The Toilers of the Sea (42 page)

A judicial enquiry had been carried out in Saint-Malo into the disappearance of coastguardsman No. 619; but the legal minds involved in the enquiry had got on to the wrong track, as not infrequently happens. They had adopted the theory that the coastguardsman had been impressed by Zuela and had sailed for Chile in the
Tamaulipas.
This ingenious hypothesis had led them into a series of aberrations. In their shortsightedness the investigators had taken no notice of Rantaine. But in the course of their work the magistrates in charge of the investigation had turned up other lines of enquiry. The affair, already obscure, had become still more complicated. Clubin had now entered into the enigma. A coincidence—a possible relationship—had been established between the departure of the
Tamaulipas
and the loss of the Durande. In the tavern at the Porte Dinan where Clubin thought he was not known he had been recognized; the landlord had talked, and revealed that Clubin had bought a bottle of brandy. Who was it for? The gunsmith of Rue Saint-Vincent had talked: Clubin had bought a revolver. For whom was it meant? The landlord of the Auberge Jean had talked: Clubin had been away from the inn on unknown business. Captain Gertrais-Gaboureau had talked: Clubin had been determined to set sail, though he had been warned and was well aware that he was likely to run into fog. The crew of the Durande had talked: the cargo had not been fully loaded and was badly stowed—carelessness that was understandable if the captain intended to wreck the ship. The passenger from Guernsey had talked: Clubin thought he had run aground on the Hanois. People in Torteval had talked: Clubin had been there a few days before the loss of the Durande and had gone off toward Pleinmont, near the Hanois. He had been carrying a traveling bag; he had left with it and returned without it. The bird's-nesters had talked: it seemed that their story might be connected with Clubin's disappearance, if the spirits they had seen were in fact smugglers. Finally, the haunted house at Pleinmont had talked: some inquisitive locals had climbed into it and discovered Clubin's traveling bag. The authorities at Torteval had taken possession of the bag and opened it: it contained food, a telescope, a chronometer, and a man's clothing and underwear marked with Clubin's initials. All this, in the gossip of Saint-Malo and Guernsey, seemed to build up into what looked like fraud. Obscure features were brought together: an unusual disregard of advice, an acceptance of the hazards of fog, a suspicious carelessness in the stowage of cargo, a bottle of brandy, a drunk helmsman, the replacement of the helmsman by the captain, a touch on the rudder that, to say the least, was unskillful. Clubin's heroism in staying on the wreck was now seen as villainy. It seemed that he had made for the wrong reef. Granted an intention to wreck the Durande, it was easy to understand the choice of the Hanois, within swimming distance of the coast, with the haunted house as a place to stay while waiting for the chance to flee. The traveling bag, held ready for that eventuality, completed the demonstration. The link between this adventure and that other adventure, the case of the missing coastguardsman, was not clear. There seemed to be some correlation between the two, but no more than that. The disappearance of coastguardsman No. 619 suggested some tragic drama. Clubin might have had no part in it, but he was at any rate to be seen in the wings.

Nevertheless, fraud on Clubin's part did not explain everything. There was the matter of the revolver that did not appear to have been used. Probably it belonged to the other affair. Popular feeling is shrewd and accurate. People's instinct excels in reconstructing the truth from bits and pieces of information. But in these various facts, which seemed to point to an act of fraud, there were grave uncertainties. Everything fit together, and the facts were in agreement; but an explanation for them was still lacking.

You do not wreck a ship merely for the pleasure of wrecking it. You do not run all the hazards of fog, going aground on a reef, swimming, seeking refuge and then flight without some good reason. What had been Clubin's reason?

It was possible to understand what he had done, but not why he had done it. This gave rise to doubts in many minds. Where there is no motive for an action there seems to be no action to account for.

This had been a grave lacuna; but the missing link was now supplied by Rantaine's letter. It provided Clubin's motive: the theft of seventyfive thousand francs.

Rantaine was the deus ex machina, descending from the clouds with a candle in his hand. His letter threw the final ray of light on the affair. It explained everything, and in addition it provided another witness in the person of Ahier-Tostevin. The decisive fact was that it explained the use of the revolver. Raintaine evidently knew about the whole business, and his letter made everything clear.

