The Drowned Man
I
Everyone in Fécamp knew the story of old Mother Patin. She had undoubtedly been unhappy with her man, had old Mother Patin; or her man had beaten her during his lifetime, as a man threshes wheat in his barns.
He was owner of a fishing-smack, and he had married her a long time ago, because she was pleasing, although she was poor.
Patin, a good seaman, but a brute, frequented old Auban’s tavern, where, on ordinary days, he drank four or five brandies, and on days when he had made a good catch, eight or ten, and even more, just for the fun of it, as he said.
The brandy was served to customers by old Auban’s daughter, a pleasant-faced dark-haired girl, who drew custom to the house merely by her good looks, for no one had ever wagged a tongue against her.
When Patin entered the tavern, he was content to look at her and hold her in civil conversation, the easy conversation of a decent fellow. When he had drunk the first brandy, he was already finding her pleasant to look on; at the second, he was winking at her; at the third, he was saying: “Miss Désirée, if you would only …” without ever finishing the sentence; at the fourth, he was trying to hold her by her petticoat to embrace her; and when he had reached the tenth, it was old Auban who served him with the rest.
The old wine-seller, who knew every trick of the trade, used to send Désirée round between the tables to liven up the orders for drinks; and Désirée, who was not old Auban’s daughter for nothing, paraded her petticoat among the drinkers and bandied jests, with a smile on her lips, and a sly twinkle in her eye.
By dint of drinking brandies, Patin grew so familiar with Désirée’s face that he thought of it even at sea, when he was throwing his nets into the water, out on the open sea, on windy nights and calm nights, on moonlit nights and black nights. He thought of it when he was standing at the helm in the after part of his boat, while his four companions slept with their hands on their arms. He saw her always smiling at him, pouring out the tawny brandy with a lift of her shoulders, and then coming towards him, saying:
“There! Is this what you want?”
And by dint of treasuring her so in eye and mind, he reached such a pitch of longing to marry her that, unable to restrain himself from it any longer, he asked her in marriage.
He was rich, owner of his boat, his nets and a house at the foot of the cliff, on the Retenue; while old Auban had nothing. The affair was arranged with much enthusiasm, and the wedding took place as quickly as possible, both parties being, for different reasons, anxious to make it an accomplished fact.
But three days after the marriage was over, Patin was no longer able to imagine in the least how he had come to think Désirée different from other women. He must have been a rare fool to hamper himself with a penniless girl who had wheedled him with her cognac, so she had, with the cognac into which she had put some filthy drug for him.
And he went cursing along the shore, breaking his pipe between his teeth, swearing at his tackle; and having cursed heartily, using every known term of abuse and applying them to everyone he could think of, he spat out such anger as remained in his spleen on the fish and crabs drawn in one of his nets, throwing them all in the baskets to an accompaniment of oaths and foul words.
Then, returning to his house, where he had his wife, old Auban’s daughter, within reach of his tongue and his hand, he was very soon treating her as the lowest of the low. Then, as she listened resignedly, being used to the paternal violence, he became exasperated by her calm, and one evening he knocked her about. After this, his home became a place of terror.
For ten years, nothing was talked of on the Retenue but the beatings Patin inflicted on his wife, and his habit of cursing when he spoke to her, whatever the occasion. He cursed, in fact, in a unique way, with a wealth of vocabulary and a forceful vigour of delivery, possessed by no other man in Fécamp. As soon as his boat, returning from fishing, appeared at the mouth of the harbour, they waited expectantly for the first broadside he would discharge on the pier, from his deck, the moment he saw the white bonnet of his other half.
Standing in the stern, he tacked, his glance fixed ahead and on the sheets when the sea was running high, and in spite of the close attention required by the narrow difficult passage, in spite of the great waves running mountain-high in the narrow gully, he endeavoured to pick out—from the midst of the women waiting in the spray of the breakers for the sailors—his woman, old Auban’s daughter, the pauper wench.
