The Toilers of the Sea (12 page)

I

CHATTER AND SMOKE

The human body is perhaps nothing more than an appearance. It conceals our reality. It solidifies over the light and shadow of our life. The reality is the soul. In absolute terms, our face is a mask. The real man is what exists under the man. If we were able to perceive that man crouching, sheltered, behind that illusion that we call the flesh, we should have many a surprise. The common error is to take the external being for the real one. Some girl we know, for example, if we were to see her as she really is, would appear in the form of a bird. A bird in the form of a girl: what could be more exquisite? Just imagine that you have one in your own home. Take, for example, Déruchette. What a charming creature! One would be tempted to say to her, “Good morning, Mademoiselle Wagtail!” You do not see her wings, but you hear her twittering. Now and then she sings. In her chattering she is below mankind; in her singing she is above it. There is a mystery in this singing; a virgin is the mortal habiliment of an angel. When she develops into a woman the angel departs; but later it returns, bringing back a small soul to the mother. While waiting for life to begin, she who will one day be a mother long remains a child; the little girl continues to exist within the young woman, and now she is a warbler. Looking at her, we think, How good of her not to fly away! This sweet familiar being moves freely about the house, from branch to branch—that is to say, from room to room—going in and out, drawing nearer and then retreating, preening her feathers or combing her hair, making all kinds of delicate little noises, murmuring ineffable things in your ears. She asks questions, and you reply; you ask her something in return, and she twitters a reply. You chat with her: chatting is a form of relaxation after serious talk. This creature has something of the sky within her. She is a blue thought mingling with your black thought. You are grateful to her for being so light, so fleeting, so evasive, so ungraspable, and for her kindness in not being invisible, when she could, it seems, be impalpable. In this world of ours, beauty is a necessity. There are few functions on earth more important than this: simply being charming. The forest would be in despair without the hummingbird. To shed joy around, to radiate happiness, to emit light amid dark things, to be the gilding on our destiny, to be harmony and grace and kindness: is not this to render a service? Beauty does me good merely by being beautiful. Occasionally we meet with someone who has this fairylike power of enchanting all around her. Sometimes she is not aware of it herself, and this makes her power all the more sovereign. Her presence lights up her surroundings; her nearness is warming. She passes on her way, and we are content; she stays, and we are happy. Merely to look at her is to feel alive; she is like the dawn with a human face. She need merely be there to make an Eden of the house; she exudes Paradise from every pore; and she distributes this ecstasy to all by doing nothing more than breathing in their presence. To have a smile that somehow lessens the weight of the enormous chain dragged behind them by all living beings in common—what else can we call it but divine? Déruchette had such a smile; indeed we might rather say that Déruchette
was
that smile. If there is one thing that has more resemblance to us than our face, it is the look on our face; and if there is one thing that has more resemblance to us than the look on our face, it is our smile. Déruchette smiling was simply Déruchette.

There is something particularly attractive about the blood of Jersey and Guernsey. The women, particularly the young girls, have a blooming and unaffected beauty, a Saxon fairness and a Norman freshness combined. Rosy cheeks and blue eyes. But the eyes lack brilliancy: English education dulls them. These limpid eyes will be irresistible when they acquire the depth of Parisiennes' eyes. Paris, fortunately, has not yet made its way among Englishwomen. Déruchette was not a Parisienne, but she was not really a Guernsey girl either. She had been born in St. Peter Port, but she had been brought up by Mess Lethierry. He had brought her up to be dainty and pretty; and so she was.

Déruchette had an indolent and an unwittingly aggressive glance. She perhaps did not know the meaning of the word
love,
but she liked people to fall in love with her. But she had no ulterior motive. She was not thinking of marriage. An old French nobleman, an émigré who had settled in St. Sampson, used to say: “That girl is flirting with powder.”
⁹⁵

Déruchette had the prettiest little hands in the world and feet to match her hands—“four fly's feet,” Mess Lethierry used to say. In person she was all sweetness and goodness; for her family and fortune she had Mess Lethierry, her uncle; for occupation she had the living of her life, for accomplishments a few songs, for learning her beauty, for intelligence her innocence, for heart her ignorance. She had the graceful indolence of a Creole, mingled with thoughtlessness and vivacity, the teasing gaiety of childhood with a leaning toward melancholy. She dressed elegantly but in a rather insular fashion that would not have been regarded as correct on the mainland, with flowers on her bonnet all year round. She had an open forehead, a simple and tempting neck, chestnut hair, a fair skin with a few freckles in summer, a wide, healthy mouth, and on that mouth the adorable and dangerous brightness of her smile. Such was Déruchette.

