The Toilers of the Sea (14 page)

VII

THE SAME GODFATHER AND THE SAME PATRON SAINT

After creating his steamship Lethierry had christened it. He had called it the Durande. Henceforth we shall call it by no other name. We may be permitted also, in spite of typographical practice, not to italicize the name
Durande,
in line with the notions of Mess Lethierry, for whom the Durande was almost a living person.

Durande and Déruchette are the same name. Déruchette is the diminutive—a diminutive that is very common in the west of France.

In country areas the saints frequently bear names with all their diminutives and all their augmentatives. You might think there were several different persons when in fact there is only one. These multiple identities of patron saints under different names are by no means rare. Lise, Lisette, Lisa, Élisa, Isabelle, Lisbeth, Betsy are all Elizabeth. It is probable that Mahout, Maclou, Malo, and Magloire are the same saint: this, however, we are less sure about.

Saint Durande is a saint of the Angoumois and Charente. Is she an authentic saint? We leave that to the Bollandists. Whether authentic or not, she has chapels dedicated to her.

When he was a young seaman at Rochefort, in Charente, Lethierry had made the acquaintance of this saint, probably in the person of some pretty local girl, perhaps the grisette with the fine nails. He remembered it sufficiently well to give this name to the two things he loved—Durande to the ship, Déruchette to the girl.

He was father of one and uncle of the other.

Déruchette was the daughter of a brother of his. She had lost her father and mother, and he had adopted her, replacing both the father and the mother.

Déruchette was not only his niece: she was his goddaughter. It was he who had held her in his arms at her christening and he who had chosen her patron saint, Durande, and her name, Déruchette.

Déruchette, as we have said, had been born in St. Peter Port. Her name was entered in the parish register under the date of her birth.

While the niece was small and the uncle poor, no one paid any particular attention to the name Déruchette; but when the child became a young lady and the seaman a gentleman, the name struck people as odd. They were astonished at Lethierry's choice. They asked him: “Why Déruchette?” He replied: “It's a name like any other.” Several attempts were made to change her name. He would have none of it. One day a fine lady of St. Sampson's high society, the wife of a well-to-do blacksmith who no longer worked, said to Mess Lethierry: “In the future I shall call your girl Nancy.” “Why not Lons-le-Saulnier?” he retorted.
¹⁰⁷
The fine lady did not give up, and on the following day returned to the attack, saying: “We really cannot have Déruchette. I have found a pretty name for her—Marianne.” “Certainly it is a pretty name,” rejoined Mess Lethierry, “but it is made up of two ugly creatures, a husband and a donkey.”
¹⁰⁸
So he held to the name Déruchette. It would be wrong to conclude from this last remark that he did not want to see his niece married. He wanted to have her married, but in the way he wanted. He wanted her to have a husband like himself, a hard worker whose wife would have little to do. He liked black hands in a man and white hands in a woman. To prevent Déruchette from spoiling her pretty hands, he had brought her up to be a young lady. He had given her a music teacher, a piano, a small library, and a work-basket with needles and thread. She liked reading better than sewing, and playing the piano better than reading. This was what Mess Lethierry wanted. To be charming was all that he expected of her. He had brought her up to be a flower rather than a woman. Anyone who is familiar with seamen will understand this. Rough characters like delicate ones. For the niece to realize the uncle's ideal, she had to be rich. This was Mess Lethierry's firm intention. His great maritime machine was working toward that end. He had made it Durande's mission to provide a dowry for Déruchette.

VIII

“BONNY DUNDEE”

Déruchette had the prettiest room in Les Bravées, with two windows, figured mahogany furniture, a bed with curtains in a white-and-green-check pattern, and a view of the garden and the high hill on which stands Vale Castle. On the far side of the hill was the Bû de la Rue.

In her room Déruchette had her music and her piano. She accompanied herself on the piano when she sang her favorite song, the melancholy Scottish air “Bonny Dundee.” All the gloom of evening is in the song, all the brightness of dawn was in her voice, making a pleasantly surprising contrast. People said: “Miss Déruchette is at her piano,” and as they passed by at the foot of the hill they would sometimes stop outside the garden wall to listen to this voice of such freshness singing a song of such sadness.

Déruchette was gaiety itself as she flitted about the house, creating a perpetual spring. She was beautiful, but more pretty than beautiful, and more sweet than pretty. She reminded the good old pilots who were Mess Lethierry's friends of the princess in a soldiers' and sailors' song—

Qui était si belle qu'elle passait pour telle
Dans le régiment.

Mess Lethierry used to say: “She has a cable of hair.”

She had been a charmer since her earliest days. There had been concern for many years about her nose, but the little girl—probably determined to be pretty—had held on her course. The process of growth had done her no harm; her nose had become neither too long or too short; and as she grew up she remained charming.

She always referred to her uncle as “my father.”