Then, as soon as he had caught sight of her, in spite of the clamour of waves and wind, he poured on her a volley of abuse with such vocal energy that everyone laughed at it, although they pitied her deeply. Then, when his boat reached the quay, he had a habit of discharging his ballast of civilities, as he said, while he unloaded his fish, which attracted round him all the rascals and idlers of the harbour.
It issued from his mouth, now like cannon-shots, terrible and short, now like thunderclaps that rolled for five minutes, such a tempest of oaths that he seemed to have in his lungs all the storms of the Eternal Father.
Then, when he had left his boat, and was face to face with her in the middle of a crowd of curious spectators and fishwives, he fished up again from the bottom of the hold a fresh cargo of insults and hard words, and escorted her in such fashion to their home, she in front, he behind, she weeping, he shouting.
Then, alone with her, doors shut, he came to blows on the least pretext. Anything was enough to make him lift his hand, and once he had begun, he never stopped, spitting in her face, all the time, the real causes of his hate. At each blow, at each thump, he yelled: “Oh, you penniless slut, oh, you guttersnipe, oh, you miserable starveling, I did a fine thing the day I washed my mouth out with the firewater of your scoundrel of a father.”
She passed her days now, poor woman, in a state of incessant terror, in a continuous trembling of soul and of body, in stunned expectation of insults and thrashings.
And this lasted for ten years. She was so broken that she turned pale when she was talking to anyone, no matter who, and no longer thought of anything but the beatings that threatened her, and she had grown as skinny, yellow and dried up as a smoked fish.
II
One night when her man was at sea she was awakened by the noise like the growling of a beast which the wind makes when it gets up, like an unleashed hound. She sat up in bed, uneasy, then, hearing nothing more, lay down again; but almost at once, there was a moaning in the chimney that shook the whole house and ran across the whole sky as if a pack of furious animals had crossed the empty spaces, panting and bellowing.
Then she got up and ran to the harbour. Other women were running from all sides with lanterns. Men came running and everyone was watching the foam flashing white in the darkness on the crest of the waves out at sea.
The storm lasted fifteen hours. Eleven sailors returned no more, and Patin was among them.
The wreckage of his boat, the Jeune-Amélie, was recovered off Dieppe. Near Saint-Valéry, they picked up the bodies of his sailors, but his body was never found. As the hull of the small craft had been cut in two, his wife for a long time expected and dreaded his return; for if there had been a collision, it might have happened that the colliding vessel had taken him on board, and carried him to a distant country.
Then, slowly, she grew used to the thought that she was a widow, even though she trembled every time that a neighbour or a beggar or a tramping pedlar entered her house abruptly.
Then, one afternoon, almost four years after the disappearance of her man, she stopped, on her way along the Rue aux Juifs, before the house of an old captain who had died recently and whose belongings were being sold.
Just at this moment, they were auctioning a parrot, a green parrot with a blue head, which was regarding the crowd with a discontented and uneasy air.
“Three francs,” cried the seller, “a bird that talks like a lawyer, three francs.”
A friend of widow Patin jogged her elbow.
“You ought to buy that, you being rich,” she said. “It would be company for you; he is worth more than thirty francs, that bird. You can always sell him again for twenty to twenty-five easy.”
“Four francs, ladies, four francs,” the man repeated. “He sings vespers and preaches like the priest. He’s a phenomenon … a miracle!”
Widow Patin raised the bid by fifty centimes, and they handed her the hook-nosed creature in a little cage and she carried him off.
Then she installed him in her house, and as she was opening the iron-wire door to give the creature a drink, she got a bite on the finger that broke the skin and drew blood.
“Oh, the wicked bird,” said she.
However, she presented him with hemp-seed and maize, then left him smoothing his feathers while he peered with a malicious air at his new home and his new mistress.
