The Launching of Roger Brook

chilly. As he began to jerk his limbs about to restore his circulation he turned his head, and suddenly saw a moving light no more than fifty yards distant from him. Instantly he began to shout.

A French voice answered his cries, excited shouts followed; the direction in which the light was moving changed, now coming towards him, and the bulk of a small craft, with her sails set, loomed up out of the darkness. A few minutes later he was being hauled aboard her.

Roger's French consisted only of what he had picked up at school during a year of lessons, and the handful of sailors who crowded round him as he was dragged squelching on to the deck questioned him in their Normandy patois, which he found it almost impossible to understand. But his flair for languages had enabled him to make good use of his comparatively slender instruction. He managed to convey to them that he had fallen overboard unnoticed in the darkness from an English merchantman an hour earlier, and to gather that their boat was one of the fishing fleet which he had seen after they had put out from Le Havre, just before dusk that evening.

A short, swarthy man with gorilla-like shoulders, who appeared to be the Captain, took him below to the tiny cabin. He had borne up so far, but now the reaction from the shock and strain of the last few hours set in and he practically collapsed. It was all he could do to swallow the fiery Calvados that was poured down his throat and to keep his senses while his soaking garments were peeled from his body. Within a quarter of an hour of his rescue he was wrapped up like a mummy in four thicknesses of rough blankets and sound asleep.

When he woke it was daylight and he found the swarthy Captain staring down at him. They exchanged a few more sentences with diffi­culty, from which Roger learned that the smack had had a good night's fishing and was now heading back to Le Havre. The man then gave him a basin of gruel and left him.

Roger's first thought was for his possessions, but with great relief he saw that the sausage-like bundle, containing Georgina's jewels, had been laid, still tied by the piece of hemp, beside him, and that near it in a small crockery pot were the gold and silver coins that he had had in his boots. His rescuers were evidently honest men, or, perhaps, having recognised that he was a person of quality by his clothes, had been afraid to rob him; but he felt that on discovering his wealth they must have been highly tempted and might well have thrown him back into the sea after despoiling him, so he blessed their integrity.

As he looked round the mean little cabin he thought it all the more striking from their evident poverty. That of Dan's lugger had smelt almost as evilly, but there had been an air of rough comfort about it; bits of spare clothing, worn but of good thick material, stout leather sea-boots, a flitch of bacon and a cask of rum. Here, there was nothing but the refuse of semi-destitution. Even the Captain, Roger had noticed, wore ragged trousers of some thin cotton stuff and wooden clogs, while the gruel he had been given was obviously the crew's normal fare, as there was no good English odour of liver, onions and bacon lingering about the cabin.

The blankets, too, in which he was wrapped were little better than sacking; but, since his clothes had been taken away, there seemed no alternative to lying there until they were returned to him.

For some two hours he dozed and meditated on his own miraculous preservation, the strange sequence of events that had led to his being where he was and the wretched fate which he had good reason to suppose had overtaken the crew of the Albatross. Then the Captain clattered down the ladder, bringing him his clothes.

They had been rough-dried on deck in the morning sunshine and, apart from the fact that they were sadly rumpled, appeared to be little the worse for their immersion. As he put them on he thought sadly of the fine warm greatcoat, and of the satchell with his silver-mounted pistols and other items he valued in it, all of which he had left behind in the cabin of the Albatross; but he swiftly upbraided himself for worrying about such comparative trifles when a merciful Providence had spared him his life, liberty and little fortune.

On going on deck he found that the smack and some two score of her fellow craft were running before a fair breeze towards a smudge on the horizon which must be the coast of France. The bulk of the little ship was occupied by its hold and this was now more than half-filled by a great heap of shiny silver fish, mainly haddocks, whiting and plaice. While he was looking at it one of the crew leant over and gathered a few of them into a small basket, which he took below. Then, half an hour later, the Captain came to Roger, took off his cap, bowed to him and invited him down to the cabin.

