CHAPTER II
"OUT, BRIEF CANDLE!"
About a fortnight later, as the sky was darkening at the approach of
the rains, and the heat more heavily weighed over yellow Tonquin,
Sylvestre brought to Hanoi, was sent to Ha-Long, and placed on board a
hospital-ship about to return to France.
He had been carried about for some time on different stretchers, with
intervals of rest at the ambulances. They had done all they could for
him; but under the insufficient conditions, his chest had filled with
water on the pierced side, and the gurgling air entered through the
wound, which would not close up.
He had received the military medal, which gave him a moment's joy. But
he was no longer the warrior of old--resolute of gait, and steady in
his resounding voice. All that had vanished before the long-suffering
and weakening fever. He had become a home-sick boy again; he hardly
spoke except in answering occasional questions, in a feeble and almost
inaudible voice. To feel oneself so sick and so far away; to think
that it wanted so many days before he could reach home! Would he ever
live until then, with his strength ebbing away? Such a terrifying
feeling of distance continually haunted him and weighed at every
wakening; and when, after a few hours' stupor, he awoke from the
sickening pain of his wounds, with feverish heat and the whistling
sound in his pierced bosom, he implored them to put him on board, in
spite of everything. He was very heavy to carry into his ward, and
without intending it, they gave him some cruel jolts on the way.
They laid him on one of the iron camp bedsteads placed in rows,
hospital fashion, and then he set out in an inverse direction, on his
long journey through the seas. Instead of living like a bird in the
full wind of the tops, he remained below deck, in the midst of the bad
air of medicines, wounds, and misery.
During the first days the joy of being homeward bound made him feel a
little better. He could even bear being propped up in bed with
pillows, and at times he asked for his box. His seaman's chest was a
deal box, bought in Paimpol, to keep all his loved treasures in;
inside were letters from Granny Yvonne, and also from Yann and Gaud, a
copy-book into which he had copied some sea-songs, and one of the
works of Confucius in Chinese, caught up at random during pillage; on
the blank sides of its leaves he had written the simple account of his
campaign.
Nevertheless he got no better, and after the first week, the doctors
decided that death was imminent. They were near the Line now, in the
stifling heat of storms. The troop-ship kept on her course, shaking
her beds, the wounded and the dying; quicker and quicker she sped over
the tossing sea, troubled still as during the sway of the monsoons.
Since leaving Ha-Long more than one patient died, and was consigned to
the deep water on the high road to France; many of the narrow beds no
longer bore their suffering burdens.
Upon this particular day it was very gloomy in the travelling
hospital; on account of the high seas it had been necessary to close
the iron port-lids, which made the stifling sick-room more unbearable.
Sylvestre was worse; the end was nigh. Lying always upon his wounded
side, he pressed upon it with both hands with all his remaining
strength, to try and allay the watery decomposition that rose in his
right lung, and to breathe with the other lung only. But by degrees
the other was affected and the ultimate agony had begun.
Dreams and visions of home haunted his brain; in the hot darkness,
beloved or horrible faces bent over him; he was in a never-ending
hallucination, through which floated apparitions of Brittany and
Iceland. In the morning was called in the priest, and the old man, who
was used to seeing sailors die, was astonished to find so pure a soul
in so strong and manly a body.
He cried out for air, air! but there was none anywhere; the
ventilators no long gave any; the attendant, who was fanning him with
a Chinese fan, only moved unhealthy vapours over him of sickening
staleness, which revolted all lungs. Sometimes fierce, desperate fits
came over him; he wished to tear himself away from that bed, where he
felt death would come to seize him, and rush above into the full fresh
wind and try to live again. Oh! to be like those others, scrambling
about among the rigging, and living among the masts. But his extreme
effort only ended in the feeble lifting of his weakened head;
something like the incompleted movement of a sleeper. He could not
manage it, but fell back in the hollow of his crumpled bed, partly
chained there by death; and each time, after the fatigue of a like
shock, he lost all consciousness.
To please him they opened a port at last, although it was dangerous,
the sea being very rough. It was going on for six in the evening. When
the disk was swung back, a red light entered, glorious and radiant.
The dying sun appeared upon the horizon in dazzling splendour, through
a torn rift in a gloomy sky; its blinding light glanced over the
waves, and lit up the floating hospital, like a waving torch.
But no air rushed in; the little there was outside, was powerless to
enter and drive before it the fevered atmosphere. Over all sides of
that boundless equatorial sea, floated a warm and heavy moisture,
unfit for respiration. No air on any side, not even for the poor
gasping fellows on their deathbeds.
One vision disturbed him greatly; it was of his old grandmother,
walking quickly along a road, with a heartrending look of alarm; from
low-lying funereal clouds above her, fell the drizzling rain; she was
on her way to Paimpol, summoned thither to be informed of his death.
He was struggling now, with the death-rattle in his throat. From the
corners of his mouth they sponged away the water and blood, which had
welled up in quantities from his chest in writhing agony. Still the
grand, glorious sun lit up all, like a conflagration of the whole
world, with blood-laden clouds; through the aperture of the port-hole,
a wide streak of crimson fire blazed in, and, spreading over
Sylvestre's bed, formed a halo around him.
At that very moment that same sun was to be seen in Brittany, where
midday was about to strike. It was, indeed, the same sun, beheld at
the precise moment of its never-ending round; but here it kept quite
another hue. Higher up in the bluish sky, it kept shedding a soft
white light on grandmother Yvonne, sitting out at her door, sewing.
In Iceland, too, where it was morning, it was shining at that same
moment of death. Much paler there, it seemed as if it only showed its
face by some miracle. Sadly it shed its rays over the fjord where /La
Marie/ floated; and now its sky was lit up by a pure northern light,
which always gives the idea of a frozen planet's reflection, without
an atmosphere. With a cold accuracy, it outlined all the essentials of
that stony chaos that is Iceland; the whole of the country as seen
from /La Marie/ seemed fixed in one same perspective and held upright.
Yann was there, lit up by a strange light, fishing, as usual, in the
midst of this lunar-like scenery.
As the beam of fiery flame that came through the port-hole faded, and
the sun disappeared completely under the gilded billows, the eyes of
the grandson rolled inward toward his brow as if to fall back into his
head.
They closed his eyelids with their own long lashes, and Sylvestre
became calm and beautiful again, like a reclining marble statue of
manly repose.
