The Pitards, page 10
‘Swept overboard with the radio cabin and the funnel.’
‘Are you taking water?’
‘Not a lot. Try to get a message to my wife in Fécamp.’
‘She’s at the coastguard.’
Every word translated into Morse by light took minutes to transmit, and coding mistakes often got in the way.
In Lenglois’ cabin, Lannec was giving dictation:
‘From the Tonnerre-de-Dieu to Fécamp coastguard … We are aside the Françoise and hope to rescue her at dawn …’
‘And all hands alive?’ Lenglois queried, who hadn’t stood down since the start.
‘No, you idiot!’
‘What should I add?’
‘Nothing.’
Other wives must have joined Madame Jallu at the wireless station by now and must be asking the radio operator the same question.
‘They’ll find out soon enough.’
Everybody stayed on duty. From one minute to the next a single wave could bring the men of the Françoise into even greater peril.
‘Will you or will you not go to bed?’ Lannec shouted, putting his face right next to his wife’s.
He did not want to slack off, yet he felt pity for her as she shrank humbly into herself. He imagined her eyes betrayed admiration, as it were, or a great wish to submit.
‘Campois! Take my wife to her bed …’
You could hardly stand upright in the wild rolling of the boat on the crests of the waves. Towards two in the morning, five men had to run after carriage wheels that had once again broken free in the hold.
Lannec took his watch out of his pocket from time to time. Dawn would break around 7.30. They were drifting away from the Françoise, and then back again. They started chatting to each other.
‘Are you holding out?’
‘Men are taking turns at the bilge pump. We’ve switched off the lights as a precaution.’
To prevent an explosion, if water should get into the engine! The Tonnerre-de-Dieu’s stokers also put in a few appearances on deck to fill their lungs with spray-laden fresh air.
As they circled around they saw the Seeteufel a dozen times, and each time Lenglois called the captain down, because the German telegraphist with the guttural accent kept on asking for news and repeating his warning to give their nets a wide berth.
9
The sign of the dawning of day on board the Tonnerre-de-Dieu was the distribution of black coffee in tin mugs, except for the officers, who got theirs in bowls from the ghostly steward.
‘Get a bottle of rum and give all hands a dram,’ Lannec said as he glanced at the dawning sky with bad-tempered eye.
It was colder than during the night, and the chill was damp and piercing. All the men had eyes red from fatigue. The sea didn’t abate, quite the opposite, and as the greying light allowed more of the Françoise to be seen, the men’s faces looked glummer still.
The drifting trawler was a sinister sight. Having lost its funnel and bridge, it no longer looked like a proper ship, and it hadn’t been behaving like one for some while.
The swell raised the boat, but as it could not move under its own steam, it was thrown a hundred fathoms or two on the crest of a wave and then pitched into a trough so deep that it went out of sight for a long while.
‘… So what do you say?’ Lannec grunted, knowing that Moinard was at hand.
‘Aye!’
They were both thinking the same thought, as were all the men. Lannec had taken over the wheel from the helmsman and was steering the Tonnerre-de-Dieu to pass as close as possible to the damaged ship so as to assess what could be done.
Seamen still had their coffee mugs in their hands. There was a smell of rum in the air, but the mugs vanished as if by magic the moment the men on board the trawler came into sight.
The Françoise was careening so badly that nobody could stand upright on deck. A dozen men were hanging on to the rails or the capstan, lying flat or on their haunches. They all had lifebelts, which made them look like monsters, but what was just as monstrous was the fact that they weren’t moving at all. Waves crashed over the gunwales and fell on their heads and shoulders, but they didn’t budge an inch as they lay there gazing at the freighter coming towards them at walking pace.
