While his crew of half-starved scarecrows, hard as nails and ravenous13 as so many wolves for the delights of the shore, swarmed14 aloft to furl the sails nearly as thin and as patched as the grimy shirts on their backs, Peyrol took a survey of the quay. Groups were forming along its whole stretch to gaze at the new arrival. Peyrol noted15 particularly a good many men in red caps and said to himself — “Here they are.” Amongst the crews of ships that had brought the tricolour into the seas of the East, there were hundreds professing16 sans-culotte principles; boastful and declamatory beggars he had thought them. But now he was beholding17 the shore breed. Those who had made the Revolution safe. The real thing. Peyrol, after taking a good long look, went below into his cabin to make himself ready to go ashore18.
He shaved his big cheeks with a real English razor, looted years ago from an officer's cabin in an English East Indiaman captured by a ship he was serving in then. He put on a white shirt, a short blue jacket with metal buttons and a high roll-collar, a pair of white trousers which he fastened with a red bandana handkerchief by way of a belt. With a black, shiny low-crowned hat on his head he made a very creditable prize-master. He beckoned19 from the poop to a boatman and got himself rowed to the quay.
By that time the crowd had grown to a large size. Peyrol's eyes ranged over it with no great apparent interest, though it was a fact that he had never in all his man's life seen so many idle white people massed together to stare at a sailor. He had been a rover of the outer seas; he had grown into a stranger to his native country. During the few minutes it took the boatman to row him to the step, he felt like a navigator about to land on a newly discovered shore.
On putting his foot on it he was mobbed. The arrival of a prize made by a squadron of the Republic in distant seas was not an everyday occurrence in Toulon. The wildest rumours20 had been already set flying. Peyrol elbowed himself through the crowd somehow, but it continued to move after him. A voice cried out, “Where do you come from, citoyen?” — “From the other side of the world,” Peyrol boomed out.
He did not get rid of his followers21 till the door of the Port Office. There he reported himself to the proper officials as master of a prize taken off the Cape22 by Citoyen Renaud, Commander-in-Chief of the Republican Squadron in the Indian Seas. He had been ordered to make for Dunkerque but, said he, having been chased by the sacrés Anglais three times in a fortnight between Cape Verde and Cape Spartel, he had made up his mind to run into the Mediterranean23 where, he had understood from a Danish brig he had met at sea, there were no English men-of-war just then. And here he was; and there were his ship's papers and his own papers and everything in order. He mentioned also that he was tired of rolling about the seas, and that he longed for a period of repose24 on shore. But till all the legal business was settled he remained in Toulon roaming about the streets at a deliberate gait, enjoying general consideration as Citizen Peyrol, and looking everybody coldly in the eye.
His reticence25 about his past was of that kind which starts a lot of mysterious stories about a man. No doubt the maritime26 authorities of Toulon had a less cloudy idea of Peyrol's past, though it need not necessarily have been more exact. In the various offices connected with the sea where his duties took him, the wretched scribes, and even some of the chiefs, looked very hard at him as he went in and out, dressed very neatly27, and always with his cudgel, which he used to leave outside the door of private offices when called in for an interview with one or another of the “gold-laced lot.” Having, however, cut off his queue and got in touch with some prominent patriots29 of the Jacobin type, Peyrol cared little for people's stares and whispers. The person that came nearest to trying his composure was a certain naval30 captain with a patch over one eye and a very threadbare uniform coat who was doing some administrative31 work at the Port Office. That officer, looking up from some papers, remarked brusquely, “As a matter of fact you have been the best part of your life skimming the seas, if the truth were known. You must have been a deserter from the Navy at one time, whatever you may call yourself now.”
There was not a quiver on the large cheeks of the gunner Peyrol.
“If there was anything of the sort it was in the time of kings and aristocrats,” he said steadily32. “And now I have brought in a prize, and a service letter from Citizen Renaud, commanding in the Indian Seas. I can also give you the names of good republicans in this town who know my sentiments. Nobody can say I was ever anti-revolutionary in my life. I knocked about the Eastern seas for forty-five years — that's true. But let me observe that it was the seamen33 who stayed at home that let the English into the Port of Toulon.” He paused a moment and then added: “When one thinks of that, citoyen Commandant, any little slips I and fellows of my kind may have made five thousand leagues from here and twenty years ago cannot have much importance in these times of equality and fraternity.”
