Keep me! . . . They would keep me! . . . Oh! . . . I lowered my head and turned my eyes away, for I could feel that their expression had changed, had become a little wild. I could not respond to my mother with a word or a caress.
Such a serene confidence upon her part distressed me cruelly, for the moment in which I heard her say, “We shall keep you,” I understood, for the first time in my life, what a firm hold on my mind the project of going away had taken--of going even farther than my brother, of going everywhere upon the face of the earth.
A sea-faring life terrified me, and I relished the idea of it as little as ever. To a little being like me, so greatly attached to my home, bound to it by a thousand sweet ties, the very thought of it made my heart bleed. And besides, how could I break the news of such a decision to my parents, how give them so much pain and thus flagrantly outrage their wishes! But to renounce all my plans, always to remain in the same place, to be upon this earth, and to see nothing of it--what a squalid, disenchanting future! What was the use to live, what the good of growing up for that?
And in that empty parlor with its disordered chairs, one even overturned, and while I was still under the dark spell of our sad farewells, there beside my mother, leaning against her with eyes turned away and with soul overwhelmed with sorrow, I suddenly remembered the old log-book which I had read at sunset last spring at Limoise. The short sentences written down upon the old paper with yellow ink came slowly back to me one after the other with a charm as lulling and perfidious as that exercised by a magic incantation:
“Fair weather . . . beautiful sea . . . light breeze from the south-east . . . Shoals of dolphins . . . passing to larboard.”
And with a shudder of almost religious awe, with pantheistic ecstasy, my inward eye saw all about me the sad and vast blue splendor of the South Pacific Ocean.
A great calm, tinged with melancholy, fell upon us after my brother's departure, and to me the days were monotonous in the extreme.
They had always thought of sending me to the Polytechnic school, but it had not been decided upon irrevocably. The wish to become a sailor, which had obtruded itself upon me almost against my will, charmed and terrified me in an almost equal degree; I lacked the courage necessary to settle such a grave matter with myself, and I always hesitated to speak of it. The upshot was that I decided to reflect over it until my next vacation, and thus by my irresolution and delay I secured to myself a few more months of careless childhood.