The Toilers of the Sea

by Victor Hugo

  Winter, hunger, fatigue, the dismantling of the wreck, the transfer of the Durande's engines to the paunch, the equinoctial gales, the wind, the thunder, the devilfish: all these counted for nothing compared with the leak. There were resources for dealing with these various difficulties, and Gilliatt had possessed them. Against cold there was fire; against hunger, the shellfish on the reef; against thirst, rain; against the difficulties of salvaging the wreck, industry and energy; against the tides and the storm, the breakwater; against the devilfish, his knife. Against the leak there was nothing.

  The hurricane was taking this sinister farewell of him: a final assault, defenses that were failing him, a treacherous attack by the conquered on the conqueror. The tempest, fleeing in defeat, was firing this last Parthian shot. The rout was turning and striking back. It was a stab in the back by the abyss.

  You can fight the tempest, but how can you fight a trickle of water?

  If the plug gave way and the leak opened up again the paunch would certainly founder. It would be like undoing a ligature on an artery. And once the paunch was on the bottom, with the heavy load of the Durande's engines, there was no possibility of raising her. The tremendous effort of two months' titanic labor would end in nothing. There could be no question of starting again. Gilliatt now had no forge and no materials. Perhaps at daybreak he would see all his work sinking slowly and irremediably into the abyss. It was terrible to feel the somber force beneath him. The abyss was drawing him into its grasp.

  With his boat engulfed by the sea, he would be left to die of hunger and cold, like the man on the Homme rock.

  For two long months the consciousnesses and providences that exist in the invisible world had watched the contest. On one side were ranged the vast expanses of the ocean, the waves, the winds, the lightning, the meteors, on the other one man; on one side the sea, on the other a human soul; on one side the Infinite, on the other an atom. There had been a battle. And now perhaps this prodigious effort was to be wasted. This extraordinary heroism was to be reduced to impotence; this formidable combat, the challenge to which had been accepted, this struggle between Nothing and Everything, this one-man Iliad was to end in despair.

  Gilliatt, at a loss, gazed into space. He had not a single garment left: he was naked in face of immensity.

  Then, despondent in face of all this unknown enormity, no longer knowing what was wanted of him, confronting the darkness, in presence of this irreducible obscurity, amid the noise of the water, the waves, the swell, the foam, and the squalls, under the clouds, under the winds, under these vast scattered forces, under this mysterious firmament of wings, stars, and tombs, subject to the unknown intentions of these vast presences, with the ocean around him and below him and the constellations above him, oppressed by the unfathomable, he sank down, gave in, and lay down at full length with his back on the rock, looking up to the stars, vanquished, and, raising his joined hands in face of these terrible depths, cried to the Infinite: "Have mercy!" Defeated by the immensity, he was making his submission.

  He lay there, alone in the night on this rock in the middle of the ocean, prostrated by exhaustion, like a man struck by lightning, as naked as a gladiator in the circus, with in place of a circus the abyss; in place of wild beasts, the darkness; in place of the watching eyes of spectators, the glance of the Unknown; in place of the vestal virgins, the stars; in place of Caesar, God.

  He felt his whole being dissolving in the cold, in fatigue, in impotence, in prayer, in darkness, and his eyes closed.

  VII

  THERE IS AN EAR IN THE UNKNOWN207

  Some hours passed.

  The sun rose in all its brilliance. Its first ray lit up a motionless form on the summit of the Great Douvre. It was Gilliatt.

  He was still stretched out on the rock. This naked body, cold and rigid, no longer shivered. The closed eyelids had a pallid hue. It would have been difficult for an observer to decide whether it was a living body or a corpse.

  The sun seemed to be looking at him.

  If this naked man was not dead, he was so close to death that the least cold wind would be enough to carry him off.

  The wind began to blow, a mild, life-giving wind: the spring breath of May.

  Now the sun was rising higher in the deep blue sky; its rays, falling less horizontally, took on a tinge of red. Its light became heat. It enveloped Gilliatt.

  Gilliatt did not move. If he was breathing it was with a faint respiration that would barely tarnish a mirror.

  The sun continued its ascent, now shining less obliquely on Gilliatt. The wind, which had originally been merely mild, was now warm.

  The rigid naked body was still without movement, but the skin now seemed less pallid.

  The sun, approaching the zenith, fell vertically on the summit of the Great Douvre. A prodigality of light streamed down from the sky, and was joined by the vast reverberations from the serene ocean. The rock began to warm up, and conveyed some of its warmth to the man.

  A sigh stirred Gilliatt's chest: he was alive.

  The sun continued its caresses, which were now almost ardent. The wind, which was already the wind of midday and of spring, drew close to Gilliatt, like a mouth breathing gently on him. He moved.

  The sea was ineffably calm. Its murmur was like the lullaby of a nurse cradling a child. The waves seemed to be rocking the reef to sleep.

  The seabirds, now familiar with Gilliatt, fluttered anxiously above him--no longer with their former wariness but with an air of tenderness and sympathy. They uttered little cries, as if calling to him. A seagull, which seemed fond of him, was tame enough to perch near him and began to talk to him. He seemed not to hear. It jumped onto his shoulder and gently pecked at his lips.