“As to fraternity,” remarked the post-captain in the shabby coat, “the only one you are familiar with is the Brotherhood34 of the Coast, I should say.”
“Everybody in the Indian Ocean except milksops and youngsters had to be,” said the untroubled Citizen Peyrol. “And we practised republican principles long before a republic was thought of; for the Brothers of the Coast were all equal and elected their own chiefs.”
“They were an abominable35 lot of lawless ruffians,” remarked the officer venomously, leaning back in his chair. “You will not dare to deny that.”
Citizen Peyrol refused to take up a defensive36 attitude. He merely mentioned in a neutral tone that he had delivered his trust to the Port Office all right, and as to his character he had a certificate of civism from his section. He was a patriot28 and entitled to his discharge. After being dismissed by a nod he took up his cudgel outside the door and walked out of the building with the calmness of rectitude. His large face of the Roman type betrayed nothing to the wretched quill-drivers, who whispered on his passage. As he went along the streets he looked as usual everybody in the eye; but that very same evening he vanished from Toulon. It wasn't that he was afraid of anything. His mind was as calm as the natural set of his florid face. Nobody could know what his forty years or more of sea-life had been, unless he told them himself. And of that he didn't mean to tell more than what he had told the inquisitive37 captain with the patch over one eye. But he didn't want any bother for certain other reasons; and more than anything else he didn't want to be sent perhaps to serve in the fleet now fitting out in Toulon. So at dusk he passed through the gate on the road to Fréjus in a high two-wheeled cart belonging to a well-known farmer whose habitation lay that way. His personal belongings38 were brought down and piled up on the tailboard of the cart by some ragamuffin patriots whom he engaged in the street for that purpose. The only indiscretion he committed was to pay them for their trouble with a large handful of assignats. From such a prosperous seaman39, however, this generosity40 was not so very compromising. He himself got into the cart over the wheel, with such slow and ponderous41 movements, that the friendly farmer felt called upon to remark: “Ah, we are not so young as we used to be — you and I.” — “I have also an awkward wound,” said Citizen Peyrol, sitting down heavily.
And so from farmer's cart to farmer's cart, getting lifts all along, jogging in a cloud of dust between stone walls and through little villages well known to him from his boyhood's days, in a landscape of stony42 hills, pale rocks, and dusty green of olive trees, Citizen Peyrol went on unmolested till he got down clumsily in the yard of an inn on the outskirts43 of the town of Hyères. The sun was setting to his right. Near a clump44 of dark pines with blood-red trunks in the sunset, Peyrol perceived a rutty track branching off in the direction of the sea.
At that spot Citizen Peyrol had made up his mind to leave the high road. Every feature of the country with the darkly wooded rises, the barren flat expanse of stones and sombre bushes to his left, appealed to him with a sort of strange familiarity, because they had remained unchanged since the days of his boyhood. The very cartwheel tracks scored deep into the stony ground had kept their physiognomy; and far away, like a blue thread, there was the sea of the Hyères roadstead with a lumpy indigo45 swelling46 still beyond — which was the island of Porquerolles, but he really did not know. The notion of a father was absent from his mentality47. What he remembered of his parents was a tall, lean, brown woman in rags, who was his mother. But then they were working together at a farm which was on the mainland. He had fragmentary memories of her shaking down olives, picking stones out of a field, or handling a manure48 fork like a man, tireless and fierce, with wisps of greyish hair flying about her bony face; and of himself running barefooted in connection with a flock of turkeys, with hardly any clothes on his back. At night, by the farmer's favour, they were permitted to sleep in a sort of ruinous byre built of stones and with only half a roof on it, lying side by side on some old straw on the ground. And it was on a bundle of straw that his mother had tossed ill for two days and had died in the night. In the darkness, her silence, her cold face had given him an awful scare. He supposed they had buried her but he didn't know, because he had rushed out terror-struck, and never stopped till he got as far as a little place by the sea called Almanarre, where he hid himself on board a tartane that was lying there with no one on board. He went into the hold because he was afraid of some dogs on shore. He found down there a heap of empty sacks, which made a luxurious49 couch, and being exhausted50 went to sleep like a stone. Some time during the night the crew came on board and the tartane sailed for Marseilles. That was another awful scare — being hauled out by the scruff of the neck on the deck and being asked who the devil he was and what he was doing there. Only from that one he could not run away. There was water all around him and the whole world, including the coast not very far away, wobbled in a most alarming manner. Three bearded men stood about him and he tried to explain to them that he had been working at Peyrol's. Peyrol was the farmer's name. The boy didn't know that he had one of his own. Moreover, he didn't know very well how to talk to people, and they must have misunderstood him. Thus the name of Peyrol stuck to him for life.