Lethierry allowed her to develop some skill as a gardener and even as a housewife. She personally watered her beds of hollyhocks, purple mulleins, perennial phlox, and scarlet herb bennet; she grew pink hawk's-beard and pink oxalis; and took full advantage of the Guernsey climate, so hospitable to flowers. Like everyone else, she had aloes growing in the open, and—what is much more difficult—she successfully grew Nepalese cranesbill. Her little kitchen garden was well organized; she had spinach in succession to radishes and peas in succession to spinach; she sowed Dutch cauliflowers and brussels sprouts, planting them out in July, turnips for August, curly endive for September, round parsnips for the autumn, and rampion for the winter. Mess Lethierry did not interfere with these activities, provided that she did not do too much digging or raking and, above all, that she did not apply the fertilizer herself. He had given her two maids, one called Grace and the other Douce—common Guernsey names. They worked in the garden as well as in the house, and were allowed to have red hands.

Mess Lethierry's bedroom was a small room looking onto the harbor and adjoining the large low room on the ground floor in which were the main doorway of the house and its various staircases. In this room were his hammock, his chronometer, and his pipe. There were also a table and a chair. The ceiling, with exposed beams, was whitewashed, as were the four walls. Nailed to the wall on the right of the door was the Archipelago of the Channel, a handsome chart bearing the inscription W. FADEN, 5 CHARING CROSS. GEOGRAPHER TO HIS MAJESTY. To the left of the door, also suspended on nails, was one of those large cotton handkerchiefs displaying in color the naval signals used all over the globe, with the flags of France, Russia, Spain, and the United States in the four corners and the Union Jack of England in the center.

Douce and Grace were two quite ordinary girls, in the best sense of the term. Douce was not ill natured and Grace was not plain. The dangerous names they bore had not brought them to any harm. Douce was not married but had a “gallant”: the term is used in the Channel Islands, and the thing exists. The two girls provided what might be called a Creole type of service, with a slowness characteristic of Norman domesticity in the archipelago. Grace, a pretty and coquettish girl, kept scanning the horizon with the watchfulness of a cat: like Douce, she had a gallant, but also, it was said, a husband, a seaman whose return she dreaded. But that is none of our business. The difference between Grace and Douce was that, in a house less austere and less innocent, Douce would have remained a servant and Grace would have become a soubrette. Grace's potential talents were lost on an ingenuous girl like Déruchette. In any case, the love affairs of Douce and Grace were kept secret. Mess Lethierry knew nothing of them, and no word of them had reached Déruchette.

The room on the ground floor, a spacious hall with a fireplace and benches and tables around the walls, had been the meeting place in the last century of a conventicle of French Protestant refugees. The only form of decoration on the bare stone walls was a frame of black wood displaying a parchment notice recording the achievements of Bénigne Bossuet, bishop of Meaux, which some poor Protestant refugees from the diocese of this ecclesiastical eagle, who had been persecuted by him after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and had found refuge on Guernsey, had hung up to bear witness to their trials. On this you might read, if you could decipher the awkward writing and the yellowed ink, the following little known facts: “October 29, 1685, demolition of the Protestant churches of Morcef and Nanteuil on the orders of the king at the request of the bishop of Meaux.”—“April 2, 1686, arrest of the Cochards, father and son, on account of their religion, at the request of the bishop of Meaux. Released, the Cochards having abjured their faith.”—“October 28, 1699, the bishop of Meaux sends Monsieur de Pontchartrain a memorandum advising him that it would be necessary to consign the Demoiselles de Chalandes and de Neuville, who are of the reformed religion, to the house of the New Catholics in Paris.”—“July 7, 1703, execution of the king's order, at the request of the bishop of Meaux, to have the individual named Baudouin and his wife, bad Catholics of Fublaine, confined in a hospital.” At the far end of the room, near the door into Mess Lethierry's bedroom, was a small wooden structure that had been the Huguenot pulpit and with the addition of a grille with an opening in it had become the office of the steamship company; that is, the office of the Durande, manned by Mess Lethierry in person. On the old oak reading-desk, replacing the Bible, was a ledger with pages headed “Debit” and “Credit.”

IX

THE MAN WHO HAD SEEN THROUGH RANTAINE

As long as Mess Lethierry had been able to sail, he had commanded the Durande and had no other pilot or captain than himself. But, as we have said, a time had come when he had to find someone to replace him. He had chosen Sieur Clubin of Torteval, a man of few words who was reputed along the whole coast for his absolute integrity. He had now become Lethierry's alter ego and deputy.

Although Sieur Clubin looked more like a lawyer than a mariner, he was an excellent and very competent seaman. He had all the skills necessary to deal with the risks of seafaring and come safely through. He was a good stevedore, a meticulous topman, a careful and knowledgeable boatswain, a sturdy helmsman, a skilled pilot, and a bold captain. He was prudent, and sometimes carried prudence so far as to be daring, which is a great quality at sea. His fear of what was probable was tempered by his instinct for what was possible. He was one of those seamen who face danger in a proportion known to them and are able to wrest success from any adventure. He had all the certainty that the sea allows to any man.

On top of all this Sieur Clubin was a renowned swimmer; he was one of those men who are at home in the gymnastics of the waves, who can stay in the water as long as they wish, and who, on Jersey, set out from the Havre des Pas, round the Collette, continue past the Hermitage Rock and Elizabeth Castle, and return to their starting point after a two-hour swim. He came from Torteval, and was reputed to have swum several times through the dangerous waters between the Hanois and Pleinmont Point.

