He had no trouble in finding a blue sailor-suit at the first dealer’s. He hurried back to his hotel, changed clothes. “I ought to have a few brooms, or something like that.” Buy some old brooms from the “boys”? Absurd: Why would a sailor be parading about on land with his prooms? To look more handsome? Completely idiotic. If he crossed the gangway with brooms, it would be because he had just bought them on land. They must be new. Let’s go and buy some.
He entered the shop with his usual Clappique-air. Before the disdainful look of the English salesman, he exclaimed: “Into my arms!” put the brooms on his shoulder, turned round, knocking down one of the brass lamps, and went out.
“Into my arms,” in spite of his deliberate extravagance, expressed what he felt: up to that point, he had been playing an uncomfortable comedy, through an obscure prompting of his conscience and through fear, but without freeing himself from the unavowed sense that he would fail; the salesman’s disdain-although Clappique, forgetting about his costume, had not assumed the manner of a sailor-proved to him that he could succeed. With the brooms on his shoulder, he was walking towards the steamer, watching all eyes as he went, to find in them the con^firmation of his new status. As when he had stopped before the gangplank, he was stupefied to discover how indifferent his fate was to others-it existed only for him. The travelers, awhile ago, had gone aboard without noticing the man left standing on the quay, perhaps to be killed; the passers-by were now looking indifferently at this sailor; no one came out of the crowd to express astonishment or to recognize him; not even a curious face. Not that there was anything about an assumed life to astonish him, but this time it was imposed upon him, and his real life perhaps depended on it. He was thirsty. He stopped at a Chinese bar, put down his brooms. As soon as he started to drink, he realized that he was not thirsty at all, that he had merely wanted to try himself out once more. The manner in which the man behind the counter gave him back his change was enough to enlighten him. Since he had changed his costume, the world around him had become transformed. He tried to discover how: it was the way people looked at him that had changed. The habitual single wimess of his mythomania had become a crowd.
At the same time-pleasure or a defensive instinct-the general acceptance of his new civil status pervaded him, too. He had found, suddenly, by accident, the most dazzling success of his life. No, men do not exist, since a costume is enough to enable one to escape from oneself, to find another life in the eyes of others. It was the same feeling of strangeness, of happiness that had seized him the first time he had found himself in a Chinese crowd-but now the sensation had not only surface, but depth. “Now I’m living a story, not merely telling one!” Carrying his brooms like guns, he crossed the gangplank, passed the man at the bulwark (he felt his knees almost giving way), and found himself on the deck. He hurried forward among the passengers of the bridge, put his brooms on a coil of rope. He was safe, at least until they struck the first port. However, he was far from feeling at ease. One of the deck passengers, a Russian, came up to him:
“You belong to the crew?”
And, without waiting for an answer:
“Do you like the life on board ship?”
“Say, my dear fellow, you have no idea! A Frenchman likes to travel, that’s a fact: not a word. The officers are sons of bitches but no worse than the owners, and you don’t sleep very well (I don’t like hammocks-a matter of taste) but you eat weU. And you see things. When I was in South America, the missionaries had made the savages learn 1-little Latin canticles by heart-taught them day and night. The bishop arrives, the missionary beats the time: silence-the savages are struck dumb with respect. But not a word! the canticle comes all by itself: the parrots of the forest, my g-good man, who have never heard anything else, sing it with reverence. And just imagine, in the Sea of Celebes, ten years ago, I came across some Arabian caravels, adrift, sculptured like cocoanuts and full of corpses-victims of the plague — with their arms hanging like this over the bulwarks, under a whirling cloud of seagulls. Absolutely. ” “You’re lucky. I’ve been traveling for seven years, and I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“You must introduce the means of art into life, my g-good man, not in order to make art-God, no! — but to make more life. Not a word!”
He tapped him on the belly, and turned away prudently: a car which he recognized was stopping at the end of the gangplank-Ferral was returning to France.
A cabin-boy was beginning to pace the first-class deck, ringing the bell of departure. Each stroke resounded in Clappique’s chest.
“Europe,” he thought; “the feast is over. Now, Europe.” It seemed to be coming towards him with the bell that was approaching, no longer as one of liberation, but as of a prison. But for the menace of death he would have gone back on land.
“Is the third-class bar open?” he asked the Russian. “Been open for an hour. Anyone can go there till we are at sea.”
Clappique took him by the arm:
“Let’s go and get drunk. ”
Six o’clock in the evening
In the large hall-formerly a school-yard-two hundred wounded Communists were waiting to be taken out and shot. Katov, among the last ones brought in, was propped up on one elbow, looking. All were stretched out on the ground. Many were moaning, in an extraordinarily regular way; some were smoking, as had done those of the Post, and the wreaths of smoke vanished upward to the ceiling, already dark in spite of the large European windows, darkened by the evening and the fog. It seemed very high, above all those prostrate men. Although daylight had not yet disappeared, the atmosphere was one of night. “Is it because of the wounds,” Katov wondered, “or because we are all lying down, as in a station? It is a station. We shall leave it for nowhere, and that’s all. ”
Four Chinese sentries were pacing back and forth among the wounded, with fixed bayonets, and their bayonets reflected the weak light strangely, sharp and straight above all those formless bodies. Outside, deep in the fog, yellowish lights-street-lamps no doubt-also seemed to be watching them. As if it had come from them (because it also came from out there in the fog) a whistle rose and submerged the murmurs and groans: that of a locomotive; they were near the Chapei station. In that vast hall there was something atrociously tense, which was not the expectation of death. Katov was enlightened by his own throat: it was thirst-and hunger. With his back against the wall, he was looking from left to right: many faces that he knew, for a great number of the wounded were fighters of the ch'ons. Along one of the narrower walls, a free space, three meters wide, was reserved. “Why are the wounded lying on top of each other,” he asked aloud, “instead of going over there?” He was among the last brought in. Leaning against the wall, he began to raise himself up; although he suffered from his wounds, it seemed to him that he would be able to hold himself upright; but he stopped, still bent over: although not a single word had been said, he sensed around him such a startling terror that it made him motionless. In the looks? He could scarcely make them out. In the attitudes? They were, above all, the attitudes of wounded men, absorbed in their own suffering. Yet, however it was transmitted, the dread was there — not fear, but terror, that of beasts, of men who are alone before the inhuman. Katov, without ceasing to lean against the wall, straddled the body of his neighbor.
“Are you crazy?” asked a voice from the level of the floor.
“Why?”
It was both a question and a command. But no one answered. And one of the guards, five meters away, instead of knocking him down, looked at him with stupefaction.