Michel trudged home to supper. All day he had been forking heavy, slippery seaweed into carts. His arms and legs ached, but he had earned five francs. That would be something to tell Uncle Ives when he got back from his cruise to the Bay of Biscay.
The seaweed, washed up on the beach by a month’s storm, was community property, prized as fertilizer and as bedding for the live stock. The mayor had appointed a day for each family to gather its share, and Michel had been hired by an absent citizen to harvest his part of this strange sea crop.
As he started home, the world, hitherto wrapped in a golden mist, began to darken; and looking at the sky, Michel was surprised to see a great mounting cloud, which had not been there a few moments before. As he opened the cottage door, it was nearly jerked from his hand by a sudden gust. He dropped his wooden shoes at the door, and entered the kitchen in his felt slippers.
His grandmother sat near the fireplace, giving little Martha her supper. On the hearthstone knelt Guen. There was an appetizing smell of frying fish. Now and then a drop of rain came down the chimney and splashing into the pan, made a great sizzling. The wooden shutters, closing with a bang, shut out the last glimmer of twilight. ‘Go out, Michel, and fasten them open,’ said Grandmother; ‘we will keep the lamp in the window to-night.’
‘I am glad Uncle Ives got off the coast before the storm came,’ said Guen. ‘Don’t you suppose the Jeanot is in the Bay of Biscay by this time, Grandmother?’
‘God knows,’ sighed the old woman. She turned the fish in the pan, Josef came in red-cheeked and muddy from a game of ball, and they had supper.
The bed in which Michel and Josef slept was built into the wall and heaped with pillows and bedding. It had sliding doors, which could be closed, so that it looked like a handsome carved wardrobe; but usually they were left open, showing the pretty chintz curtains. That night when Michel, sitting on Uncle Ives’s sea chest, pulled off his stockings, the storm was raging around the little stone house like a howling wolf. But the four children slept like dormice under their feather beds. Only grandmother, peering between her curtains, watched the flickering lamp all night long.
Michel had never been beyond the smell of the sea, and there was brine in his blood. He knew that sooner or later he, too, like his father and all his forebears, would become an Iceland fisherman; in fact he lived for the day when, as mousse or cabin boy, he would take ship under his Uncle Ives for the Arctic Circle; for Michel lived in the town of Paimpol, in that part of Brittany called the Côte du Nord. From this port every year in March a fishing fleet sails for northern waters, to return in August for a few weeks’ respite before starting for the Bay of Biscay to buy salt for the next year’s catch. Toward September those who have not slipped forever into the silence of the North are back in their homes for the cozy winter months, there to make ready for a fresh voyage in the spring. But there are always some for whom there is only a tablet in the gray church by the sea, like the one for Michel’s father, ‘Jules Karadoc, lost on the Iceland Coast’; and under the darkened rafters hangs the model of many a brave little ship gone down.
For the people of Brittany storm and shipwreck are things of every day. They work and eat and sleep as usual, but the women, who do not go to sea, learn to sigh with the wind and to pray as they work.
The next morning, after Josef and Guen had gone to school, Michel, taking a pail, ran down to the beach for clams. The sun was shining again, the tide was out, and only the banks of seaweed and the driftwood flung high on the beach gave any sign of last night’s storm.