  Gilliatt opened his eyes. The birds, pleased but still shy, flew off.

  He stood up, stretched like a lion awakened from sleep, ran to the edge of the summit platform, and looked down at the defile between the two Douvres. The paunch was still there, intact. The plug had held: the sea had probably not troubled it much. All was saved.

  Gilliatt was no longer tired. He had recovered his strength. His faintness had been merely a sleep. He baled out the paunch, bringing the breach in the hull above the waterline; then he dressed, ate and drank, and was happy.

  The leak, inspected in daylight, required more work to repair it than Gilliatt had thought. The damage had been serious and took the whole of the day to put right.

  On the following morning, at daybreak, he took down the barrier he had constructed and opened up the way out of the defile. Then, clad in the rags that had mastered the leak and wearing Clubin's belt with its seventy-five thousand francs, standing erect in the paunch, now fully seaworthy, with the Durande's engines beside him, with a favorable wind and a tranquil sea, Gilliatt left the Douvres reef and set his course for Guernsey.

  As he left the reef he might have been heard--if anyone had been there to hear him--humming under his breath the tune of "Bonny Dundee."

  PART III

  DERUCHETTE

  BOOK I

  NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT

  I

  THE HARBOR BELL

  The St. Sampson of our day is almost a town; the St. Sampson of forty years ago was almost a village.

  When the long nights of winter were over and spring had come, people cut their evenings short and went to bed when night fell. The parish of St. Sampson had formerly been subject to a curfew, and it still maintained the habit of blowing out its candles early. People went to bed and rose from bed with daylight. These old Norman villages tend to be like chicken roosts.

  Apart from a few well-to-do families of townsfolk St. Sampson has a population of quarrymen and carpenters. The harbor is a boat repair yard. All day long the men of St. Sampson are engaged in extracting stone and shaping wood: here the pickax is at work, there the hammer. The day is spent working oak timber and granite. In the evening the men are dead tired and sleep like logs: heavy work makes for heavy slumbers.

 
One evening in early May, after briefly watching the crescent moon amid the trees and listening to Deruchette walking by herself in the garden of Les Bravees in the evening coolness, Mess Lethierry had withdrawn to his room overlooking the harbor and gone to bed. Douce and Grace were already in bed. Except for Deruchette the whole house was asleep. In St. Sampson, too, everyone was asleep. Everywhere doors and shutters were closed. No one was moving in the streets. A few lights, like winking eyes about to close, shone here and there through dormer windows, showing that the servants were going to bed. It was some time since nine o'clock had struck on the old ivy-covered Norman belfry that shares with St. Brelade's church on Jersey the peculiarity of having a date consisting of four ones (IIII), for the year eleven hundred and eleven.

  Mess Lethierry's popularity in St. Sampson had depended on his success; and when his success was taken from him his popularity had declined. Bad luck seems to be contagious, and unlucky people seem to be stricken with plague, so quickly are they put into quarantine. The eligible sons of good families now avoided Deruchette. The isolation of Les Bravees was so complete that the household knew nothing of the great event--great by local standards--which that day had been the talk of St. Sampson. The rector of the parish, the Reverend Ebenezer Caudray, was now rich. His uncle, the magnificent dean of St. Asaph's, had died in London, and the news had been brought from England that very morning by the mail sloop, the Cashmere, whose mast could be seen in the anchorage at St. Peter Port. The Cashmere was due to leave for Southampton on the following day at noon, and, it was said, would have among its passengers the rector, recalled to England at short notice for the official reading of the will, to say nothing of other urgent matters concerned with the inheritance of a large estate. All day there had been much confused discussion of the event. The Cashmere, the Reverend Ebenezer, his late uncle, his wealth, his departure, his future prospects had kept the town in a buzz of interest. Only one house, Les Bravees, knew nothing of the news and remained silent.

  Mess Lethierry had thrown himself down on his hammock, fully dressed. Since the catastrophe that had hit the Durande this was all he felt like doing. Prisoners regularly resort to their wretched pallet, and Lethierry was a prisoner of his chagrin. He went to bed each night: it was a truce, a breathing space, a suspension of thought. Did he sleep at night? No. Did he lie awake? No. It would be true to say that for the past two and a half months--it was two and a half months since the catastrophe--Mess Lethierry had been living like a sleepwalker. He had not yet regained possession of his faculties. He was in the cloudy and confused state of mind of those who have suffered great afflictions. His reflections did not amount to thought; his sleep did not bring him repose. During the day he was not a man in a waking state, and during the night he was not a man asleep. He was up, and then he was lying down: that was all. When he was in his hammock he had some moments of forgetfulness that he called sleep; chimeras floated over him and within him, and the cloud of night, filled with blurred faces, passed through his brain; the emperor Napoleon dictated his memoirs to him; there were several Deruchettes; strange birds perched in trees, the streets of Lons-le-Saunier turned into snakes. Nightmares offered a respite from despair. He spent his nights in dreaming, his days in daydreams.