Sometimes in the evening, after sunset, when night mingles with the sea and twilight invests the waves with a kind of terror, there could be seen entering the harbor of St. Sampson, menacingly churning up the water, a shapeless mass, a monstrous form that whistled and spluttered, a hideous thing that roared like a wild beast and smoked like a volcano, a kind of hydra slavering in the foam and trailing a wake of fog, hurtling toward the town with a fearful beating of its fins and a maw belching forth flames. This was Durande.

II

THE ETERNAL HISTORY OF UTOPIA

A steamship was a prodigious novelty in the waters of the Channel in 182–. For many years it caused alarm along the whole coast of Normandy. Nowadays ten or twelve steamers sail across the horizon in both directions and no one pays any attention to them. At the most some knowledgeable observer may watch them for a moment to make out from the color of their smoke whether they are burning Welsh coal or Newcastle coal. They pass on their way: that is all. “Welcome” to them if they are coming in; “Bon voyage” if they are outward bound.

People did not accept these new inventions so calmly in the first quarter of this century, and these vessels with their smoke were particularly disliked by the Channel Islanders. In this puritanical archipelago, where the queen of England has been accused of violating the Bible by giving birth with the help of chloroform,
⁹⁶
the steamship immediately became known as the devil boat. To the worthy fishermen of those days—formerly Catholics, now Calvinists, but always bigots—it was seen as hell afloat. A local preacher took as his text, “Is it right to let water and fire, which were divided by God, work together?”
⁹⁷
Did not this beast of fire and iron resemble Leviathan? Were we not re-creating Chaos on a human scale? This was not the first time that the advance of progress had been called a return to chaos.

“A mad idea—a gross error—an absurdity!” Such had been the verdict of the Academy of Sciences when consulted by Napoleon at the beginning of this century on the subject of steamboats; and the fishermen of St. Sampson can be excused for being no wiser in scientific matters than the mathematicians of Paris. In religious matters, too, a small island like Guernsey cannot be expected to be more enlightened than a great continent like America. In 1807, when Fulton's first boat, equipped with one of Watt's engines imported from England, captained by Livingston and manned by two Frenchmen, André Michaux and another, in addition to the crew—when this first steamship made its maiden voyage from New York to Albany it chanced to be the seventeenth of August: whereupon the Methodists gave voice and in every chapel preachers denounced this machine, declaring that the number seventeen was the sum of the ten horns and the seven heads of the beast of the Apocalypse. In America they invoked the beast of the Apocalypse against the steamship, in Europe the beast of Genesis: that was the only difference.

Learned men had rejected the steamship as impossible; the priests for their part rejected it as impious. Science had condemned it; religion damned it. Fulton was a variant of Lucifer. The simple people of the coasts and the countryside joined in this reprobation because of the uneasiness they felt at the sight of this novelty. Faced with the steamship, the religious point of view was that there was a division between water and fire, a division ordained by God. Man must not separate what God has joined; and must not join what He has disjoined. The countryfolk's point of view was: “I'm afraid of it.”

No one, at that remote period, was daring enough for such an enterprise—a steamship sailing between Guernsey and Saint-Malo—except Mess Lethierry. He alone, as an independent thinker, was able to conceive the plan and, as a hardy seaman, to carry it out. The French part of his nature had the idea; the English part put it into execution.

How and when this was, we shall now explain.

III

RANTAINE

Some forty years before the events we have been relating there stood in the suburbs of Paris, near the city wall, between the Fosse-aux-Loups and the Tombe Issoire, a house of very dubious reputation. It was an isolated, tumbledown hovel, a likely setting for dark deeds. Here lived, with his wife and child, a kind of urban bandit who had once been clerk to a public prosecutor at the Châtelet and had then become a thief in real earnest, later appearing before the assize court. The name of this family was Rantaine. On a mahogany chest of drawers in their house stood two porcelain cups decorated with flower patterns; on one of them, in gilt letters, were the words A SOUVENIR OF FRIENDSHIP, on the other IN TOKEN OF ESTEEM. The child lived in this miserable home side by side with crime. Since the father and mother had once belonged to the semimiddle class, the child was learning to read; he was being properly brought up. The mother, pale-faced and almost in rags, was mechanically giving her son an “education,” teaching him to spell, and interrupting his lessons from time to time to help her husband in some criminal enterprise or to prostitute herself to some passerby. While she was away
La Croix-de-Jésus
98 lay on the table, open at the place where she had stopped; the boy sat beside it, day-dreaming.

The father and mother, caught red-handed in some crime, disappeared into the night of the penal system. The child, too, disappeared.

Lethierry, in the course of his travels, encountered an adventurer like himself, helped him out of some awkward predicament or other, was of service to him, as a result felt grateful to him, took a liking to him, picked him up and brought him to Guernsey, found him quick to learn the coastal shipping trade and made him his partner. This was the Rantaine boy, now grown up.