One of the things that had most strongly recommended him to Mess Lethierry was that, knowing or discovering what Rantaine was like, he had warned Lethierry about his dishonesty, saying, “Rantaine will rob you.” And so it had turned out. More than once, though admittedly in matters of no great importance, Mess Lethierry had tested Sieur Clubin's own scrupulous honesty, and he now relied on him in his retirement. He used to say: “An honest man should be given your full confidence.”

X

A MARINER'S TALES

Mess Lethierry always wore his seagoing clothes—he would have been uncomfortable in anything else—and preferred his seaman's pea jacket to his pilot's jacket. Déruchette wrinkled her little nose at this. Nothing is more charming than the face a pretty woman makes when she is displeased. She would scold him, laughing. “Father,” she would say, “Ugh! You smell of tar,” and she would give him a little tap on his broad shoulder.

This good old hero of the sea had brought back some surprising tales from his voyages. In Madagascar he had seen birds' feathers so large that only three were needed to roof a house. In India he had seen sorrel growing nine feet high. In New Holland he had seen flocks of turkeys and geese rounded up and guarded by a sheepdog in the form of a bird known as the agami. He had seen elephant graveyards. In Africa he had seen gorillas—half men, half tigers—seven feet tall. He knew the ways of all kinds of monkeys, from the wild macaque, which he called
macaco bravo,
to the howling macaque, which he called
macaco
barbado.
In Chile he had seen a female monkey softening the hearts of her hunters by showing them her young one. In California he had seen the hollow trunk of a fallen tree through which a horseman could ride a distance of 150 paces. In Morocco he had seen Mozabites and Biskris fighting with clubs and iron bars—the Biskris because they had been called
kelb,
which means dogs, and the Mozabites because they had been called
khamsi,
which means people of the fifth sect. In China he had seen a pirate named Chanhthong-quan-larh-Quoi being cut into pieces for murdering the âp of a village. At Thu-dan-mot he had seen a lion carrying off an old woman from the middle of the town market. He had watched the arrival in Saigon of the great serpent from Canton to take part in the celebrations of the festival of Quan-nam, goddess of seamen, in the Cho-len pagoda. Among the Moi he had seen the great Quan-Sû. In Rio de Janeiro he had seen Brazilian ladies putting little balls of gauze in their hair in the evening, each containing a
vagalumes,
a beautiful firefly, so as to give them a headdress of stars. In Uruguay he had fought with anthills, and in Paraguay with bird spiders, hairy creatures the size of a child's head, covering a diameter of a third of an ell with their feet, and attacking men by firing bristles that pierce their skin like arrows and raise blisters. On the river Arinos, a tributary of the Tocantins, in the virgin forests to the north of Diamantina, he had encountered the fearsome bat men, the
murdagos,
who are born with white hair and red eyes, who live in the gloom of the woods, sleeping by day, waking at night, and fishing and hunting in the darkness, seeing better when there is no moon. Near Beirut, in the encampment of an expedition in which he had taken part, after a rain gauge was stolen from a tent, a witch doctor wearing only a few strips of leather, and looking like a man clad in his braces, had rung a bell attached to a horn with such vigor that a hyena had brought back the rain gauge. The hyena had been the thief. These true stories were so like romantic tales that they amused Déruchette.

The figurehead of the Durande was the link between the ship and the girl. In the Channel Islands the figurehead is called the
poupée,
the doll. Hence the local expression that means “being at sea,”
être entre
poupe et poupée
(“being between the poop and the puppet”).

The Durande's figurehead was particularly dear to Mess Lethierry. He had had it made by a carpenter to resemble Déruchette. The resemblance was achieved with strokes of an ax. It was a block of wood trying to be a pretty girl.

Mess Lethierry saw this slightly misshapen block of wood with the eyes of illusion. He looked on it with the reverence of a believer. He sincerely believed that it was a perfect likeness of Déruchette—in much the same way as a dogma resembles a truth and an idol resembles God.

Mess Lethierry had two great joys during the week, one on Tuesday and the other on Friday. The first joy was seeing the Durande leaving harbor; the second, seeing it return. He leaned on his windowsill, looked on what he had created, and was content. It was something like the verse in Genesis, Et vidit quod esset bonum.
¹⁰⁹

On Friday the sight of Mess Lethierry at his window was as good as a signal. When people saw him lighting his pipe at the window of Les Bravées they said, “Ah! The steamship is on the horizon.” One puff of smoke heralded another.

Entering the harbor, the Durande tied up to a large ring in the basement of Les Bravées, under Mess Lethierry's windows. On the nights after the vessel's return Lethierry slept soundly in his hammock, knowing that on one side Déruchette was asleep and on the other Durande was moored.

The Durande's mooring was close to the harbor bell. Here, too, in front of the entrance to Les Bravées, was a short stretch of quay.

This quay, Les Bravées, the house and garden, the lanes lined by hedges, and most of the surrounding houses are no longer there. The working of Guernsey's granite has led to the sale of the land in this area, and the whole site is now occupied by stone breakers' yards.