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Updated: June 14, 2025
Tanrade shrugged his broad shoulders, and for some moments sipped his glass. At length, he set it down on the broad table at his elbow, and said slowly: "You know how good Alice is, how much she will do for any one she is fond of for a friend, I mean, like the curé.
The curé was coming down it, striding along as straight as a savage, nodding to those who nodded to him. An old fisherwoman hobbled forth and kissed his hand. Young and old, gamblers of the sea, lifted their caps as he passed. "The census of opinion is with him," I whispered to Tanrade, as I regained my chair. "He has his old grit with him, too."
Tanrade was busy between puffs of his pipe in transposing various passages in his latest score. Now and then he would hesitate, finger the carefully thought out bar on his knee, and again his stub of a pencil would fly on through a maze of hieroglyphics that were to the curé and myself wholly unintelligible.
Tanrade did not speak. He had let the despatch slip to the floor and sat staring at his glass. "You'll come, of course," I said with sudden apprehension, but he only shook his head. "What! you're not going?" I exclaimed in amazement. "We'll kill fifty ducks a night it's the gale we've been waiting for."
Only now and then he gave out flashes of his old geniality and even they seemed forced. I was amazed at the change in him, and yet, when I consider all I have heard since, I do not wonder much at his appearance. Despite his hearty Bohemian spirit, Tanrade, like most musicians, is a dreamer and as ready as a child to believe anything and anybody.
"There there mais voyons!" I exclaimed in a vain effort to stop her tears "mais voyons! Come, you must not cry like that." Little by little she ceased crying, until her sobbing gave way to brave little hiccoughs, then, at length, she opened her eyes. "Suzette," I whispered the thought flashing through my mind, "is it possible that you love Monsieur Tanrade?"
Is it not so?" Still Tanrade was silent. Now and then he gave a shrug of his big shoulders and toyed with his half empty glass of liqueur. Sapristi! it is not easy to decide between the woman you love and a northeast gale thrashing the marsh in front of my house abandoned. He, like myself, could already picture in his mind's eye duck after duck plunge out of the night among our live decoys.
Toward the end of the afternoon, a week later, at Pont du Sable, Tanrade and the curé sat smoking under my sketching-umbrella on the marsh. The curé is far from a bad painter. His unfinished sketch of the distant strip of sea and dunes lay at my feet as I worked on my own canvas while the sunset lasted.
"It's a long drive for him," added the marquise, a ring of sympathy in her voice. "Poor boy, he is working so hard now that he is editor of La Revue Normande. Ah, those wretched politics!" "He doesn't mind it," broke in Tanrade, "he has a skin like a bear driving night and day all over the country as he does. What energy, mon Dieu!"
"Tanné," he whimpered. "Where is he, Tanné?" "Monsieur Tanrade will come," returned the curé, "if you go to sleep like a brave little man." "Tanné," repeated the child and closed his eyes obediently. A cock crowed in a distant yard, awakening a sleek cat who emerged from beneath the bed, yawned, stretched her claws, and walked out of the narrow doorway into the misty lane.
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