There the memories of his native country stopped, overlaid by other memories, with a multitude of impressions of endless oceans, of the Mozambique Channel, of Arabs and negroes, of Madagascar, of the coast of India, of islands and channels and reefs; of fights at sea, rows on shore, desperate slaughter51 and desperate thirst, of all sorts of ships one after another: merchant ships and frigates52 and privateers; of reckless men and enormous sprees. In the course of years he had learned to speak intelligibly53 and think connectedly and even to read and write after a fashion. The name of the farmer Peyrol, attached to his person on account of his inability to give a clear account of himself, acquired a sort of reputation, both openly, in the ports of the East and, secretly, amongst the Brothers of the Coast, that strange fraternity with something masonic and not a little piratical in its constitution. Round the Cape of Storms, which is also the Cape of Good Hope, the words Republic, Nation, Tyranny, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and the cult54 of the Supreme55 Being came floating on board ships from home, new cries and new ideas which did not upset the slowly developed intelligence of the gunner Peyrol. They seemed the invention of landsmen, of whom the seaman Peyrol knew very little — nothing, so to speak. Now, after nearly fifty years of lawful56 and lawless sea-life, Citizen Peyrol, at the yard gate of the roadside inn, looked at the late scene of his childhood. He looked at it without any animosity, but a little puzzled as to his bearings amongst the features of the land. “Yes, it must be somewhere in that direction,” he thought vaguely57. Decidedly he would go no further along the high road. . . . A few yards away the woman of the inn stood looking at him, impressed by the good clothes, the great shaven cheeks, the well-to-do air of that seaman; and suddenly Peyrol noticed her. With her anxious brown face, her grey locks, and her rustic58 appearance she might have been his mother, as he remembered her, only she wasn't in rags.
“Hé! La mère,” hailed Peyrol. “Have you got a man to lend a hand with my chest into the house?”
He looked so prosperous and so authoritative59 that she piped without hesitation60 in a thin voice, “Mais oui, citoyen. He will be here in a moment.”
In the dusk the clump of pines across the road looked very black against the quiet clear sky; and Citizen Peyrol gazed at the scene of his young misery61 with the greatest possible placidity62. Here he was after nearly fifty years, and to look at things it seemed like yesterday. He felt for all this neither love nor resentment63. He felt a little funny as it were, and the funniest thing was the thought which crossed his mind that he could indulge his fancy (if he had a mind to it) to buy up all this land to the furthermost field, away over there where the track lost itself sinking into the flats bordering the sea where the small rise at the end of the Giens peninsula had assumed the appearance of a black cloud.
“Tell me, my friend,” he said in his magisterial64 way to the farmhand with a tousled head of hair who was awaiting his good pleasure, “doesn't this track lead to Almanarre?”
“Yes,” said the labourer, and Peyrol nodded. The man continued, mouthing his words slowly as if unused to speech. “To Almanarre and further too, beyond the great pond right out to the end of the land, to Cape Esterel.”
Peyrol was lending his big flat hairy ear. “If I had stayed in this country,” he thought, “I would be talking like this fellow.” And aloud he asked:
“Are there any houses there, at the end of the land?”
“Why, a hamlet, a hole, just a few houses round a church and a farm where at one time they would give you a glass of wine.”
