Jean had a kind of superstitious horror of all these amulets; at length there were moments when this profusion of grigris vexed and oppressed him. He had no faith in them, to be sure, but to see them everywhere, these negro amulets, to know that nearly all of them possessed the supposed virtue of holding and enmeshing him; to see them hanging from his ceiling and on his walls; to find them hidden under his mats and under his tara—charms everywhere, little objects, old and witchlike, with a malevolent air about them, and weird in shape—to wake up in the morning and feel them being stealthily slipped on to his breast—it seemed to him that in the end all this would weave in the air around him invisible, shadowy shackles.
And then he was short of money.
He said to himself very firmly that he would send Fatou away. He would make use of these last two years to win at last his gold stripes; he would send his old parents a small monthly remittance to make their life more comfortable; and he could still save sufficient money to bring back wedding presents to Jeanne Méry, and to make a respectable contribution towards the expenses of their marriage feast.
But whether it was due to the power of the amulets, to force of habit, or the inertness of a will stupefied by the atmosphere, Fatou continued to hold him in the hollow of her little hand—and he did not drive her away.
He often thought of his betrothed. If he were to lose her he felt that his life would be ruined. The memory of her had a radiance. This “grown-up” girl, of whom his mother had told him, who “was prettier every day,” wore for him an aureole. He tried to form an idea of her face, now that she had come to womanhood, imagining the development of the features of the fifteen-year-old child whom he had left. She was the centre of all his plans for future happiness. It was very precious, this possession of his that was waiting for him over there, very far away, in safe keeping at home.
The image of her, as she was in past days, had already become a little fainter; that of the future was still a little remote, and there were moments when he lost sight of her altogether.
And his old parents! How much he loved them too! For his father he felt a profound and filial love—a veneration which amounted almost to worship.
But perhaps it was his mother who still had the warmest place in his heart.
Take sailors and spahis—all those forlorn young men, who spend their lives far away on the wide ocean, or in the countries of exile, in the midst of the roughest and most abnormal conditions of life. Take the worst of them; choose out the most reckless, the most unruly, the wildest, look into the deepest, most sacred corner of their heart. In that sanctuary you will often find an old mother enshrined—an old peasant from anywhere you please—a Basque in a woollen hood, or a good Breton housewife in a white cap.