Читать книгу A Tale of Brittany (Mon frère Yves) - Pierre Loti - Страница 3

The pay-book of my brother Yves differs in no wise from the pay-book of all other sailors.

It is covered with a yellow-coloured parchment paper and, as it has travelled much about the sea, in many a ship's locker, it is absolutely wanting in freshness.

In large letters on the cover appears:

KERMADEC, 2091. P.

Kermadec is his family name; 2091, his number in the army of the sea; and P., the initial letter of Paimpol, the port at which he was enrolled.

Opening the book, one finds, on the first page, the following description:

"Kermadec (Yves-Marie), son of Yves-Marie and Jeanne Danveoch. Born 28 August, 1851, at Saint Pol-de-Léon (Finistère). Height 5 ft. 11 inches. Hair brown, eyebrows brown, eyes brown, nose ordinary, chin ordinary, forehead ordinary, face oval.

"Distinctive marks: tattooed on the left breast with an anchor and, on the right wrist, with a bracelet in the form of a fish."

These tattooings were still the fashion, some ten years ago, for your true sailor. Executed on board the Flore by a friend in an hour of idleness, they became an object of mortification for Yves, who many a time had tortured himself in an effort to obliterate them. The idea that he was marked in this indelible manner, and that he might be recognized always and everywhere by these little blue designs was to him absolutely insupportable.

Turning over the page one comes across a series of printed leaves setting out, in a clear and concise form, all the shortcomings to which sailors are subject, with, opposite them, the tariff of the penalties incurred—from insignificant irregularities which may be expiated by a few nights in irons to the dire rebellions which are punished by death.

Unhappily this quotidian reading has never sufficed to inspire the salutary awe which it should, either in sailors in general, or in my poor Yves in particular.

Follow several pages of manuscript containing the names of ships, with blue stamp impressions, figures and dates. The quartermasters, men of taste as they are, have decorated this part of the book with elegant flourishes. It is here that particulars of his voyages are set out and details of the pay he has received.

The first years, in which he earned fifteen francs a month, ten of which he saved for his mother; years passed in the onrush of the wind, in which he lived half naked at the top of those great oscillating shafts which are the masts of ships; years in which he wandered without a care in the world over the changing desert of the sea; then the more troubled years in which love was born and took shape in the virgin and untutored heart—to be translated into brutal orgies or into dreams naïvely pure according to the hazard of the places to which the wind drove him, according to the hazard of the women thrown into his arms; terrible awakenings of the heart and senses, wild excesses, and then the return to the ascetic life of the ocean, to the sequestration on the floating monastery; all this may be divined behind these figures and these names and dates which accumulate, year by year, in the poor little pay-book of a sailor. A whole poem of strange adventures and sufferings lies within its yellow pages.