CHAPTER I

“Tschah!” exclaimed old Roland suddenly, after he had remained motionless for a quarter of an hour, his eyes fixed on the water, while now and again he very slightly lifted his line sunk in the sea.

Mme. Roland, dozing in the stern by the side of Mme. Rosemilly, who had been invited to join the fishing-party, woke up, and turning her head to look at her husband, said: 

“Well, well!  Gerome.”

And the old fellow replied in a fury: 

“They do not bite at all.  I have taken nothing since noon.  Only men should ever go fishing.  Women always delay the start till it is too late.”

His two sons, Pierre and Jean, who each held a line twisted round his forefinger, one to port and one to starboard, both began to laugh, and Jean remarked: 

“You are not very polite to our guest, father.”

M. Roland was abashed, and apologized.

“I beg your pardon, Mme. Rosemilly, but that is just like me.  I invite ladies because I like to be with them, and then, as soon as I feel the water beneath me, I think of nothing but the fish.”

Mme. Roland was now quite awake, and gazing with a softened look at the wide horizon of cliff and sea.

“You have had good sport, all the same,” she murmured.

But her husband shook his head in denial, though at the same time he glanced complacently at the basket where the fish caught by the three men were still breathing spasmodically, with a low rustle of clammy scales and struggling fins, and dull, ineffectual efforts, gasping in the fatal air.  Old Roland took the basket between his knees and tilted it up, making the silver heap of creatures slide to the edge that he might see those lying at the bottom, and their death-throes became more convulsive, while the strong smell of their bodies, a wholesome reek of brine, came up from the full depths of the creel.  The old fisherman sniffed it eagerly, as we smell at roses, and exclaimed: 

“Cristi!  But they are fresh enough!” and he went on:  “How many did you pull out, doctor?”

His eldest son, Pierre, a man of thirty, with black whiskers trimmed square like a lawyer’s, his mustache and beard shaved away, replied: 

“Oh, not many; three or four.”

The father turned to the younger.  “And you, Jean?” said he.

Jean, a tall fellow, much younger than his brother, fair, with a full beard, smiled and murmured: 

“Much the same as Pierre—­four or five.”

Every time they told the same fib, which delighted father Roland.  He had hitched his line round a row-lock, and folding his arms he announced: 

“I will never again try to fish after noon.  After ten in the morning it is all over.  The lazy brutes will not bite; they are taking their siesta in the sun.”  And he looked round at the sea on all sides, with the satisfied air of a proprietor.