That’s how they had spent the whole night, and now they probably realized themselves how difficult the rescue would be. At one point the two crews, on the Françoise and on the Tonnerre-de-Dieu, were barely fifty metres apart, and the air was clear enough to see in a flash the nervous grins of men who would maybe never be got off the wrecked ship. With furrowed brow Lannec was working out how best to manoeuvre into position when he suddenly saw a figure stand upright on the trawler. The roar of the sea prevented him from hearing anything, but to everyone on the steamer it seemed as if there was a piercing scream.
It was the cabin boy, a lanky lad with red hair. In a fit of madness, he left his position, jumped into the sea and tried to swim towards the Tonnerre-de-Dieu.
His face had been seen for just a few seconds before he dived, but nobody would ever forget it. They would always be able to remember his open mouth, his wild eyes and his windswept head of hair.
The men of the Françoise dragged themselves to the railing to see what would become of the child.
He was raised aloft for a long time by a huge wave, and there was a hope that it would be kind enough to propel him all the way to the freighter. The boy’s arms flailed about. No human being had ever seemed so small and feeble.
They caught sight of him ten metres off, maybe as little as five. Three lifebuoys went over the side, and one landed within his reach.
But he could not get a hold. The wave withdrew. The lad was swept along the side of the hull into the backwash, while Lannec, now powerless, struggled to hold the rudder.
Nothing more could be done for the cabin boy! No lifeboat could survive in those seas.
‘The tall fellow next to the stump of the funnel hiding his face in his hands, that’s his dad,’ Campois intoned. ‘He already lost a son on the Grand Banks, two years ago.’
Lannec turned round and saw Mathilde standing next to Campois. She was staring straight ahead. He didn’t know where she’d come from or where she’d spent the previous few hours. She was bedraggled, like everybody else, and her upper lip was swollen out of shape by an eruptive pimple.
‘Émile!’ she called out.
He didn’t move. Once again he circled the wreck, trying to work out the best tactic.
‘Émile!’
She was shivering. Her brown hair was soaked and hung in clumps over her cheeks.
‘Listen to me, Émile! Let’s leave! I’m scared!’
Lannec shuddered. He’d never heard those last words spoken with such a tone of voice. He was profoundly affected, as if they hadn’t come from a woman, but from a mysterious, non-human voice.
‘Shut up!’
‘We have to leave!’
Moinard, nearby, turned his back. Campois had already taken his distance.
‘Do you hear me? I do not want to die … Émile!’
And she screamed as she watched the great waves tipping the damaged ship ever more on its side.
‘Shut your mouth!’ he yelled, stamping his foot on the floor.
Was he too going to panic? He just could not stand his wife being there behind him.
‘Go away!’
Then it got worse. Like the cabin boy who had jumped into the sea from terror, she lost all self-control. She grabbed the wheel, tried to turn it around to make the ship change course and bawled:
‘I want to go away! I want to go home to France, don’t you hear me? This ship belongs to me! You know we’re going to die …’
‘Moinard,’ Lannec said in the firmest tone he could muster.
Moinard looked at the two of them and said nothing.
‘Get this woman out of my way. Lock her up somewhere …’
But Moinard didn’t budge. Mathilde, who was halfway out of her mind, bleated:
‘You’re murderers! Yes, all of you, murderers! You know very well we’re going to die and you are doing it on purpose!’
Men on the deck raised their heads.
‘I want to go away! I do! You have no right to …’
Seeing that his mate wasn’t lifting a finger, Lannec let go of the wheel and grabbed his wife by the shoulders.
‘Shut up! Come with me!’
‘I want to go!’
‘Of course you do. And we will, soon. But for heaven’s sake, keep quiet!’
He pushed, and she pushed back, scratched his face and hands. He didn’t know what to do with her. In the end, he shoved her into the chart house and bolted the door.
He was pale when he got back to the bridge and he took back the wheel, which Moinard had been handling while he was away.
‘That’s all we needed!’ he muttered as he scanned the sea for the lost boat. To Moinard, he said:
‘What do we do?’
