At Paimpol lives a large, stout woman named Madame Tressoleur. In one of the streets that lead to the harbour she keeps a tavern, well known to all the Icelanders, where captains and ship-owners come to engage their sailors, and choose the strongest among them, men and masters all drinking together.
At one time she had been beautiful, and was still jolly with the fishers; she has a mustache, is as broad built as a Dutchman, and as bold and ready of speech as a Levantine. There is a look of the daughter of the regiment about her, notwithstanding her ample nun-like muslin headgear; for all that, a religious halo of its sort floats around her, for the simple reason that she is a Breton born.
The names of all the sailors of the country are written in her head as in a register; she knows them all, good or bad, and knows exactly, too, what they earn and what they are worth.
One January day, Gaud, who had been called in to make a dress, sat down to work in a room behind the tap-room.
To go into the abode of our Madame Tressoleur, you enter by a broad, massive-pillared door, which recedes in the olden style under the first floor. When you go to open this door, there is always some obliging gust of wind from the street that pushes it in, and the new-comers make an abrupt entrance, as if carried in by a beach roller. The hall is adorned by gilt frames, containing pictures of ships and wrecks. In an angle a china statuette of the Virgin is placed on a bracket, between two bunches of artificial flowers.
These olden walls must have listened to many powerful songs of sailors, and witnessed many wild gay scenes, since the first far-off days of Paimpol—all through the lively times of the privateers, up to these of the present Icelanders, so very little different from their ancestors. Many lives of men have been angled for and hooked there, on the oaken tables, between two drunken bouts.
While she was sewing the dress, Gaud lent her ear to the conversation going on about Iceland, behind the partition, between Madame Tressoleur and two old sailors, drinking. They were discussing a new craft that was being rigged in the harbour. She never would be ready for the next season, so they said of this Leopoldine.
“Oh, yes, to be sure she will!” answered the hostess. “I tell 'ee the crew was all made up yesterday—the whole of 'em out of the old Marie of Guermeur's, that's to be sold for breaking up; five young fellows signed their engagement here before me, at this here table, and with my own pen—so ye see, I'm right! And fine fellows, too, I can tell 'ee; Laumec, Tugdual Caroff, Yvon Duff, young Keraez from Treguier, and long Yann Gaos from Pors-Even, who's worth any three on 'em!”
The Leopoldine! The half-heard name of the ship that was to carry Yann away became suddenly fixed in her brain, as if it had been hammered in to remain more ineffaceably there.
At night back again at Ploubazlanec, and finishing off her work by the light of her pitiful lamp, that name came back to her mind, and its very sound impressed her as a sad thing. The names of vessels, as of things, have a significance in themselves—almost a particular meaning of their own. The new and unusual word haunted her with an unnatural persistency, like some ghastly and clinging warning. She had expected to see Yann start off again on the Marie, which she knew so well and had formerly visited, and whose Virgin had so long protected its dangerous voyages; and the change to the Leopoldine increased her anguish.
But she told herself that that was not her concern, and nothing about him ought ever to affect her. After all, what could it matter to her whether he were here or there, on this ship or another, ashore or not? Would she feel less miserable with him back in Iceland, when the summer would return over the deserted cottages, and lonely anxious women—or when a new autumn came again, bringing home the fishers once more? All that was alike indifferent to her, equally without joy or hope. There was no link between them now, nothing ever to bring them together, for was he not forgetting even poor little Sylvestre? So, she had plainly to understand that this sole dream of her life was over for ever; she had to forget Yann, and all things appertaining to his existence, even the very name of Iceland, which still vibrated in her with so painful a charm—because of him all such thoughts must be swept away. All was indeed over, for ever and ever.
She tenderly looked over at the poor old woman asleep, who still required all her attention, but who would soon die. Then, what would be the good of living and working after that; of what use would she be?
Out of doors, the western wind had again risen; and, notwithstanding its deep distant soughing, the soft regular patter of the eaves-droppings could be heard as they dripped from the roof. And so the tears of the forsaken one began to flow—tears running even to her lips to impart their briny taste, and dropping silently on her work, like summer showers brought by no breeze, but suddenly falling, hurried and heavy, from the over-laden clouds; as she could no longer see to work, and she felt worked out and discouraged before this great hollowness of her life, she folded up the extra-sized body of Madame Tressoleur and went to bed.
She shivered upon that fine, grand bed, for, like all things in the cottage, it seemed also to be getting colder and damper. But as she was very young, although she still continued weeping, it ended by her growing warm and falling asleep.
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