“Ay, the boats are all right for that.”
There was a long silence and then La Touche began in a high complaining voice:
“I was lookout, but it was not my fault, that I swear. I saw nothing till a big three-master broke out of the smother making to cross our bows, no lights shewing, snoring along asleep. Then I shouted. The bridge had seen her too and put the engines full speed ahead. They’d mistaken the distance, thought to clear her. I got aft. Hadn’t reached the port alley way when the smash came. It was all the fault of those fools on the bridge.”
“Who knows,” came Bompard’s voice. “Things happen and what is to be must be. Well, they’re all gone a hundred fathoms deep and here we are drifting about with a dead woman. I’d sooner have any other cargo if I was given my choice.”
“Sure she’s dead?”
“Ay, she’s dead sure enough by the way she’s lying, not a breath in her.”
Neither man suggested that she should be cast over. She ballasted the boat, and for Bompard she was something to lean against.
The French mercantile marine is divided into two great classes, the northerners and southerners. The man from the north is a Ponantaise, the man from the south a Moco.
Bompard was a Moco, La Touche a Ponantaise. They talked and talked, repeating themselves, cursing the “hooker,” the Bridge and the steersman. Once La Touche, grown hysterical, seemed choking against tears.
Then after a while, conversation died out. They had nothing more to talk about. The boat rode easy. There was nothing to do, and these men blunt to life and sea-hardened so that to them all things came in the hour’s work, nodded off, La Touche curled up in the bow, Bompard with his grizzled head on the breast of Mademoiselle de Bromsart.