One day, in the first fortnight of June, as old Yvonne was returning home, some neighbours told her that she had been sent for by the Commissioner from the Naval Registry Office. Of course it concerned her grandson, but that did not frighten her in the least. The families of seafarers are used to the Naval Registry, and she, the daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother of seamen, had known that office for the past sixty years.
Doubtless it had to do with his “delegation”; or perhaps there was a small prize-money account from La Circe to take through her proxy. As she knew what respect was due to “Monsieur le Commissaire,” she put on her best gown and a clean white cap, and set out about two o'clock.
Trotting along swiftly on the pathways of the cliff, she neared Paimpol; and musing upon these two months without letters, she grew a bit anxious.
She met her old sweetheart sitting out at his door. He had greatly aged since the appearance of the winter cold.
“Eh, eh! When you're ready, you know, don't make any ceremony, my beauty!” That “suit of deal” still haunted his mind.
The joyous brightness of June smiled around her. On the rocky heights there still grew the stunted reeds with their yellow blossoms; but passing into the hollow nooks sheltered against the bitter sea winds, one met with high sweet-smelling grass. But the poor old woman did not see all this, over whose head so many rapid seasons had passed, which now seemed as short as days.
Around the crumbling hamlet with its gloomy walls grew roses, pinks, and stocks; and even up on the tops of the whitewashed and mossy roofs, sprang the flowerets that attracted the first “miller” butterflies of the season.
This spring-time was almost without love in the land of Icelanders, and the beautiful lasses of proud race, who sat out dreaming on their doorsteps, seemed to look far beyond the visible things with their blue or brown eyes. The young men, who were the objects of their melancholy and desires, were remote, fishing on the northern seas.
But it was a spring-time for all that—warm, sweet, and troubling, with its buzzing of flies and perfume of young plants.
And all this soulless freshness smiled upon the poor old grandmother, who was quickly walking along to hear of the death of her last-born grandson. She neared the awful moment when this event, which had taken place in the so distant Chinese seas, was to be told to her; she was taking that sinister walk that Sylvestre had divined at his death-hour—the sight of that had torn his last agonized tears from him; his darling old granny summoned to Paimpol to be told that he was dead! Clearly he had seen her pass along that road, running straight on, with her tiny brown shawl, her umbrella, and large head-dress. And that apparition had made him toss and writhe in fearful anguish, while the huge, red sun of the Equator, disappearing in its glory, peered through the port-hole of the hospital to watch him die. But he, in his last hallucination, had seen his old granny moving under a rain-laden sky, and on the contrary a joyous laughing spring-time mocked her on all sides.
Nearing Paimpol, she became more and more uneasy, and improved her speed. Now she is in the gray town with its narrow granite streets, where the sun falls, bidding good-day to some other old women, her contemporaries, sitting at their windows. Astonished to see her; they said: “Wherever is she going so quickly, in her Sunday gown, on a week-day?”
“Monsieur le Commissaire” of the Naval Enlistment Office was not in just then. One ugly little creature, about fifteen years old, who was his clerk, sat at his desk. As he was too puny to be a fisher, he had received some education and passed his time in that same chair, in his black linen dust-sleeves, scratching away at paper.
With a look of importance, when she had said her name, he got up to get the official documents from off a shelf.
There were a great many papers—what did it all mean? Parchments, sealed papers, a sailor's record-book, grown yellow on the sea, and over all floated an odour of death. He spread them all out before the poor old woman, who began to tremble and feel dizzy. She had just recognized two of the letters which Gaud used to write for her to her grandson, and which were now returned to her never unsealed. The same thing had happened twenty years ago at the death of her son Pierre; the letters had been sent back from China to “Monsieur le Commissaire,” who had given them to her thus.
Now he was reading out in a consequential voice: “Moan, Jean-Marie-Sylvestre, registered at Paimpol, folio 213, number 2091, died on board the Bien Hoa, on the 14th of ——.”
“What—what has happened to him, my good sir?”
“Discharged—dead,” he answered.
It wasn't because this clerk was unkind, but if he spoke in that brutal way, it was through want of judgment, and from lack of intelligence in the little incomplete being.
As he saw that she did not understand that technical expression, he said in Breton:
“Marw eo!”
“Marw eo!” (He is dead.)
She repeated the words after him, in her aged tremulous voice, as a poor cracked echo would send back some indifferent phrase. So what she had partly foreseen was true; but it only made her tremble; now that it was certain, it seemed to affect her no more. To begin with, her faculty to suffer was slightly dulled by old age, especially since this last winter. Pain did not strike her immediately. Something seemed to fall upside down in her brain, and somehow or another she mixed this death up with others. She had lost so many of them before. She needed a moment to grasp that this was her very last one, her darling, the object of all her prayers, life, and waiting, and of all her thoughts, already darkened by the sombre approach of second childhood.
She felt a sort of shame at showing her despair before this little gentleman who horrified her. Was that the way to tell a grandmother of her darling's death? She remained standing before the desk, stiffened, and tearing the fringes of her brown shawl with her poor aged hands, sore and chapped with washing.
How far away she felt from home! Goodness! what a long walk back to be gone through, and steadily, too, before nearing the whitewashed hut in which she longed to shut herself up, like a wounded beast who hides in its hole to die. And so she tried not to think too much and not to understand yet, frightened above all at the long home-journey.
They gave her an order to go and take, as the heiress, the thirty francs that came from the sale of Sylvestre's bag; and then the letters, the certificates, and the box containing the military medal.
She took the whole parcel awkwardly with open fingers, unable to find pockets to put them in.
She went straight through Paimpol, looking at no one, her body bent slightly like one about to fall, with a rushing of blood in her ears; pressing and hurrying along like some poor old machine, which could not be wound up, at a great pressure, for the last time, without fear of breaking its springs.
At the third mile she went along quite bent in two and exhausted; from time to time her foot struck against the stones, giving her a painful shock up to the very head. She hurried to bury herself in her home, for fear of falling and having to be carried there.
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