THE ROVER & SUSPENSE (Napoleonic Novels). Джозеф Конрад
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buried himself here.” The rover suffered from great instability of feelings for he passed in a flash from melancholy into fierceness. “And he was quiet enough till you came sniffing around this hole. More than once in my life I had occasion to wonder how soon the jackals would have a chance to dig up my carcass; but to have a naval officer come scratching round here was the last thing . . . .” Again a change came over him. “What can you want here?” he whispered, suddenly depressed.
The lieutenant fell into the humour of that discourse. “I don't want to disturb the dead,” he said, turning full to the rover who after his last words had fixed his eyes on the ground. “I want to talk to the gunner Peyrol.”
Peyrol, without raising his eyes from the ground, growled: “He isn't here. He is disparu. Go and look at the papers again. Vanished. Nobody here.”
“That,” said Lieutenant Réal, in a conversational tone, “that is a lie. He was talking to me this morning on the hillside as we were looking at the English ship. He knows all about her. He told me he spent nights making plans for her capture. He seemed to be a fellow with his heart in the right place. Un homme de coeur. You know him.”
Peyrol raised his big head slowly and looked at the lieutenant.
“Humph,” he grunted. A heavy, non-committal grunt. His old heart was stirred, but the tangle was such that he had to be on his guard with any man who wore epaulettes. His profile preserved the immobility of a head struck on a medal while he listened to the lieutenant assuring him that this time he had come to Escampobar on purpose to speak with the gunner Peyrol. That he had not done so before was because it was a very confidential matter. At this point the lieutenant stopped and Peyrol made no sign. Inwardly he was asking himself what the lieutenant was driving at. But the lieutenant seemed to have shifted his ground. His tone, too, was slightly different. More practical.
“You say you have made a study of that English ship's movements. Well, for instance, suppose a breeze springs up, as it very likely will towards the evening, could you tell me where she will be to-night? I mean, what her captain is likely to do.”
“No, I couldn't,” said Peyrol.
“But you said you have been observing him minutely for weeks. There aren't so many alternatives, and taking the weather and everything into consideration, you can judge almost with certainty.”
“No,” said Peyrol again. “It so happens that I can't.”
“Can't you? Then you are worse than any of the old admirals that you think so little of. Why can't you?”
“I will tell you why,” said Peyrol after a pause and with a face more like a carving than ever. “It's because the fellow has never come so far this way before. Therefore I don't know what he has got in his mind, and in consequence I can't guess what he will do next. I may be able to tell you some other day but not to-day. Next time when you come . . . to see the old gunner.”
“No, it must be this time.”
“Do vou mean you are going to stay here tonight?”
“Did you think I was here on leave? I tell you I am on service. Don't you believe me?”
Peyrol let out a heavy sigh. “Yes, I believe you. And so they are thinking of catching her alive. And you are sent on service. Well, that doesn't make it any easier for me to see you here.”
“You are a strange man, Peyrol,” said the lieutenant. “I believe you wish me dead.”
“No. Only out of this. But you are right, Peyrol is no friend either to your face or to your voice. They have done harm enough already.”
They had never attained to such intimate terms before. There was no need for them to look at each other. The lieutenant thought: “Ah! He can't keep his jealousy in.” There was no scorn or malice in that thought. It was much more like despair. He said mildly:
“You snarl like an old dog, Peyrol.”
“I have felt sometimes as if I could fly at your throat,” said Peyrol in a sort of calm whisper. “And it amuses you the more.”
“Amuses me? Do I look light-hearted?”
Again Peyrol turned his head slowly for a long, steady stare. And again the naval officer and the rover gazed at each other with a searching and sombre frankness. This new-born intimacy could go no further.
“Listen to me, Peyrol . . . .”
“No,” said the other. “If you want to talk, talk to the gunner.”
Though he seemed to have adopted the notion of a double personality the rover did not seem to be much easier in one character than in the other. Furrows of perplexity appeared on his brow, and as the lieutenant did not speak at once Peyrol the gunner asked impatiently:
“So they are thinking of catching her alive?” It did not please him to hear the lieutenant say that it was not exactly this that the chiefs in Toulon had in their minds. Peyrol at once expressed the opinion that of all the naval chiefs that ever were, Citizen Renaud was the only one that was worth anything. Lieutenant Réal, disregarding the challenging tone, kept to the point.
“What they want to know is whether that English corvette interferes much with the coast traffic.”
“No, she doesn't,” said Peyrol: “she leaves poor people alone, unless, I suppose, some craft acts suspiciously. I have seen her give chase to one or two. But even those she did not detain. Michel — you know Michel — has heard from the mainland people that she has captured several at various times. Of course, strictly speaking, nobody is safe.”
“Well, no. I wonder now what that Englishman would call `acting suspiciously.' ”
“Ah, now you are asking something. Don't you know what an Englishman is? One day easy and casual, next day ready to pounce on you like a tiger. Hard in the morning, careless in the afternoon, and only reliable in a fight, whether with or against you, but for the rest perfectly fantastic. You might think a little touched in the head, and there again it would not do to trust to that notion either.”
The lieutenant lending an attentive ear, Peyrol smoothed his brow and discoursed with gusto of Englishmen as if they had been a strange, very little-known tribe. “In a manner of speaking,” he concluded, “the oldest bird of them all can be caught with chaff, but not every day.” He shook his head, smiling to himself faintly as if remembering a quaint passage or two.
“You didn't get all that knowledge of the English while you were a gunner,” observed the lieutenant dryly.
“There you go again,” said Peyrol. “And what's that to you where I learned it all? Suppose I learned it all from a man who is dead now. Put it down to that.”
“I see. It amounts to this, that one can't get at the back of their minds very easily.”
“No,” said Peyrol, then added grumpily, “and some Frenchmen are not much better. I wish I could get at the back of your mind.”
“You would find a service matter there, gunner, that's what you would find there, and a matter that seems nothing much at first sight, but when you look into it, is about as difficult to manage properly as anything you ever undertook in your life. It puzzled all the big-wigs. It must have, since I was called in. Of course I work on shore at the Admiralty and I was in the way. They showed me the order from Paris and I could see at once the difficulty of it. I pointed it out and I was told. . .”
“To come here,” struck in Peyrol.
“No. To make arrangements to carry it out.”
“And you began by coming here. You are always coming here.”
“I began by looking for a man,” said the naval officer with emphasis.
Peyrol looked at him searchingly. “Do you mean to say that in the whole fleet you couldn't have found a man?”
“I never attempted to look for one there. My chief agreed with