We are questioned in our turn. Yves replies: "My mother is still living at Plouherzel with my two sisters. My two brothers, Gildas and Goulven, are at sea, on American whalers. I myself have been for the last ten years in the Navy."
There is not much time to lose if we want to see before we go the old home of the Kermadecs. It is quite near, by the very side of the church. They show it to us from the door, and advise us to ask to be allowed to see the room on the left, on the first floor; that is the room in which Yves was born.
At the side of the house is the large abandoned park of the bishopric of Léon, where, it seems, Yves, when he was quite a little child, used to play every day in the grass with Goulven. It is very thick to-day, this grass of May, and full of Easter daisies and silenes. In the park roses and lilac are growing wild now, as in a wood.
We knock at the door of the house which the good women have pointed out to us, and those who live there are a little surprised at the request we make. But we do not inspire distrust, and they ask us only not to make a noise when we enter the first floor room, on account of the old grandmother who is sleeping there and is on the point of death. And then, considerately, they leave us alone.
We enter on tiptoe. It is a large room, poor and almost empty. The things in it seem to have a presentiment of the grim visitor who is expected; one is tempted almost to ask whether he has not already arrived, and our eyes glance uneasily at a bed, the curtains of which are drawn. Yves looks all round, trying to stretch his intelligence into the past, to force himself as it were to remember. But it is no use. It is finished; and even here he can find nothing.
We were descending preparatory to leaving, when suddenly something came back to him like a light in the distance.
"Ah!" he said, "I think now that I recognize this staircase. Wait! Below there should be a door on that side leading into a yard, and a well on the left with a large tree, and, at the back, the stable where we used to keep the horse with the white hoofs."
It was as if there had suddenly come a break in the clouds. Yves stood still on the stairs, gazing through this gap which had just been opened on the past; he was thrilled to feel himself at grips with that mysterious thing which men call memory.
Below, in the yard, we found everything as he had described it, the well on the left, the tree, the stable. And Yves said to me with an emotion of awe, removing his hat as if he were by a grave:
"Now I can see quite clearly my father's face."