I asked: “Whatever is that whistling?”
“The falling cinders.”
It was indeed caused by the brazier dropping a shower of burning twigs into the sea. They fell down red-hot or in flames, and went out with a soft, penetrating, queer protest, sometimes like a chuckle and sometimes like the short greeting of a passing emigrant. Drops of resin droned like cannonballs or hornets and suddenly expired in their plunge into the water. The noise was certainly like human voices: an indescribable, faint murmur of life straying about in the shadow near us.
Suddenly Trémoulin shouted: “Ah—the beggar!”
He threw his spear and when he pulled it up I saw what looked like a big lump of throbbing red flesh wrapped round the teeth of the fork and sticking to the wood. It was an octopus that was twining and untwining long, soft tentacles covered with suckers around the handle.
He held up his victim and I saw the sea-monster’s two huge eyes look at me; they were bulging, terrible eyes that emerged from a kind of pocket like a tumour. The beast, thinking it was free, slowly stretched out one of its feelers in my direction. The end was as fine as a piece of thread and as soon as the greedy arm had hooked itself on to the seat, another was uncurled and raised itself to follow the first.
There was a feeling of irresistible force about that soft, sinewy mass. Trémoulin opened his knife and plunged it swiftly between the beast’s eyes. We heard a sigh, a sound of escaping air, and the octopus ceased to move. It was not dead, however, but its power was destroyed, its spendour gone, it would never again drink blood or suck a crab dry.
Trémoulin unwound the now useless tentacles from the sides of the boat and suddenly filled with anger, shouted: “Wait a bit, I’ll make it hot for you.”
With a stroke of the spear he picked up the beast, raised it in the air, held it to the fire, rubbing the thin fleshy ends of its arms against the red-hot bars of the brazier. They crackled as the heat of the fire twisted and contracted them and I ached all over at the idea of how the hideous beast must be suffering.
“Don’t do that,” I cried.
He replied quite calmly: “Bah! Anything’s good enough for that thing,” and threw the burst, lacerated body of the octopus into the boat, where it dragged itself between my legs to the hole full of brackish water and lay down to die amongst the dead fish.
And so our fishing continued until the wood began to run short. When there was not enough to keep the fire going, Trémoulin thrust the brazier into the water, and night, which the brilliant flames had kept at a distance, fell upon us, wrapping us once more in its gloom.
The old sailor began to row slowly and regularly. I had no idea what was port or what land, nor what was sea or what the entrance to the gulf. The octopus still moved about close to my feet and my nails hurt as if they too had been burnt. Suddenly I saw the lights: we were entering the port.
“Are you sleepy?” my friend asked.
“No, not in the least.”
“Then let us go and have a talk on the roof.”
“With pleasure.”
Just as we reached the terrace I saw the crescent moon rising behind the mountains. The warm breath of the wind slipped slowly by, full of faint, almost imperceptible, odours, as if it were sweeping up the scents of all the gardens and towns of every sun-scorched country, on its way.
Around us the white houses with their square roofs descended towards the sea, we could see human forms lying down or standing up on the roofs, either asleep or dreaming in the starlight; whole families wrapped in long, flannel garments resting in the hush of the night from the heat of the day.
Suddenly it seemed as if the soul of the East was taking possession of me, that poetic, legendary soul of a simple and fanciful people. My mind was full of the Bible and the Arabian Nights: I heard prophets telling of miracles, and saw princesses in silk Turkish trousers sauntering about on palace terraces, while incense whose smoke curled up in the shape of genii, burned in silver lamps.
I said to Trémoulin: “You are lucky to live here.”
He replied: “Chance brought me here.”
“Chance?”
“Yes, chance and misfortune.”
“You have been miserable?”
“Very.”
He was standing up in front of me, wrapped in his burnous, and the tone of his voice made me shiver, it was so full of misery.
After a moment’s silence he continued:
“I can tell you my grief. It may do me good to talk about it.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Do you really mean it?”
“Yes.”
“Very well, then. You remember what I was like at college: more or less a poet, brought up in a chemist’s shop. My dream was to write books, and I tried after I had taken my degree but did not succeed. I published a volume of verse, then a novel, without selling more of one than of the other, then I wrote a play which was never acted.
“Then I fell in love, but I am not going to tell you all about that.
“Next door to my father’s shop there lived a tailor who had a daughter, it was she I loved. She was intelligent and had passed Higher School Examinations, she was mentally alert, her mind being in keeping with her body. She looked fifteen although she was really twenty-two. She was very small, with refined features, slim figure, delicate complexion, in every way like a dainty watercolour. Her nose, mouth, her blue eyes and fair hair, her smile, figure, hands,