Clubin's villainy was now beyond doubt. He had premeditated the wreck of the Durande, as was proved by the supplies he had deposited in the haunted house. And even supposing him to be innocent of this and accepting that the loss of the Durande was an accident, should he not, having decided at the last moment to remain with the wreck, have handed over the seventy-five thousand francs for Mess Lethierry to the men seeking safety in the ship's boat? The case was proved. But what had become of Clubin? He had probably fallen victim to his mistake: no doubt he had perished on the Douvres reef.

This structure of surmises—all, as we have seen, in agreement with reality—had for several days occupied Mess Lethierry's mind. Rantaine's letter did him a service in forcing him to think. He was at first shaken by his surprise, but soon made the effort of reflecting on the matter. He made the still more difficult effort of seeking further information. He was induced to listen to conversations and even to seek them. By the end of a week he had to some extent returned to practical life; his mind had recovered some of its consistency. He had emerged from his confused state.

If Mess Lethierry had retained any hope of recovering his money from Rantaine, that hope was now totally destroyed by Rantaine's letter. It added to the catastrophe of the Durande this further shipwreck of seventy-five thousand francs. It brought the money only sufficiently within his reach for him to feel its loss. The letter revealed to him the full extent of his ruin.

This was a source of fresh and very painful suffering, as we have just noted. He began to take an interest in his household, in what was to become of it, in what changes needed to be made: matters of which he had taken no heed over the past two months. These trifling cares wounded him with a thousand tiny points, almost harder to bear than his previous despair. It is terrible to suffer your misfortune bit by bit, to dispute possession, foot by foot, of the ground that it is trying to gain. Misfortune in its totality can be borne, but not the dust it scatters. Taken as a whole it overwhelmed you; in detail it tortures you. A little while ago it knocked you out: now it nags at you. Humiliation now aggravates the blow. It is a second annihilation added to the first, and a bitter one. You drop down a further stage into nothingness. Instead of a shroud you now wear rags.

There is no sadder thought than that of coming down in the world. Being ruined seems relatively simple. You suffer a violent blow, and recognize the brutality of fate; it is complete and total catastrophe. So be it: you accept it. Everything is over. You are ruined. Very well, then: you are dead. But no, you are not. You are alive. And at once you become aware of this. How? By a series of pinpricks. You meet someone, and he cuts you; tradesmen's bills rain down on you; you see one of your enemies laughing. He may be laughing at Arnal's
²⁰⁸
latest pun, but no matter: he enjoys the pun so much only because you are ruined. You read your degradation even in looks of indifference; people who used to dine in your house think it is extravagant of you to serve three courses; your deficiencies are evident to all the world; ingratitude, having nothing further to expect, proclaims itself openly; every fool of your acquaintance had foreseen what has happened to you. The malignant pull you to pieces; others, still worse, pity you. And then come a hundred petty details. Nausea gives place to tears. You used to drink wine: now you will only have cider. Two servants, too! Why, one will be too many. You will have to get rid of one and overwork the other. There are too many flowers in the garden: in the future you will have to plant vegetables. You used to give presents of fruit to your friends: in the future you will send it to be sold in the market. And there can now be no question of helping the poor: are you not poor yourself? There is, too, the painful question of dress. What a torment to deprive a woman of a ribbon! She gives you beauty: how can you refuse her some trinket? You will seem such a skinflint! She will perhaps say: “What! Rob my garden of its flowers, and now you want to take them off my bonnet as well!” Alas, too, to condemn her to wearing shabby old dresses! There is no conversation around the family table; you imagine that they resent your behavior. Beloved faces show their anxiety. This is what it means to come down in the world. Every day you die a fresh death. To be struck down is the blast of a furnace: to come down in the world is torture over a slow fire.

Total ruin is like Waterloo; slow decline is St. Helena. Fate in the person of Wellington still retains some dignity; but how wretched when it takes the form of Hudson Lowe!
²⁰⁹
Destiny becomes a dastard. We see the man who negotiated the treaty of Campo Formio
²¹⁰
reduced to haggling over a pair of silk stockings. This diminution of Napoleon had diminished Britain.