He wasn’t beyond putting a lifeboat out to sea just to get it over with, but it would be almost certain death for the men in it. Or else they could sit it out, circling the Françoise until the sea turned less rough. Only at this time of year, bad weather could last a week or more.
All that remained was to try one more time to get the boat in tow, but like as not the line would snap just like the one they hooked up during the night.
Lenglois appeared on the bridge with sagging shoulders and eyes bleary from exhaustion. He sighed and said:
‘Fécamp is calling every ten minutes. I don’t know what to tell them …’
Day had dawned down there as well! Léon had opened his café, the water was burbling in the percolator, and fishermen in drenched clothes were tramping in in their heavy boots.
‘Stand by with the Lyle gun!’ Lannec told Moinard. ‘Signal the Françoise to stand by to receive!’
‘Did you hear that?’
‘Aye, aye. It’s all right …’
He’d been hearing the noise for five long minutes already! More pieces had broken free in the hold, but tying them down was out of the question at this time. The wind was rising with the sun, and the sea was frothing.
Lenglois, for his part, was looking for Mathilde while pretending to be at a loose end. He found her at last looking out of the porthole of the chart house with her face flat against the pane.
‘Murderers!’ she screamed.
Lannec even felt something akin to remorse. He wanted to get it over with because he couldn’t answer for what he might decide to do on the spur of the moment.
Just as when he was drowsing he almost always had two levels of awareness in his mind, one closer to a dreamscape and the other closer to the real world, he was now able to keep two trains of thought going, without realizing what he was doing.
He kept his eyes on the Françoise and he steered his boat with nerves of steel. But a quite different issue carried on nagging at another level of his mind.
‘Whoever could have told her that?’
Because in the last analysis what had happened was the fault of the person unknown who had told Mathilde that her husband intended to resell the Tonnerre-de-Dieu and never return to France!
It was wrong, obviously. The idea had never crossed his mind. But his wife wasn’t the one who had cooked it up …
Someone … Could it be the same person who had predicted that the Tonnerre-de-Dieu would never make it back to port?
He’d started suspecting everyone around him, Moinard, Monsieur Gilles, Lenglois, the bos’n, even Campois …
And Dame Pitard too, and that Oscar Pitard who …
‘Standing by!’ Moinard shouted from below.
Even in circumstances of this kind, Lannec could manoeuvre his boat on a sixpence, so to speak. He would stand stock still and well balanced on his short and sturdy legs, with his hands glued to the wheel and his eyes never wavering.
‘Slow ahead,’ he told the engine room through the speaking tube.
He got closer to the Françoise than he had ever dared. All men on deck held their breath and had their hearts in their mouths. Just one swirl could pitch the boats into each other.
Not one detail of what was happening on the Françoise went unnoticed.
‘There are fifteen of them,’ Campois counted. ‘There should be twenty-eight.’
Fifteen men waiting for the tow-line but who had maybe already lost faith in it. And they were shivering! They’d not had hot coffee that morning. Lannec saw one of them taking a gulp of spirits, straight from the bottle.
‘Fire!’
The line made an arc in the sky like a whiplash and landed on the trawler’s deck. Men crawled and scrambled to haul it in, grabbed the steel hawser and latched it on to an iron hook.
‘By the grace of the Lord …’ Lannec prayed under his voice.
It wasn’t religious faith or superstition, but an old sailor’s custom. He turned around to see if the cable was playing out properly and saw his wife’s face hard up against the porthole.
She was screaming all on her own in a soundproof cabin!
‘Dead slow ahead!’ he said into the speaking tube.
Down below Mathias must have been black with oil and clinker, since he hadn’t come up from the bowels of the ship for the entire night. But now and again he’d sent up a hand to get news.
The radio operator put in another appearance on the bridge.
‘It’s that German again …’
Lannec didn’t stir. He had no time to lose. He calculated his course and speed to avoid making sharp tugs that would surely snap the line once again. Ironically, at that very moment, a passenger liner en route to Iceland appeared on the horizon (which was not very distant, because of the mist), unaware of the drama unfolding nearby.