  Sometimes he would spend a whole afternoon, motionless, at the window of his bedroom overlooking the harbor, with his head held low, his elbows on the stone sill, his hands over his ears, turning his back on the world, his eyes fixed on the old iron ring in the wall of the house, a few feet below the window, where the Durande used to be moored--watching the rust gathering on the ring.

  Mess Lethierry was now reduced to the mere mechanical habit of living.

  The most valiant of men come to this when they are deprived of their ruling idea: it is the effect of an existence emptied of its substance. Life is a journey and an idea is the itinerary. Without an itinerary the journey comes to an end. The objective is lost, and the strength to pursue it has gone. Fate has a mysterious discretionary power. It can touch with its rod even our moral being. Despair is almost the destitution of the soul. Only the greatest spirits hold out against it; and perhaps not even they.

  Mess Lethierry meditated continually, if absorption can be called meditation, in the depths of a kind of turbid abyss. Sometimes a few heartbroken words would escape him, like: "The only thing now is to ask up there for a ticket of leave."

  There was a contradiction in Lethierry's nature, a nature as complex as the sea, of which, as it were, he was the product. Mess Lethierry did not pray.

  To be powerless is a strength. In the presence of those two blind forces, destiny and nature, man in his very powerlessness has found a support in prayer.

  Man seeks help from his dread; he asks his fears for aid; anxiety bids him kneel.

  Prayer is a tremendous force peculiar to the soul and of the same kind as mystery. Prayer appeals to the magnanimity of the world of shadows; it looks on the mystery of being with the eyes of darkness itself; and we feel it possible that, faced with the powerful fixity of this suppliant glance, the Unknown may be disarmed. Even the glimpse of this possibility is a consolation.

  But Lethierry did not pray.

  In happier days God had existed for him--almost, as it were, in flesh and blood. He spoke to Him, pledged his word to Him, from time to time almost shook His hand. But in his hours of trouble, which occurred fairly often, God was eclipsed. This is what happens when we have made ourselves a good God, a friendly personal God.

  In Lethierry's present state of mind there was only one clear vision--Deruchette's smile. Beyond that everything was black.

  For some time now, no doubt because of the loss of the Durande, Deruchette's charming smile had been seen more rarely. She seemed preoccupied. Her birdlike and childlike little ways had gone. She was no longer to be seen curtseying to welcome the rising sun when the cannon fired at daybreak: "Good morning, day! Do come in!" At times she had a very serious air--a sad change in this sweet creature. She tried, however, to laugh with Mess Lethierry and to divert him; but day by day her gaiety was increasingly tarnished and covered with dust, like the wings of a butterfly with a pin through its body. Moreover, whether from chagrin at her uncle's chagrin--for there are griefs that are the reflection of other griefs--or for some other reason, she seemed now to be much inclined toward religion. In the time of the old rector, Mr. Jaquemin Herode, she had been accustomed to go to church no more than four times a year, but now she was assiduous in her attendance. She never missed a service either on Sunday or Thursday. The pious souls of the parish were pleased to see this improvement; for it is a great happiness when a young girl, who is exposed to so many dangers in the world of men, turns to God. This at least sets the minds of her parents at rest in the matter of love affairs.

  In the evening, whenever the weather allowed, she would walk for an hour or two in the garden of Les Bravees. At these times she was almost as thoughtful as Mess Lethierry, and was always alone. She was always the last to go to bed. This did not prevent Douce and Grace from always to some extent keeping an eye on her, with the instinctive watchfulness that goes with domestic service, as some relief from the dullness of service.

  In his present abstracted state of mind Mess Lethierry failed to observe these little changes in Deruchette's habits. In any case he was not a born duenna. He did not even notice her punctuality in attending church. Tenacious as he was in his prejudice against the clergy and all their doings, he would not have looked with pleasure on her churchgoing.

  Nevertheless, his own moral situation was in the process of changing. Chagrin is a cloud that changes its form.

  As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune. Virile characters like Lethierry recover after a time. Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy.

>   Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad.

  Such elegiac consolations were not for Lethierry; neither the nature of his temperament nor the circumstances of his misfortune left any room for such subtle nuances. But at the present time the dreamy contemplation of his first despair had been tending for the last week or so to dissipate. Though still sad, he was less inert; he was still somber, but he was no longer totally overwhelmed; he was beginning to take some notice of facts and events; and he was beginning to feel something of the phenomenon that might be called a return to reality.

  Thus during the day, in the ground-floor room of his house, he did not listen to what people were saying, but he heard them. One morning Grace came, quite triumphant, to tell Deruchette that Mess Lethierry had opened a newspaper.

  This half-acceptance of reality is in itself a favorable symptom, a sign of convalescence. Great misfortunes have a deadening effect. It is by such little acts that a man recovers from his stupor. But this improvement seems at first to aggravate his condition. His earlier dreamlike condition of mind dulled the pain; his sight was blurred and he was insensitive to feeling; but now that he can see clearly, nothing escapes him and everything draws blood. The wound reopens. The pain is increased by all the details that he now apprehends. He sees it all again in memory, and memory brings regret. This return to reality is accompanied by all kinds of bitter aftertastes. You are better, and yet worse. This was what Lethierry was now experiencing: his suffering had become more distinct.