The sea was rough; there was a head wind. They beat to windward for a long time, and were hard put to it to reach their ship.
[CHAPTER VI]
Yves awoke slowly towards evening. He had first of all sensations of suffering, which came one by one, as after a kind of death. He was cold, cold to the marrow of his bones.
Above all he was bruised and battered and benumbed—stretched for some hours now on a hard bed: and he made a first effort, scarcely conscious, to turn over. But his left foot, in which suddenly he felt a sharp pain, was caught in a rigid thing against which he realized at once it was vain to struggle. And he recognized the sensation: he understood now: he was in irons.
He was already familiar with the inevitable morrow of wild nights of pleasure: to be shackled by a ring to an iron bar for days on end! And this place in which he must be, he divined it without taking the trouble to open his eyes, this recess narrow as a cupboard, and dark, and damp, with its fusty smell, and its dim pale light falling from an opening above: the hold of the Magicien.
But he confused this to-morrow with others which had been spent elsewhere—far away, at the other side of the earth, in America, or in the ports of China. . . . Was this for thrashing the alguazils of Buenos Ayres? Or was it that sanguinary fight at Rosario which had brought him to this? Or, again, the affair with the Russian sailors at Hong-Kong? He was not very clear, to a thousand miles or so, having forgotten in what part of the world he was.
All the winds and all the waves of the sea had carried the Magicien to all the countries of the world; they had shaken it, rolled it, battered it from without, but without succeeding in disturbing the various things which were within this hold—without displacing the diver's dress which must be there hanging behind him, with its great eyes and morse-like head, and without changing the smell of rats, of damp, and tar.
He still felt very cold, so horribly cold that it was like a pain in his bones. And he realized that his clothes were wet and his body also. The pitiless rain of the preceding night, the wind, the darkling sky, returned vaguely to his memory. . . . He was not after all in the blue countries of the Equator! He remembered now. He was in France, in Brittany. This was the return of which he had so long dreamed.
But what had he done to be in irons already, almost before he had set foot on his native land? He tried to remember but could not. Then suddenly a recollection came to him, as of a dream: when they were hoisting him on board, he pulled himself together a little, and said that he would climb unaided, and then, as ill-luck would have it, he found himself face to face with a certain old warrant officer whom he held in aversion. And straightway he had fallen to abusing him most vilely; then there had been some sort of scuffle and what happened afterwards he did not know, for at that moment he had fallen inert again and lost consciousness.
But then ... the leave that had been promised him to go to his village of Plouherzel would not now be given him! . . . All the things for which he had hoped, for which he had longed, during three years of misery, were lost! He thought of his mother and his heart smote him sorely; his eyes opened bewildered, seeing only what was within, dilated in a strange fixity by a tumult of interior things. And, in the hope that it was only an evil dream, he tried to shake his tortured foot in its iron ring.