is why I have no receipt.

Touch a torpedo fish, touch a fully charged Leyden jar, and you will have some idea of what Mess Lethierry felt on reading this letter. In the envelope, on the sheet of paper folded in four to which he had at first paid so little attention, there was an electric shock. He recognized the writing and he recognized the signature; but at first sight he could make nothing of the letter's contents. The shock was such that it set his mind going again. The story of the seventy-five thousand francs given by Rantaine to Clubin was an enigma, but the positive side of the shock was that it forced Lethierry's brain to work. To make a conjecture is a healthy occupation for a man's mind. It stimulates the power of reasoning and calls logic into play.

For some time now, public opinion on Guernsey had been reviewing its judgment of Clubin, that honest citizen who for so many years had been unanimously regarded with esteem. People were wondering about him, were beginning to have doubts; there were speculations both in his favor and against him. Unexpected bits of information had emerged. Clubin was beginning to appear more clearly: that is, to appear blacker.