75 лучших рассказов / 75 Best Short Stories

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.’

‘You’re afraid, then, to risk anything?’

‘I’m afraid of nothing, moi . But I am not a fool either. I don’t want to kick away my sabots [307] till I am certain of a pair of shoes. I can go barefoot here. I don’t want to find water where I counted on land. As for America, I’ve been there already.’

‘Ah! you’ve been there?’

‘I’ve been to Brazil and Mexico and California and the West Indies.’

‘Ah!’

‘I’ve been to Asia, too.’

‘Ah!’

‘ Pardio , to China and India. Oh, I’ve seen the world! I’ve been three times around the Cape.’

‘You’ve been a seaman then?’

‘Yes, ma’am; fourteen years.’

‘On what ship?’

‘Bless your heart, on fifty ships.’

‘French?’

‘French and English and Spanish; mostly Spanish.’

‘Ah?’

‘Yes, and the more fool I was.’

‘How so?’

‘Oh, it was a dog’s life. I’d drown any dog that would play half the mean tricks I used to see.’

‘And you never had a hand in any yourself?’

‘ Pardon , I gave what I got. I was as good a Spaniard and as great a devil as any. I carried my knife with the best of them, and drew it as quickly, and plunged it as deep. I’ve got scars, if you weren’t a lady. But I’d warrant to find you their mates on a dozen Spanish hides!’

He seemed to pull with renewed vigor at the recollection. There was a short silence.

‘Do you suppose,’ said Madame Bernier, in a few moments ‘do you remember – that is, can you form any idea whether you ever killed a man?’

There was a momentary slackening of the boatman’s oars. He gave a sharp glance at his passenger’s countenance, which was still so shaded by her position, however, as to be indistinguishable. The tone of her interrogation had betrayed a simple, idle curiosity.

He hesitated a moment, and then gave one of those conscious, cautious, dubious smiles, which may cover either a criminal assumption of more than the truth or a guilty repudiation of it.

‘Mon Dieu! [308] ’ said he, with a great shrug, ‘there’s a question!….. I never killed one without a reason.’

‘Of course not,’ said Hortense.

‘Though a reason in South America, ma foi! [309] ’ added the boatman, ‘wouldn’t be a reason here.’

‘I suppose not. What would be a reason there?’

‘Well, if I killed a man in Valparaiso [310] – I don’t say I did, mind – it’s because my knife went in farther than I intended.’

‘But why did you use it at all?’

‘I didn’t. If I had, it would have been because he drew his against me.’

‘And why should he have done so?’

‘Ventrebleu! [311] for as many reasons as there are craft in the harbor.’

‘For example?’

‘Well, that I should have got a place in a ship’s company that he was trying for.’

‘Such things as that? is it possible?’

‘Oh, for smaller things. That a lass should have given me a dozen oranges she had promised him.’

‘How odd!’ said Madame Bernier, with a shrill kind of laugh. ‘A man who owed you a grudge of this kind would just come up and stab you, I suppose, and think nothing of it?’

‘Precisely. Drive a knife up to the hilt into your back, with an oath, and slice open a melon with it, with a song, five minutes afterward.’

‘And when a person is afraid, or ashamed, or in some way unable to take revenge himself, does he – or it may be a woman – does she get someone else to do it for her?’