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1
berth
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| n.卧铺，停泊地，锚位；v.使停泊 | |
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battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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arsenal
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| n.兵工厂，军械库 | |
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quay
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| n.码头，靠岸处 | |
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marvelled
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| v.惊奇，对…感到惊奇( marvel的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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6
rumble
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| n.隆隆声；吵嚷；v.隆隆响；低沉地说 | |
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7
hull
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| n.船身；(果、实等的)外壳；vt.去(谷物等)壳 | |
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8
rations
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| 定量( ration的名词复数 )； 配给量； 正常量； 合理的量 | |
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lookout
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| n.注意，前途，瞭望台 | |
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verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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shipwreck
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| n.船舶失事，海难 | |
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12
precarious
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| adj.不安定的，靠不住的；根据不足的 | |
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ravenous
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| adj.极饿的，贪婪的 | |
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14
swarmed
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| 密集( swarm的过去式和过去分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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15
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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professing
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| 声称( profess的现在分词 )； 宣称； 公开表明； 信奉 | |
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17
beholding
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| v.看，注视( behold的现在分词 )；瞧；看呀；（叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现）哎哟 | |
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18
ashore
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| adv.在(向)岸上，上岸 | |
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19
beckoned
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| v.（用头或手的动作）示意，召唤( beckon的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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rumours
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| n.传闻( rumour的名词复数 )；风闻；谣言；谣传 | |
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21
followers
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| 追随者( follower的名词复数 )； 用户； 契据的附面； 从动件 | |
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cape
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| n.海角，岬；披肩，短披风 | |
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Mediterranean
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| adj.地中海的；地中海沿岸的 | |
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repose
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| v.(使)休息；n.安息 | |
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reticence
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| n.沉默，含蓄 | |
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maritime
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| adj.海的，海事的，航海的，近海的，沿海的 | |
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neatly
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| adv.整洁地，干净地，灵巧地，熟练地 | |
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patriot
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| n.爱国者，爱国主义者 | |
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patriots
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| 爱国者，爱国主义者( patriot的名词复数 ) | |
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30
naval
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| adj.海军的，军舰的，船的 | |
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administrative
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| adj.行政的，管理的 | |
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steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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seamen
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| n.海员 | |
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brotherhood
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| n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊 | |
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abominable
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| adj.可厌的，令人憎恶的 | |
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defensive
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| adj.防御的；防卫的；防守的 | |
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inquisitive
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| adj.求知欲强的，好奇的，好寻根究底的 | |
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belongings
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| n.私人物品，私人财物 | |
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seaman
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| n.海员，水手，水兵 | |
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40
generosity
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| n.大度，慷慨，慷慨的行为 | |
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41
ponderous
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| adj.沉重的，笨重的，(文章)冗长的 | |
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42
stony
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| adj.石头的，多石头的，冷酷的，无情的 | |
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43
outskirts
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| n.郊外，郊区 | |
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clump
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| n.树丛，草丛；vi.用沉重的脚步行走 | |
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45
indigo
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| n.靛青，靛蓝 | |
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46
swelling
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| n.肿胀 | |
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47
mentality
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| n.心理，思想，脑力 | |
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48
manure
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| n.粪，肥，肥粒；vt.施肥 | |
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49
luxurious
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| adj.精美而昂贵的；豪华的 | |
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50
exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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51
slaughter
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| n.屠杀，屠宰；vt.屠杀，宰杀 | |
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52
frigates
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| n.快速军舰( frigate的名词复数 ) | |
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53
intelligibly
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| adv.可理解地，明了地，清晰地 | |
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54
cult
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| n.异教，邪教；时尚，狂热的崇拜 | |
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55
supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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56
lawful
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| adj.法律许可的，守法的，合法的 | |
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57
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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58
rustic
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| adj.乡村的，有乡村特色的；n.乡下人，乡巴佬 | |
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59
authoritative
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| adj.有权威的，可相信的；命令式的；官方的 | |
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60
hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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61
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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62
placidity
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| n.平静，安静，温和 | |
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63
resentment
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| n.怨愤，忿恨 | |
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magisterial
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| adj.威风的，有权威的；adv.威严地 | |
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