CHAPTER II.
OUR FIRST ROUGH SKETCHES FILLED IN.
While the hooker was in the gulf of Portland, there was but little seaon; the ocean, if gloomy, was almost still, and the sky was yet clear.The wind took little effect on the vessel; the hooker hugged the cliffas closely as possible; it served as a screen to her.
There were ten on board the little Biscayan felucca--three men in crew,and seven passengers, of whom two were women. In the light of the opensea (which broadens twilight into day) all the figures on board wereclearly visible. Besides they were not hiding now--they were all atease; each one reassumed his freedom of manner, spoke in his own note,showed his face; departure was to them a deliverance.
The motley nature of the group shone out. The women were of no age. Awandering life produces premature old age, and indigence is made up ofwrinkles. One of them was a Basque of the Dry-ports. The other, with thelarge rosary, was an Irishwoman. They wore that air of indifferencecommon to the wretched. They had squatted down close to each other whenthey got on board, on chests at the foot of the mast. They talked toeach other. Irish and Basque are, as we have said, kindred languages.The Basque woman's hair was scented with onions and basil. The skipperof the hooker was a Basque of Guipuzcoa. One sailor was a Basque of thenorthern slope of the Pyrenees, the other was of the southernslope--that is to say, they were of the same nation, although the firstwas French and the latter Spanish. The Basques recognize no officialcountry. _Mi madre se llama Montana_, my mother is called the mountain,as Zalareus, the muleteer, used to say. Of the five men who were withthe two women, one was a Frenchman of Languedoc, one a Frenchman ofProvence, one a Genoese; one, an old man, he who wore the sombrerowithout a hole for a pipe, appeared to be a German. The fifth, thechief, was a Basque of the Landes from Biscarrosse. It was he who, justas the child was going on board the hooker, had, with a kick of hisheel, cast the plank into the sea. This man, robust, agile, sudden inmovement, covered, as may be remembered, with trimmings, slashings, andglistening tinsel, could not keep in his place; he stooped down, roseup, and continually passed to and fro from one end of the vessel to theother, as if debating uneasily on what had been done and what was goingto happen.
This chief of the band, the captain and the two men of the crew, allfour Basques, spoke sometimes Basque, sometimes Spanish, sometimesFrench--these three languages being common on both slopes of thePyrenees. But generally speaking, excepting the women, all talkedsomething like French, which was the foundation of their slang. TheFrench language about this period began to be chosen by the peoples assomething intermediate between the excess of consonants in the north andthe excess of vowels in the south. In Europe, French was the language ofcommerce, and also of felony. It will be remembered that Gibby, a Londonthief, understood Cartouche.
The hooker, a fine sailer, was making quick way; still, ten persons,besides their baggage, were a heavy cargo for one of such light draught.
The fact of the vessel's aiding the escape of a band did not necessarilyimply that the crew were accomplices. It was sufficient that the captainof the vessel was a Vascongado, and that the chief of the band wasanother. Among that race mutual assistance is a duty which admits of noexception. A Basque, as we have said, is neither Spanish nor French; heis Basque, and always and everywhere he must succour a Basque. Such isPyrenean fraternity.
All the time the hooker was in the gulf, the sky, although threatening,did not frown enough to cause the fugitives any uneasiness. They wereflying, they were escaping, they were brutally gay. One laughed, anothersang; the laugh was dry but free, the song was low but careless.
The Languedocian cried, "_Caoucagno!_" "_Cocagne_" expresses the highestpitch of satisfaction in Narbonne. He was a longshore sailor, a nativeof the waterside village of Gruissan, on the southern side of theClappe, a bargeman rather than a mariner, but accustomed to work thereaches of the inlet of Bages, and to draw the drag-net full of fishover the salt sands of St. Lucie. He was of the race who wear a red cap,make complicated signs of the cross after the Spanish fashion, drinkwine out of goat-skins, eat scraped ham, kneel down to blaspheme, andimplore their patron saint with threats--"Great saint, grant me what Iask, or I'll throw a stone at thy head, _ou te feg un pic_." He mightbe, at need, a useful addition to the crew.
