Elle Read Online Free Page B

not seem as if anyone has taken thought for my future. In fact, it seems more and more like a joke or an execution. But I cannot read the General’s face as he stands with his hands behind his back, Léon’s stained and bitten leash dangling almost to the deck.
    A quarrel breaks out, a brief, violent discussion as to whether or not the barrel of salt fish might be needed on the voyage into the interior, and wouldn’t I surely be able to find food for myself on this hospitable island, birds’ eggs, for example? The Comte d’Epirgny trembles at my side, from an access of pity, I think, though he also seems torn. He is an indecisive man, kindly and lustful but lacking in courage and largeness of character. I wonder what he is thinking.
    Conscience prevails, and I am allowed the barrel of salt fish. Once that decision is made, the ship’s company seems to relent, and all sorts of extra provisions are thrown into the rowboat: an iron hatchet with a broken handle, a rusty dagger, a sword someone sat on and bent, a pewter plate, a bag of onions, a half-dozen fat candles, the bedding from my cabin, sundry combs, trinkets, necklaces, earrings (none of my valuable jewels, which vanish in transit), a three-legged chair, a quantity of fishnet in need of mending, the stump of a mending needle, some old ship’s sail for shelter. The diminutive boat rides low in the water, thumping against the hull planks with the motion of the waves. It looks like the repository for everything useless, old and broken, the things no one knew what to do with but weren’t quite ready to throw overboard.
    The last to go over is my nurse Bastienne, trussed like a capon in a butcher shop, with a rope under her armpits and her hairy legs swinging beneath her skirts. One of her wooden clogs falls off as she struggles and drops into the gulf with a splash.She weeps, wails and crosses herself, holds out her hands to the General and prays to the Virgin in a pathetic and undignified display of cowardice. Her hysteria is infectious. My knees buckle, but I catch Richard’s sleeve to steady myself before anyone notices.
    I gaze at the foreshore of my little island kingdom. It is rank wilderness, all trees and rocks with birds swinging on the off-shore breezes. As for the Great River of Canada, I cannot see the other side of its huge mouth. It looks and acts like a sea or the ocean, grey waves slopping against the rocks, tides rushing in and out, horizon like the curve of a dirty eggshell. Words that come to mind: desolate, dreary, deserted, dreadful, drafty.
    Civilization’s vanguard consists of a dirty, smelly, rat-infested hulk, notable for its familiar (though stale and often rotten) food, and a ship’s company of every social class save royalty but mostly one-eyed, impoverished, limping, lousy, raggedy, snaggletoothed dregs, led by a captious and judgmental social climber. For weeks I have wished myself off this ship, wished to feel dry land under my feet, to have the whole world to roam in instead of this cockleshell imitation of a world. What was I thinking?
    Half a dozen deckhands wrench me from my thoughts, hoisting me up like a sack. Someone takes the opportunity to cup a breast, a moment of sly lust I do not find unappealing. The ship’s block creaks as I dangle clear, swinging to and fro in front of the crew and colonists, a host of moony faces looking suddenly subdued. The seabirds are up all along the island shore, expectant, disturbed at my ungainly flight. Richard bites his hands. The General bites his moustache. I plop down awkwardly on the pyramid of my effects and am saved from toppling into the water only by a jerk of the rope, which almost drags me into the air again.
    We start for shore, six pale, underfed seamen rowing with their eyes on the water slopping in the bottom of the boat. Bastienne grips my hands and wails. The birds cry out. Richard’s face looms above us as we slip along the