Peyrol, gazing into space, spoke in a level murmur.
“I remember a naval officer trying to shake old Peyrol off his feet and not managing to do it. I may be disparu but I am too solid yet for any blancbec that loses his temper, devil only knows why. And it’s a good thing that you didn’t manage it, else I would have taken you down with me, and we would have made our last somersault together for the amusement of an English ship’s company. A pretty end that!”
“Don’t you remember me saying, when you mentioned that the English would have sent a boat to go through our pockets, that this would have been the perfect way?” In his stony immobility, with the other man leaning towards his ear, Peyrol seemed a mere insensible receptacle for whispers, and the lieutenant went on forcibly: “Well, it was in allusion to this affair, for, look here, gunner, what could be more convincing, if they had found the packet of dispatches on me! What would have been their surprise, their wonder! Not the slightest doubt could enter their heads. Could it, gunner? Of course it couldn’t. I can imagine the captain of that corvette crowding sail on her to get this packet into the admiral’s hands. The secret of the Toulon fleet’s destination found on the body of a dead officer. Wouldn’t they have exulted at their enormous piece of luck! But they wouldn’t have called it accidental. Oh no! They would have called it providential. I know the English a little too. They like to have God on their side—the only ally they never need pay a subsidy to. Come, gunner, would it not have been a perfect way?”
Lieutenant Réal threw himself back, and Peyrol, still like a carven image of grim dreaminess, growled softly:
“Time yet. The English ship is still in the Passe.” He waited a little in his uncanny living-statue manner before he added viciously: “You don’t seem in a hurry to go and take that leap.”
“Upon my word, I am almost sick enough of life to do it,” the lieutenant said in a conversational tone.
“Well, don’t forget to run upstairs and take that packet with you before you go,” said Peyrol as before. “But don’t wait for me, I am not sick of life. I am disparu, and that’s good enough. There’s no need for me to die.”
And at last he moved in his seat, swung his head from side to side as if to make sure that his neck had not been turned to stone, emitted a short laugh, and grumbled: “Disparu! Hein! Well, I am damned!” as if the word “vanished” had been a gross insult to enter against a man’s name in a register. It seemed to rankle, as Lieutenant Réal observed with some surprise; or else it was something inarticulate that rankled, manifesting itself in that funny way. The lieutenant, too, had a moment of anger which flamed and went out at once in the deadly cold philosophic reflection: “We are victims of the destiny which has brought us together.” Then again his resentment flamed. Why should he have stumbled against that girl or that woman, he didn’t know how he must think of her, and suffer so horribly for it? He who had endeavoured almost from a boy to destroy all the softer feelings within himself. His changing moods of distaste, of wonder at himself and at the unexpected turns of life, wore the aspect of profound abstraction, from which he was recalled by an outburst of Peyrol’s, not loud but fierce enough.
“No,” cried Peyrol, “I am too old to break my bones for the sake of a lubberly soldier in Paris who fancies he has invented something clever.”