“Great goose! what ails you? I knew it
well from the very first day!”
Savel began to tremble. He stammered out:
“You knew it? Then—”
He stopped.
She asked:
“Then?... What?”
He answered:
“Then ... what would you think?... what ...
what.... What would you have answered?”
She broke forth into a peal of laughter, which made
the sugar juice run off the tips of her fingers on
to the carpet.
“I? But you did not ask me anything.
It was not for me to make a declaration.”
He then advanced a step towards her.
“Tell me ... tell me.... You remember the
day when Saudres went to sleep on the grass after
lunch ... when we had walked together as far as the
bend of the river, below ...”
He waited, expectantly. She had ceased to laugh,
and looked at him, straight in the eyes.
“Yes, certainly, I remember it.”
He answered, shivering all over.
“Well ... that day ... if I had been ... if
I had been ... enterprising ... what would you have
done?”
She began to laugh as only a happy woman can laugh,
who has nothing to regret, and responded, frankly,
in a voice tinged with irony:
“I would have yielded, my friend.”
She then turned on her heels and went back to her
jam-making.
Savel rushed into the street, cast down, as though
he had encountered some great disaster. He walked
with giant strides, through the rain, straight on,
until he reached the river, without thinking where
he was going. When he reached the bank he turned
to the right and followed it. He walked a long
time, as if urged on by some instinct. His clothes
were running with water, his hat was bashed in, as
soft as a piece of rag, and dripping like a thatched
roof. He walked on, straight in front of him.
At last, he came to the place where they had lunched
so long, long ago, the recollection of which had tortured
his heart. He sat down under the leafless trees,
and he wept.
Having sailed from Havre on the 3rd of May, 1882,
for a voyage in the China seas, the square-rigged
three-master, Notre Dame des Vents, made her
way back into the port of Marseilles, on the 8th of
August, 1886, after an absence of four years.
When she had discharged her first cargo in the Chinese
port for which she was bound, she had immediately found
a new freight for Buenos Ayres, and from that place
had conveyed goods to Brazil.
Other passages, then damage repairs, calms ranging
over several months, gales which knocked her out of
her course—all the accidents, adventures,
and misadventures of the sea, in short—had
kept far from her country, this Norman three-master,
which had come back to Marseilles with her hold full
of tin boxes containing American preserves.