Next morning day was beginning to break, when widow Patin heard, with great distinctness, a loud, resonant, rolling voice, the voice of Patin, which shouted:
“Get up, slut.”
Her terror was such that she hid her head under the bedclothes, for every morning, in the old days, as soon as he had opened his eyes, her dead husband shouted in her ears those three words that she knew well.
Trembling, huddled into a ball, her back turned to the thrashing that she was momentarily expecting, she murmured, her face hidden in the bed:
“God Almighty, he’s here! God Almighty, he’s here! He’s come back, God Almighty!”
Minutes passed; no other sound broke the silence of her room. Then, shuddering, she lifted her head from the bed, sure that he was there, spying on her, ready to strike.
She saw nothing, nothing but a ray of sun falling across the windowpane, and she thought:
“He’s hiding, for sure.”
She waited a long time, then, a little reassured, thought:
“I must have been dreaming, seeing he doesn’t show himself.”
She was shutting her eyes again, a little reassured, when right in her ears the furious voice burst out, the thunderous voice of her drowned man, shouting:
“Damn and blast it, get up, bitch.”
She leaped out of bed, jerked out by her instinctive obedience, the passive obedience of a woman broken in by blows, who still remembers, after four years, and who will always remember, and always obey that voice. And she said:
“Here I am, Patin. What do you want?”
But Patin did not answer.
Then, bewildered, she looked round her, and she searched everywhere, in the cupboards, in the chimney, under the bed, without finding anyone, and at last let herself fall into a chair, distracted with misery, convinced that the spirit of Patin itself was there, near her, come back to torture her.
Suddenly, she remembered the loft, which could be reached from outside by a ladder. He had certainly hidden himself there to take her by surprise. He must have been kept by savages on some shore, unable to escape sooner, and he had come back, wickeder than ever. She could not doubt it, on the mere sound of his voice.
She asked, her head turned towards the ceiling:
“Are you up there, Patin?”
Patin did not answer.
Then she went out, and in an unutterable terror that set her heart beating madly, she climbed the ladder, opened the garret window, looked in, saw nothing, entered, searched, and found nothing.
Seated on a truss of hay, she began to cry; but while she was sobbing, shaken by an acute and supernatural terror, she heard, in the room below her, Patin telling his story. He seemed less angry, calmer, and he was saying:
“Filthy weather … high wind … filthy weather. I’ve had no breakfast, damn it.”
She called through the ceiling:
“I’m here, Patin; I’ll make you some soup. Don’t be angry. I’m coming.”
She climbed down at a run.
There was no one in her house.
She felt her body giving way as if Death had his hand on her, and she was going to run out to ask help from the neighbours, when just in her ear the voice cried:
“I’ve had no breakfast, damn it.”
The parrot, in his cage, was regarding her with his round, malicious, wicked eye.
She stared back at him, in amazement, murmuring:
“Oh, it’s you.”
He answered, shaking his head:
“Wait, wait, wait, I’ll teach you to faint.”
What were her thoughts? She felt, she realised that this was none other than the dead man, who had returned and hidden himself in the feathers of this creature, to begin tormenting her again, that he was going to swear, as he did before, all day, and find fault with her, and shout insults to attract their neighbours’ attention and make them laugh. Then she flung herself across the room, opened the cage, seized the bird, who defended himself and tore her skin with his beak and his claws. But she held him with all her might, in both hands, and throwing herself on the ground, rolled on top of him with the frenzy of a madman, crushed him to death and made a mere rag of flesh of him, a little soft green thing that no longer moved or spoke, and hung limp. Then, wrapping him in a dishcloth as a shroud, she went out, in her shift, and barefooted, crossed the quay, against which the sea was breaking in small waves, and shaking the cloth, let fall this small green thing that looked like a handful of grass. Then she returned, threw herself on her knees before the empty cage, and utterly overcome by what she had done, she asked pardon of the good God, sobbing, as if she had just committed a horrible crime.