‘Even slower!’ Lannec said into the speaking tube.
The rudderless trawler astern of the Tonnerre-de-Dieu was tossing like a kite in the sky that had lost its tail.
Moinard came back up. He looked at the skipper with a question in his eyes. Lannec shook his head.
It could not work! When the line went taut, it would break just like the others.
‘So what then?’
‘I don’t know.’
The fifteen men on the deck of the trawler made a nightmarish sight, for they must have been thinking they were lost and that if the Tonnerre-de-Dieu moved away they had no other chance of being rescued.
‘The bos’n is watching them through binoculars and says they’re drinking every last drop on board.’
‘Good for them!’
The line snapped at that very moment, and two tears of anger dropped from Lannec’s eyes. He took his hands from the wheel and walked off a few paces.
‘It’s Fécamp, skipper.’
‘Aye! So tell them anything you like … Tell them all is well, or all is ill …’
It wasn’t any brighter at ten than at eight, and men and things were just as weighed down by the dense mass of the drizzle – the marine lung, in the words of the ancient explorer.
Sometimes a man on board the Françoise would wave his arms, but they’d all stopped even trying to understand what was meant.
‘They’re drunk,’ the bos’n said.
As was the bos’n, who’d downed a whole bottle of rum on his own.
Alarm overcame the Tonnerre-de-Dieu’s crew as the men listened to the racket coming from the hold.
‘Should I go down?’ Moinard asked, pointing to the forward hatch.
‘Not worth it.’
No! It wasn’t worth risking men’s lives in that hell where rails and axles were waltzing about without restraint.
‘Listen, Moinard …’
He broke off and started again.
‘Listen, Georges, old chum … You’re captain as well … The boat is as much yours as it is mine. If you go down, you won’t come back up.’
Moinard stared hard at Lannec’s clouded eyes.
‘I’m going to put out in the lifeboat with one hand, a volunteer, and we’ll soon see …’
Moinard shook his head.
‘And if that’s what I want to do?’
‘It’s not possible. I am against it. I’d rather have you tied up by your hands and feet.’
‘So are we going to spend a week steaming round in circles here? We don’t even have coal enough!’
By way of reply, Moinard simply looked out towards Iceland. Common sense said he was right. There was nothing that could be done. Other ships would come and wait for calmer seas to take the men off the Françoise, if the Françoise was still afloat by then.
‘Your wife has shredded all the curtains.’
Like a caged dog, Mathilde had attacked everything she could get her hands on in the chart house – she’d torn up the silk curtains and the marine charts, twisted the protractor in two and spilled the bottle of calvados on the floor. Now she was lying on the bench and sobbing so hard as to make her whole body shake.
‘I just can’t …’ Lannec whispered.
Then he heard a shout and turned around. As the Tonnerre-de-Dieu passed close by, a man had jumped off the Françoise, like the carrot-haired cabin boy earlier that morning. But this one was a strong swimmer.
‘The lifebuoys.’
Five, then six, were thrown overboard with ropes attached. The seamen all leaned over the railing and this time the miracle happened. The sailor grasped one of the buoys and, not trusting his own strength, locked himself into it with a grimace of pain on his face.
‘Haul him in gently!’
But however gently they did it he hit the hull twice over, once with his head, once with his shoulder, and when they finally laid him out on deck, he’d passed out.
It was the cabin boy’s father. He had close-cropped hair on his narrow head, and his week-old beard was just as red. His breath smelled of spirits and he was bleeding from his forehead.
The other men on the Françoise were waving their arms as if to ask for news, and Lannec had the lights signal:
‘Alive!’
He regretted doing so straight away, because it set off a mad frenzy. Another fisherman made a large sign of the cross and then jumped in.
‘Starboard all!’ Lannec yelled at the steersman.
