“See here,” said Gaspard, “it’s strange I was thinking of that hooker lying in the lagoon over there.”
“I was thinking, maybe, there is stuff worth looking for a’board her if one could get at it.”
Yves laughed.
“Yes, if you could get at it—if you could get at it—and she built over with coral a foot thick; and if you could break through it what would you find? dead men’s bones. It’s like your flowers under the sea.” He tapped the dottle out of his pipe, rose, stretched, and turned toward the little tent, whilst Gaspard without a word continued smoking; he could have struck Yves.
The son of a tradesman in Montpellier, he possessed still some rudiments of the education he had received before that fatal day when, driven by the instinct of wandering and the hatred of restraint, he had run away to sea. Yves, the son of long generations of sailors, had gone to sea as a duckling goes to the pond. Gaspard had been taken there by his imagination. He knew himself superior to the lumbering Yves whose fingers were like fish-hooks, who had the manners of a bear and the walk of a walrus, yet Yves was always proving himself (by chance, no doubt) the better and the luckier man.
He turned in under the shelter of the tent where Yves was already snoring, and he slept and dreamt of the docks of Marseilles, of Anisette, and of Yves.