At a distance the stranger seemed a young man. He was dressed like a fisherman, in a brown canvas smock and trousers. His feet were bare; he was tall and broad-shouldered. Simon shouted to him:
"I've come from Dieppe. You, what town do you come from? Did you take long to get here? Are you alone?"
He could see that the fisherman was smiling and that his tanned, clean-shaven face wore a frank and happy expression.
They met and clasped hands; and Simon repeated:
"I started from Dieppe at one in the morning. And you? What port do you come from?"
The man began to laugh and replied in words which Simon could not understand. He did not understand them, though he well enough recognized the language in which they were uttered. It was English, but a dialect spoken by the lower orders. He concluded that this was an English fisherman employed at Calais or Dunkirk.
He spoke to him again, dwelling on his syllables and pointing to the horizon:
"Calais? Dunkirk?"
The other repeated these two names as well as he could, as though trying to grasp their meaning. At last his face lit up and he shook his head.
Then, turning round and pointing in the direction from which he had come, he twice said: