The Little Blue Devil/On the Deux-Fréres-Chambasse

The next two days were restless. Derwent did not know what to do with the boy. It seemed impossible to get hold of Ste. Croix, and to go to law and compel him to support his son was not so easy as it looked; especially since, as Derwent admitted to himself, Ste. Croix had never been known to support anything in his whole life.

Derwent’s acquaintance with him was a limited one. Ste. Croix was not his sort at all; but Tony had interested him from the first—he was such an unusual small person, and at the same time, so utterly forlorn. He and Derwent had been for various excursions together, conversing with due gravity on many important topics. Derwent was fond of children—a lonely man, without ties, and possessed of sufficient income to indulge his love of roaming about the globe.

What was to be done with Tony? He was distressingly vague about his English relations (who would surely be his most suitable guardians), and affairs were complicated by the fact that George was on the point of leaving Paris on an important business matter he had undertaken for a friend, which admitted of no delay. Much as he disliked the idea, he felt there was nothing for it but to get Antoine into "some kind of institution," as he said vaguely, temporarily at least; and he took steps to do so.

But Antoine was alert and suspicious.

“What you going to do?” he said with a quick ​natural elision. “Remember I won’t go—you’re meaning to be good, but—I just won’t.”

His English vocabulary was disconcertingly apt to stop short at times, leaving him with all the lesser shades of his meaning unexpressed, and he would not speak French to help it out. On this point he explained himself more fully the second day.

“I don’t want to be French—like him. I hate anything that’s like him. I’ll be English—my mother was English, did you know? I’ll call myself Antony St. Croix—Croy, like those Jersey people we met; and I’ll grow up and do things. What do you do?”

George? George just travelled about, and hunted, and had a good deal of shooting, and———

“Then you have money,” said Tony briefly. “I shan’t be able to do that. I must work.”

There was a short pause while he looked rather puzzled. Then:

“But I haven't seen many people work,” he said. “He never worked in his life. It’s hard to know what to do, but when I’m old it’ll be easier. A man can do anything.”

On the evening of the third day George had settled something for Tony, and it was that same evening that Tony left for the South. He did not say good-bye, for he was afraid of being kept and locked up, his vision of orphélinats being a lurid one; and he took with him eleven francs fifty and nothing beside. In any case his savage sense of independence, sprung out of disgusted revolt from Ste. Croix’ eternal sponging, would not have allowed him to stay with George much longer. He reflected bitterly that he could not pay back, but that was soon swamped in the happy conviction that when he was grown up he would retrace his steps through the world, showering gold on all who had befriended him and wreaking vague, ​terrible vengeances on the others—his father and some of his father’s hard-eyed, full-lipped companions.

He stowed himself on board a south-bound petite vitesse and was soon discovered. How he managed to stay on he never remembered; he was too excited at the time. But the conductor was good-natured, and Tony had pretty ways when he chose, which was seldom except when he had an end in view. He looked such a child too, being small and slight for his age, with big grey eyes that made a strange contrast to his dark skin.

He got to Marseilles by slow stages (the first train only went as far as Châteauroux) at the cost of three francs ten. He had begged at many doors for food and shelter, always beginning by a request for work, much more convincing than is usual. But that no one had given him, though food and a shake-down in outhouses were generally easy to get. He was sometimes offered his board and lodging in exchange for his work, which was generous enough, but he never accepted. As he said to himself, you never knew what would come of it. He wanted to feel free to go on.

He reached Marseilles after two more stolen rides in trains. He knew the town well—the hotel-and-mainstreet-aspect of it—but now it seemed more interesting than it ever had before. He was intoxicated with the joy of tramping, but very much at a loose end. After two days’ knocking about the vivid, noisy docks, living more from hand to mouth than he ever had before in his haphazard little life, he was taken on board a fruit-boat, the Deux-Frères-Chambasse, one of those that wander all round the Mediterranean picking up varied cargoes of fruit that is railed afterwards to Paris and even to London.

Achille Chambasse, skipper and part-owner, wanted a mousse and liked Tony, small as he undoubtedly was. A vrai gars—a boy that could hold his tongue! That child ​was no fool. Matters were soon arranged, especially as Tony, dazzled by the sea, felt less inclined than usual for his precocious haggling. The pay was so tiny as to be almost non-existent, but—the Mediterranean and a dozen queer ports he had not seen! Besides, he would be learning to “do something.”

The next few months were full of colour, and pleasant enough. There was always something for Tony to do, and sometimes a great deal. He was glad to sleep at odd moments, but he enjoyed it more than he had enjoyed, for example, the lessons which his adored and ineffectual mother had tried to teach him. The small crew was composed of black-haired and voluble men who looked brutally piratical and were very much the reverse. They liked Tony, and were willing to teach him—anything connected with sailors’ work interested him profoundly. He learnt a good deal, and grew taller, stronger, and browner.

So much for the summer and autumn. Towards the end of November, Agatha Wilcox, having walked down the coast about a mile from Smyrna, suddenly came upon a little boy in a béret, apparently a French sailor-boy, only he was very small for that—perched on a high rock and occupied in staring at the sea. She stopped dead. It was a surprising vision in that place. Tony turned his head and met her astonished gaze.

“Hullo!” said he.

“Why, you speak English?”

“I am English.” Pause. “Why?”

“You funny little boy! Because you don’t look a bit English—and what are you doing here?”

Tony resented intrusions into his private affairs, and that he did not look English was a sore point; so it was curtly that he answered:

“Having a holiday.”

