I went down to my room, and went to look at the letter under my old uniform coat. It had a different face: it seemed to me to laugh, and its seals looked rose-coloured. I no longer doubted its good nature, and made it a little signal of friendship.
In spite of that, I put my coat back on the top of it; it worried me. We never thought of looking at it at all for some days, and we were cheerful; but, when we approached the first degree of latitude, we began to stop talking.
One fine morning, I woke rather surprised at feeling no motion in the ship. To tell the truth, I always sleep with one eye open, as they say, and, as I missed the rolling, I opened them both. We had fallen on a dead calm, and it was below the first degree of north latitude, at the 27th of longitude. I put my nose above deck: the sea was as smooth as a bowl of oil; all the spread sails were fallen, clinging to the masts like empty balloons. I said at once: “Come, I shall have time to read you!” looking sideways in the direction of the letter. I waited till evening, at sunset. However, it had to be done: I opened the clock, and hastily pulled out the sealed order.—Well, my dear fellow, I held it in my hands for a quarter of an hour, without being able to read it. At last I said to myself: “This is too much!” and I broke the three seals with my thumb; and, as for the big red seal, I ground it into dust.
After I had read I rubbed my eyes, thinking I had made a mistake.
I re-read the whole letter; I re-read it again; I began once more taking the last line and going back to the first. I didn’t believe it. My legs were shaking under me a little, I sat down; I had a sort of quivering on the skin of my face; I rubbed my cheeks a little with rum, I put some in the hollow of my hands, I pitied myself for being so foolish; but it only lasted a moment; I went up to get some air.
Laurette was so pretty that day, that I didn’t wish to go near her: she had a little white frock, quite plain, her arms bare to the neck, and her long hair loose as she always wore it. She was amusing herself with dipping her other dress into the sea at the end of a string, and laughed as she tried to catch the sea-wrack, a plant that looks like bunches of grapes, and floats on the water in the tropics.
“Do come and see the grapes! come quickly!” she was crying; and her lover leaned on her and bent down, and did not look at the water, for he was looking at her very tenderly.
I signed to the young man to come and speak to me on the quarter-deck. She turned round. I don’t know what I looked like, but she let her string fall; she seized him violently by the arm, and said:
“Oh! don’t go, he is quite pale.”
That might well be; there was something to be pale about. Nevertheless he came to me on the quarter-deck; she looked at us, leaning against the mainmast. For a long time we walked up and down without saying anything. I was smoking a cigar which seemed to me bitter, and I spat it into the water. His eye followed me; I took his arm; I was choking, truly, on my word of honour! I was choking.