Array Коллектив авторов - 75 лучших рассказов / 75 Best Short Stories

‘Milk.’

‘Who for?’

‘Granny.’

‘Granny be hanged.’

The man disengaged his hands, lifted the jug from the child’s feeble grasp, tilted it toward the light, surveyed its contents, put it to his lips, and exhausted them. The child, although liberated, did not retreat. It stood watching its uncle drink until he lowered the jug. Then, as he met its eyes, it said:

‘It was for the baby.’

For a moment the man was irresolute. But the child seemed to have a foresight of the parental resentment, for it had hardly spoken when it darted backward and scampered off, just in time to elude a blow from the jug, which the man sent clattering at its heels. When it was out of sight, he faced about to the water again, and replaced the pipe between his teeth with a heavy scowl and a murmur that sounded to Madame Bernier very like – ‘I wish the baby’d choke.’

Hortense was a mute spectator of this little drama. When it was over, she turned around, and retraced her steps twenty yards with her hand to her head. Then she walked straight back, and addressed the man.

‘My good man,’ she said, in a very pleasant voice, ‘are you the master of one of these boats?’

He looked up at her. In a moment the pipe was out of his mouth, and a broad grin in its place. He rose, with his hand to his cap.

‘I am, madame, at your service.’

‘Will you take me to the other side?’

‘You don’t need a boat; the bridge is closed,’ said one of his comrades at the foot of the steps, looking that way.

‘I know it,’ said Madame Bernier; ‘but I wish to go to the cemetery, and a boat will save me half a mile walking.’

‘The cemetery is shut at this hour.’

‘Allons [301], leave madame alone,’ said the man first spoken to.

‘This way, my lady.’

Hortense seated herself in the stern of the boat. The man took the sculls.

‘Straight across?’ he asked.

Hortense looked around her. ‘It’s a fine evening,’ said she; suppose you row me out to the lighthouse, and leave me at the point nearest the cemetery on our way back.

‘Very well,’ rejoined the boatman; ‘fifteen sous,’ and began to pull lustily.

‘Allez [302], I’ll pay you well,’ said Madame.

‘Fifteen sous is the fare,’ insisted the man.

‘Give me a pleasant row, and I’ll give you a hundred,’ said Hortense.

Her companion said nothing. He evidently wished to appear not to have heard her remark. Silence was probably the most dignified manner of receiving a promise too munificent to be anything but a jest.

For some time this silence was maintained, broken only by the trickling of the oars and the sounds from the neighboring shores and vessels. Madame Bernier was plunged in a sidelong scrutiny of her ferryman’s countenance. He was a man of about thirty-five. His face was dogged, brutal, and sullen. These indications were perhaps exaggerated by the dull monotony of his exercise. The eyes lacked a certain rascally gleam which had appeared in them when he was so empressé [303]with the offer of his services. The face was better then – that is, if vice is better than ignorance. We say a countenance is ‘lit up’ by a smile; and indeed that momentary flicker does the office of a candle in a dark room. It sheds a ray upon the dim upholstery of our souls. The visages of poor men, generally, know few alternations. There is a large class of human beings whom fortune restricts to a single change of expression, or, perhaps, rather to a single expression. Ah me! the faces which wear either nakedness or rags; whose repose is stagnation, whose activity vice; ignorant at their worst, infamous at their best!

‘Don’t pull too hard,’ said Hortense at last. ‘Hadn’t you better take breath a moment?’

‘Madame is very good,’ said the man, leaning upon his oars. ‘But if you had taken me by the hour,’ he added, with a return of the vicious grin, ‘you wouldn’t catch me loitering.’

‘I suppose you work very hard,’ said Madame Bernier.

The man gave a little toss of his head, as if to intimate the inadequacy of any supposition to grasp the extent of his labors.

‘I’ve been up since four o’clock this morning, wheeling bales and boxes on the quay, and plying my little boat. Sweating without five minutes’ intermission. C’est comme ça [304]. Sometimes I tell my mate I think I’ll take a plunge in the basin to dry myself. Ha! ha! ha!’

‘And of course you gain little,’ said Madame Bernier.

‘Worse than nothing. Just what will keep me fat enough for starvation to feed on.’

‘How? you go without your necessary food?’

‘Necessary is a very elastic word, madame. You can narrow it down, so that in the degree above nothing it means luxury. My necessary food is sometimes thin air. If I don’t deprive myself of that, it’s because I can’t.’

‘Is it possible to be so unfortunate?’

‘Shall I tell you what I have eaten today?’

‘Do,’ said Madame Bernier.

‘A piece of black bread and a salt herring are all that have passed my lips for twelve hours.’

‘Why don’t you get some better work?’

‘If I should die tonight,’ pursued the boatman, heedless of the question, in the manner of a man whose impetus on the track of self-pity drives him past the signal flags of relief, ‘what would there be left to bury me? These clothes I have on might buy me a long box. For the cost of this shabby old suit, that hasn’t lasted me a twelve-month, I could get one that I wouldn’t wear out in a thousand years. La bonne idée! [305]’

‘Why don’t you get some work that pays better?’ repeated Hortense.

The man dipped his oars again.

‘Work that pays better? I must work for work. I must earn that too. Work is wages. I count the promise of the next week’s employment the best part of my Saturday night’s pocketings. Fifty casks rolled from the ship to the storehouse mean two things: thirty sous and fifty more to roll the next day. Just so a crushed hand, or a dislocated shoulder, mean twenty francs to the apothecary and bon jour to my business.’

‘Are you married?’ asked Hortense.

‘No, I thank you. I’m not cursed with that blessing. But I’ve an old mother, a sister, and three nephews, who look to me for support. The old woman’s too old to work; the lass is too lazy, and the little ones are too young. But they’re none of them too old or young to be hungry, allez. I’ll be hanged if I’m not a father to them all.’

There was a pause. The man had resumed rowing. Madame Bernier sat motionless, still examining her neighbor’s physiognomy. The sinking sun, striking full upon his face, covered it with an almost lurid glare. Her own features being darkened against the western sky, the direction of them was quite indistinguishable to her companion.

‘Why don’t you leave the place?’ she said at last.

‘Leave it! how?’ he replied, looking up with the rough avidity with which people of his class receive proposals touching their interests, extending to the most philanthropic suggestions that mistrustful eagerness with which experience has taught them to defend their own side of a bargain – the only form of proposal that she has made them acquainted with.

‘Go somewhere else,’ said Hortense.

‘Where, for instance!’

‘To some new country – America.’

The man burst into a loud laugh. Madame Bernier’s face bore more evidence of interest in the play of his features than of that discomfiture which generally accompanies the consciousness of ridicule.

‘There’s a lady’s scheme for you! If you’ll write for furnished apartments, là-bas [306], I don’t desire anything better. But no leaps in the dark for me. America and Algeria are very fine words to cram into an empty stomach when you’re lounging in the sun, out of work, just as you stuff tobacco into your pipe and let the smoke curl around your head. But they fade away before a cutlet and a bottle of wine. When the earth grows so smooth and the air so pure that you can see the American coast from the pier yonder, then I’ll make up my bundle. Not before.’