In it he saw that some food had been put ready on a rough pine table, but to his surprise the Captain did not sit down with him. Indicating a bench to Roger he tipped the fish from a saucepan out on to a large earthenware dish, cut from a loaf a great hunk of rye bread which he laid beside it, then stood back, respectfully.

Seeing that he was expected to eat with his fingers, Roger set to. The fish had been plain boiled with a clove of garlic and, owing to their freshness, Roger found them excellent. He would have much preferred them fried, but guessed that these poor fisher-folk could not afford the luxury of fat. There was a jug on the table, but no glass, and on drinking from it, Roger found that it contained still cider of an incredible sourness; and it was all he could do, in deference to his host, to prevent his face screwing up into an agonised grimace.

When he had done the Captain bowed him up on deck again and calling to two of his men they went down to eat their share of the mess of fish.

Roger now found that the coast was clearly visible and an hour later the masts of the shipping in the great port of Le Havre could be clearly made out. The fishing fleet duly put into its own harbour, which was some little way from the big naval dock and the basins in which the merchantmen were berthed.

There were no landing formalities to go through here so it remained only for Roger to thank his rescuers. Having Georgina's jewels safely round his waist again he felt that he could well afford to be at least as generous as he had been with Dan, so he gave the swarthy Captain five out of the fourteen pounds that remained to him. The Frenchman did not appear to have expected so handsome a present and with many barely understandable expressions of gratitude bowed Roger on to the wharf as though he had been a veritable Prince.

Roger had yet to learn that the poor of France were in such a sad condition of slavery to the nobility that, far from daring to lay a finger on him, they would almost certainly have executed any reasonable order that he cared to give without expecting to be rewarded in any way for their services. As it was, he walked off into the town with the happy feeling that he had satisfactorily maintained the honour of England and the belief that every English gentleman was a milor rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

The clocks of the city were dnming half-past three as he landed and it was again a pleasant sunny afternoon. Turning into the Rue Francois 1er, which, as it chanced, was the busiest and most fashionable thoroughfare of the town, he entered its turmoil, turning his head swiftly from side to side as each new sight or sound of this strange foreign town caught his attention. Although the street was com­paratively broad for the times the upper storeys of the houses that lined it projected so far above the lower that they almost met overhead. In this it differed little from the streets that he knew well in Winchester and Southampton, but its occupants seemed to him almost as if they were all got up in fancy dress.

In France, a much richer and more colourful standard of attire was still maintained among the upper classes than had of recent years become the fashion in England. Few gentlemen had as yet abandoned wigs unless their own hair was prolific and in that case they still wore it powdered. Cloth was still regarded as a bourgeois material, except for wear when travelling, and the men from the smart equipages who were shopping in the street were nearly all clad in satin or velvet, while their ladies were dressed in flowered silk skirts with bulging panniers and wore absurd little hats perched on elaborate powdered coiffures, often as much as a foot and a half in height.

Even the common people seemed more colourful than those in English provincial cities, as the grisettes aped the fashions of their betters, the postilions and footmen were all dressed in gaudy liveries, and the sober black of the countrywomen who had come into market was relieved by their picturesque local head-dresses of white lace.

The goods of the shopkeepers in this busy centre were displayed not only in the bow windows but also on trestles outside their shops and the wealth of articles they offered struck Roger as in strange contrast to the dire poverty of the fishermen he had just left.

The street was so crowded with vehicles and its sides so cluttered with stalls that half-a-dozen times Roger had to dodge beneath the heads of horses, or swerve to avoid the wheel of a coach, in order to escape being run over. But at every opportunity he paused to sniff up the spicy scent that came from an epicene or to stare into a shop window in which, to him, unusual goods were displayed.

Behind the narrow panes of one halfway down the street he saw an array of swords, and stopped to look at them. In England, civilians no longer wore swords habitually, but he had been quick to notice that here in France, every man who, from his raiment, had any pretension to quality carried a sword at his side: in fact it was obviously the hallmark by which the gentry distinguished themselves from their inferiors.