The Provencal in the caboose was blowing up a turf fire under aniron pot, and making broth. The broth was a kind of puchero, in whichfish took the place of meat, and into which the Provencal threwchick peas, little bits of bacon cut in squares, and pods of redpimento--concessions made by the eaters of _bouillabaisse_ to theeaters of _olla podrida_. One of the bags of provisions was beside himunpacked. He had lighted over his head an iron lantern, glazed withtalc, which swung on a hook from the ceiling. By its side, on anotherhook, swung the weather-cock halcyon. There was a popular belief inthose days that a dead halcyon, hung by the beak, always turned itsbreast to the quarter whence the wind was blowing. While he made thebroth, the Provencal put the neck of a gourd into his mouth, and now andthen swallowed a draught of aguardiente. It was one of those gourdscovered with wicker, broad and flat, with handles, which used to be hungto the side by a strap, and which were then called hip-gourds. Betweeneach gulp he mumbled one of those country songs of which the subject isnothing at all: a hollow road, a hedge; you see in the meadow, through agap in the bushes, the shadow of a horse and cart, elongated in thesunset, and from time to time, above the hedge, the end of a fork loadedwith hay appears and disappears--you want no more to make a song.
A departure, according to the bent of one's mind, is a relief or adepression. All seemed lighter in spirits excepting the old man of theband, the man with the hat that had no pipe.
This old man, who looked more German than anything else, although he hadone of those unfathomable faces in which nationality is lost, was bald,and so grave that his baldness might have been a tonsure. Every time hepassed before the Virgin on the prow, he raised his felt hat, so thatyou could see the swollen and senile veins of his skull. A sort of fullgown, torn and threadbare, of brown Dorchester serge, but half hid hisclosely fitting coat, tight, compact, and hooked up to the neck like acassock. His hands inclined to cross each other, and had the mechanicaljunction of habitual prayer. He had what might be called a wancountenance; for the countenance is above all things a reflection, andit is an error to believe that idea is colourless. That countenance wasevidently the surface of a strange inner state, the result of acomposition of contradictions, some tending to drift away in good,others in evil, and to an observer it was the revelation of one who wasless and more than human--capable of falling below the scale of thetiger, or of rising above that of man. Such chaotic souls exist. Therewas something inscrutable in that face. Its secret reached the abstract.You felt that the man had known the foretaste of evil which is thecalculation, and the after-taste which is the zero. In hisimpassibility, which was perhaps only on the surface, were imprinted twopetrifactions--the petrifaction of the heart proper to the hangman, andthe petrifaction of the mind proper to the mandarin. One might have said(for the monstrous has its mode of being complete) that all things werepossible to him, even emotion. In every savant there is something of thecorpse, and this man was a savant. Only to see him you caught scienceimprinted in the gestures of his body and in the folds of his dress. Hiswas a fossil face, the serious cast of which was counteracted by thatwrinkled mobility of the polyglot which verges on grimace. But a severeman withal; nothing of the hypocrite, nothing of the cynic. A tragicdreamer. He was one of those whom crime leaves pensive; he had the browof an incendiary tempered by the eyes of an archbishop. His sparse graylocks turned to white over his temples. The Christian was evident inhim, complicated with the fatalism of the Turk. Chalkstones deformed hisfingers, dissected by leanness. The stiffness of his tall frame wasgrotesque. He had his sea-legs, he walked slowly about the deck, notlooking at any one, with an air decided and sinister. His eyeballs werevaguely filled with the fixed light of a soul studious of the darknessand afflicted by reappar
itions of conscience.
From time to time the chief of the band, abrupt and alert, and makingsudden turns about the vessel, came to him and whispered in his ear. Theold man answered by a nod. It might have been the lightning consultingthe night.