Rantaine, like Lethierry, had a bull neck, a powerful breadth of shoulders for carrying burdens, and the loins of the Farnese Hercules. Lethierry and he had the same bearing and the same sturdy build; Rantaine was taller. Anyone who saw them from behind, walking side by side in the harbor, would take them for two brothers. From the front it was quite different. Whereas Lethierry was all openness, Rantaine was reserved and impenetrable. He was circumspect. He was an expert swordsman, played the harmonica, could snuff a candle with a bullet at twenty paces, had a tremendous punch, could recite verses from Voltaire's
Henriade
and interpret dreams. He knew Treneuil's “Les Tombeaux de Saint-Denis” by heart. He talked of having been a friend of the sultan of Calicut, “whom the Portuguese call the Zamorin.” If you had been able to look through the little diary he carried you would have found among his memoranda notes such as this: “At Lyons, in a crack in the wall of one of the cells in the Saint-Joseph prison, there is a file.” He spoke slowly and deliberately. He claimed to be the son of a knight of the Order of St. Louis. His linen did not match and was marked with different initials. No one was more touchy than he on a point of honor: he was ever ready to fight and kill his man. His eye had something of the watchfulness of an actress's mother.

A powerful body housing a crafty mind: that was Rantaine.

It was the beauty of his punch, applied to a cabeza de moro
⁹⁹
at a fair, that had originally won Lethierry's heart.

No one on Guernsey knew anything of his adventures. They were varied and colorful. If men's destinies have a wardrobe, Raintaine's destiny would have worn the garb of a harlequin. He had seen the world and had seen life. He had circumnavigated the globe. He had run through a whole gamut of trades. He had been a cook in Madagascar, a breeder of birds on Sumatra, a general in Honolulu, a religious journalist in the Galapagos Islands, a poet at Oomrawuttee,
¹⁰⁰
a freemason in Haiti. In this last capacity he had delivered a funeral oration at Grand-Gôave, of which the local newspapers have preserved this fragment: “Farewell, then, noble spirit! In the azure vault of the heavens whither you now take flight you will no doubt meet the good Abbé Léandre Crameau of Petit-Gôave. Tell him that, thanks to ten years of glorious effort, you have completed the church at L'Anse-à-Veau. Farewell, transcendent genius, model mas∴!” As can be seen, his freemason's mask did not prevent him from wearing a Catholic false nose. The former won over the men of progress, the latter the men of order. He declared himself pure-bred white, and hated the blacks; but he would undoubtedly have admired Soulouque. At Bordeaux, in 1815, he had been a Verdet. At that period the vapors of his royalism emerged from his brow like an immense white plume.
¹⁰¹
His whole life had been a series of eclipses—appearing, disappearing, reappearing. He was a rogue fitted with a revolving light. He knew Turkish; and instead of “guillotined” he said
neboissed.
He had been the slave of a thaleb,
¹⁰²
and had learned Turkish by dint of regular beatings. His employment had been to stand at the doors of mosques in the evening and read aloud to the faithful passages of the Koran written on wooden tablets or camels' shoulder blades. He was probably a renegade.

He was capable of anything, and of worse than that.

He had a way of laughing out loud and frowning at the same time. He used to say: “In politics I esteem only those who cannot be influenced by others.” He would say: “I am for decency and morality.” He would say: “The pyramid must be set back on its base.” His manner was cheerful and cordial rather than otherwise. The form of his mouth gave the lie to the meaning of his words. His nostrils were like those of a horse. At the corners of his eyes there were networks of wrinkles where all kinds of dark thoughts congregated. It was only there that the secrets of his physiognomy could be deciphered. His crow's-feet were like a vulture's claws. His skull was low on the crown and wide at the temples. His misshapen ear, bristling with hair, seemed to say: “Beware of speaking to the beast in this cave.”

One fine day, on Guernsey, Rantaine was suddenly found to be missing.

Lethierry's partner had absconded, leaving the partnership's treasury empty. It had contained some of Rantaine's money, no doubt, but there were also fifty thousand francs of Lethierry's.

In forty years of industry and probity as a shipowner and shipwright Lethierry had made a hundred thousand francs. Rantaine had gone off with half of it.

Although half ruined, Lethierry did not lose heart and at once set out to restore his fortunes. A stout heart can be ruined in fortune but not in courage. At that time people were beginning to talk about boats driven by steam. Lethierry conceived the idea of trying out Fulton's engine, which had been the subject of so much controversy, and linking the Norman archipelago with France by a fire-driven vessel. He staked everything on his idea and devoted his remaining wealth to the project. Six months after Rantaine's flight the astonished people of St. Sampson saw, putting out to sea from the harbor, the first steamer to sail in the Channel, belching smoke and looking like a ship on fire at sea.

This vessel, attracting general dislike and disdain and immediately christened “Lethierry's galliot,” was advertised as being about to run a regular service between Guernsey and Saint-Malo.