​“All by yourself? But holidays don’t generally begin till just before Christmas. What a lucky boy!”

Tonyt’s lip curled in the sneer that was a clean likeness of his father’s (a very naughty little face, thought the missionary’s daughter). “It isn’t lessons. I’m mousse—boy—cabin-boy, you call it? in the Deux-Frères-Chambasse—and I’m off to-day. It’s a fruit-boat; we’re loading figs.”

“But how did you come to be on a French boat, if you are English? What is your name?”

“You do ask lots of questions, don’t you?” said Tony impartially. “It’s Antony St. Croix—Tony. What’s yours?”

“Agatha Wilcox, and my father is at the Church Mission here.” She really had a very nice smile. “I teach there too. So now you know about me. But do tell me how you came to be here—and you’re very young to be working alone. I never heard of such a thing.”

Tony flushed dark red and looked at the ground.

“Your people———”

His voice was harsh as a trapped hare’s. “My mother is dead, and I don’t count that I have a father.”

He looked up at Agatha at last. Her eyes were shocked and wondering.

“He turned me out and said I could—shift for myself, and I have.”

“You poor little soul!” said Agatha, but something warned her not to say it aloud.

“So that was all there was to do,” he said. It was easier once he had begun.

“But isn’t it very hard for you—Tony?”

“Oh—no. But I don’t see what’ll happen, and they’ll kick me out when we get to Marseilles this time.”

“Then—what sort of schooling do you get? None? —and wouldn’t you like some? You can’t go on like this, you know.”

​“Well, they do say you can’t do much without it," said Tony, as an open-minded man of the world, “but I can’t afford school, anyhow.”

“Oh, dear!” Agatha thought a moment. “If you left your ship and came to the Mission I could teach you for a time, at least. Let me do that, Tony.”

“But I have no money—not to count. Only a few francs.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does,” said he between his teeth. “I won’t come on charity.”

“Then—then—Can you speak French?”

“Of course I can—better than English. More words.”

“Then you can teach the children French—lots of them want to learn; and you’ll live with us.”

“But what about the Deux-Frères? I don’t know if they’ll let me go, and if I run away that’s a thing they put you in prison for.”

“Oh, you mustn’t think of doing that. If you told your master just how it was—how you wanted to learn things and would have a home here, would he let you go? Is he a kind man?”

“Master? Oh, the patron. Yes, he might. He could easily get another mousse here, and he always said, ‘Ambition, p’tit gars—ambition, mon rat!’ as if it was a good thing to make a move. . . . He’s bon enfant, he might let me go. The other brother Chambasse, Hector, doesn’t go to sea—he’s cross like a bear. But I’ll try the patron, and if he doesn’t—would you wait till the voyage is over and take me then?”

“Of course, but———”

“That’s all right,” said Tony briefly, getting down from his rock and holding out his hand to Agatha, seated on another ledge of it. She took the hard little hand, wondering; she did not realise at the moment that this was the ​concluding ceremony that clinched a bargain. They shook solemnly and walked towards Smyrna. The long rays of the setting sun made the native town on the hill dazzlingly white, but the European quarter along the shore was already blue and violet in the shadow. Agatha tried hard to make the odd little boy talk, he interested her; she had never seen anything quite like him in all her twenty-three years. But Tony was very silent. He had plenty to think about as they walked along, and Agatha was only an incident in his thoughts—a pleasant, brown-haired incident that was to help him on in the world. For nothing had gone so deeply into his mind as the conviction that his father wanted him to sink; being past shame himself, Ste. Croix had wished to shame his wife’s family, who could still feel. “He wants me to be a beggar,” thought Tony. “I won’t beg. I’ll be as different from him as ever I can. And he doesn’t care if I starve, so I won’t starve. . . . I hope the patron will let me go . . . this woman could teach me things . . . it’s not like lessons really, not like being a schoolchild—it’s learning how to work. He wouldn’t care if I knew nothing—I’ll know as much as he does by the time I’m grown up. . . . Mother taught me some, but I was little then. . . . If he had been good she wouldn’t have died—I heard the porter of the Imperial saying so to the head-waiter . . . but I knew before. . . . She—she . . . I wonder what these people are like—I never knew any missionaries, except some we saw on boats, and they always kept away from us. . . . They pray a lot, I suppose, and go to church lots of times besides Sunday. I haven’t been to church for more than three years, and then it was the English Church in Yokohama, the Sunday before mother died . . . the kneeling made her faint. . . . Oh! . . . I—I hope the patron will be on board, and I won’t have to wait to tell him. I feel shaky inside when I think about it, and I want to do it quickly. . . .”

​Agatha was thinking, between her small remarks: “Extraordinary child! And his people must be gentlefolk, by his voice. What a shocking father!—and the mother is dead. It is dreadful to think of his growing up without religion of education among all those rough sailors. (I wonder if he is a Roman Catholic? I must ask him—but not now. He’s a curious child—somehow you can’t ask him too many questions.) I am sure papa won’t object to my having him here—I really felt I must do something for him—it was my plain duty. . . . I hope he will be allowed to come at once. He’s terribly old for his age, but a few months of home life will change that. How mamma would have loved mothering him!”

The sun had set by the time they reached the town, and Tony’s heart seemed to sink with it, weighted with unrest and change, and some dread.

He said a brief good-bye to Agatha and dived towards the wharves to settle his fate, hurrying head down like a small charging bull, with his hands tight clenched at his side. He did not dare tell himself how nervous he felt.