A ruined man goes through both of these phases, Waterloo and St. Helena, reduced to the scale of everyday life.

On the day we have mentioned, an evening in early May, Lethierry had gone to bed in a gloomier mood than usual, leaving Déruchette walking in the garden in the moonlight. He was turning over in his mind all these petty and disagreeable details associated with the loss of fortune, all these petty cares, which at first are merely trifling and end up by being lugubrious: a melancholy burden of miseries. Mess Lethierry felt that his fall was irremediable. What was he going to do? What was to become of him? What sacrifices was he going to have to impose on Déruchette? Which of the two maids would he have to dismiss, Douce or Grace? Should he sell Les Bravées? Would he not be reduced to leaving the island? To be nothing where he had been everything was an unendurable decline.

And so it was all over! To think of those crossings between France and the archipelago, the departure on Tuesday, the return on Friday, the crowd on the quay, those heavy cargoes, that industry, that prosperity, those proud direct sailings, that machinery embodying the human will, that all-powerful boiler, that smoke, that reality! The steamship is the necessary counterpart of the compass: the compass shows the right course, the steamship follows it. One proposes, the other does what is required. Where was she, his Durande, that magnificent and sovereign Durande, that mistress of the sea, that queen who made him a king? To have been in his own country the man of an idea, the man who had achieved success, the man who had carried out a revolution—and then to give it all up, to abdicate! To cease to exist! To become a laughingstock! To be an empty sack, a sack that had once been full! To be the past where you have been the future! To suffer the condescending pity of fools! To see the triumph of routine, obstinacy, the humdrum, egotism, and ignorance! To see again the old sailing cutters, relics of the dark ages, tossing on the waves as they sailed to and fro! To see such outdated ways taking on a new lease of life! To have wasted the whole of his own life! To have been a light, and now to suffer eclipse! Ah! What a fine sight it was, that proud funnel, that prodigious cylinder, that pillar with its capital of smoke, that column that was greater than the Vendôme Column,
²¹¹
for on one there is only a man, while on the other there is progress. It had vanquished the ocean: it represented certainty in the open sea. It had been seen on this little island, in this little harbor, in this little town of St. Sampson: it had been seen, but now it was to be seen no more!

Lethierry was tortured by this obsession with regrets. We can sob even in thought. Never, perhaps, had he more bitterly felt his loss. Acute suffering of this kind is followed by a certain numbness; and under the weight of his sorrow he dozed off.

He remained with his eyes closed for some two hours, sleeping a little, meditating for much of the time. Such a state of torpor overlies a continuing activity of the brain that is very fatiguing. About the middle of the night, around midnight—a little before or a little after—he shook off his lethargy. He awoke, opened his eyes, and, looking out of the window, which was immediately opposite his hammock, saw an extraordinary sight.

Outside the window was a shape. An unbelievable shape. The funnel of a steamship.

Mess Lethierry sat bolt upright. His hammock oscillated like a swing shaken by a storm. He looked out. In the window was a vision. The harbor, gleaming in the moonlight, was framed in the window-panes, and against this light background there stood out, quite close to the window, a proud silhouette, straight, black, and round. It was the exhaust pipe of a steam engine.

Lethierry sprang down from his hammock, ran to the window, raised the sash, leaned out, and saw what it was: the funnel of the Durande. It was back in its old place. Its four chains held it fast to the planking of a boat, within which, lower down, was a dark mass of complicated shape.

Lethierry turned away, with his back to the window, and sat down in his hammock. Then he turned around, and saw the vision again.

A moment later, with the speed of lightning, he was out on the quay with a lantern in his hand.

Made fast to the Durande's old mooring ring was a boat in which, toward the stern, was a bulky object from which there emerged the erect funnel he had seen in front of the window. The forward part of the boat continued beyond the corner of the house, just above the level of the quay. There was no one in the boat. The boat had very distinctive lines that anyone on Guernsey would have recognized. It was the paunch.