Joseph Conrad

The Rover Joseph Conrad

CITIZEN PEYROL stayed at the inn-yard gate till the night had swallowed up all those features of theland to which his eyes had clung as long as the last gleams of daylight. And even after the last gleamshad gone he had remained for some time staring into the darkness, in which all he could distinguishwas the white road at his feet and the black heads of pines where the cart track dipped towards thecoast. He did not go indoors till some carters who had been refreshing themselves had departedwith their big two-wheeled carts, piled up high with empty wine-casks, in the direction of Fréjus. The fact that they did not remain for the night pleased Peyrol. He ate his bit of supper alone, insilence, and with a gravity which intimidated the old woman who had aroused in him the memory ofhis mother. Having finished his pipe and obtained a bit of candle in a tin candlestick, Citizen Peyrolwent heavily upstairs to rejoin his luggage. The crazy staircase shook and groaned under his feet asthough he had been carrying a burden. The first thing he did was to close the shutters most carefullyas though he had been afraid of a breath of night air. Next he bolted the door of the room. Thensitting on the floor, with the candlestick standing before him between his widely straggled legs, hebegan to undress, flinging off his coat and dragging his shirt hastily over his head. The secret of hisheavy movements was disclosed then in the fact that he had been wearing next his bare skin-like apious penitent his hair-shirt-a sort of waistcoat made of two thicknesses of old sail-cloth andstitched all over in the manner of a quilt with tarred twine. Three horn buttons closed it in front. Heundid them, and after he had slipped off the two shoulder-straps which prevented this strangegarment from sagging down on his hips he started rolling it up. Notwithstanding all his care therewere during this operation several faint chinks of some metal which could not have been lead. His bare torso thrown backwards and sustained by his rigid big arms heavily tattooed on thewhite skin above the elbows, Peyrol drew a long breath into his broad chest with a pepper and saltpelt down the breastbone. And not only was the breast of Citizen Peyrol relieved to the fullest of itsathletic capacity, but a change had also come over his large physiognomy on which the expression ofsevere stolidity had been simply the result of physical discomfort. It isn't a trifle to have to carry girtabout your ribs and hung from your shoulders a mass of mixed foreign coins equal to sixty orseventy thousand francs in hard cash; while as to the paper money of the Republic, Peyrol had hadalready enough experience of it to estimate the equivalent in cartloads. A thousand of them. Perhapstwo thousand. Enough in any case to justify his flight of fancy, while looking at the countryside inthe light of the sunset, that what he had on him would buy all that soil from which he had sprung: houses, woods, vines, olives, vegetable gardens, rocks and salt lagoons-in fact, the wholelandscape, including the animals in it. But Peyrol did not care for the land at all. He did not want toown any part of the solid earth for which he had no love. All he wanted from it was a quiet nook, anobscure corner out of men's sight where he could dig a hole unobserved.