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party to see. They found a man hanging by the neck from one of
the branches, and when they cut him down discovered that he was
the executioner. It was given out that he had committed suicide,
but there was a knife-thrust in his back, and the convicts knew that
An Official Position
225
he had been stabbed and then, still alive, taken to the jungle and
hanged.
Louis Remire had no fear that anything of that sort would hap-
pen to him. He knew how his predecessor had been caught. The
job had not been done by the convicts. By the French law when a
man is sentenced to hard labour for a certain number of years he
has at the expiration of his sentence to remain in the colony for the
same number of years. He is free, but he may not stir from the spot
that is assigned to him as a residence. In certain circumstances he
can get a concession and if he works hard he manages to scrape a
bare living from it, but after a long term of penal servitude, during
which he has lost all power of initiative, what with the debilitating
effect of fever, hookworm and so on, he is unfit for heavy and con-
tinuous labour, and so most of the liberated men subsist on beg-
ging, larceny, smuggling tobacco or money to the prisoners, and
loading and unloading cargoes when two or three times a month a
steamer comes into the harbour. It was the wife of one of these
freed men that had been the means of the undoing of Louis Re-
mire's predecessor. She was a coloured woman, young and pretty,
with a neat little figure and mischievous eyes. The plot was well
considered. The executioner was a burly, sanguine man, of ardent
passions. She had thrown herself in his way, and when she caught
his approving glance, had cast him a saucy look. He saw her a day
or two later in the public garden. He did not venture to speak to
her (no one, man, woman or child, would be seen speaking to him),
but when he winked at her she smiled. One evening he met her
walking through the coconut grove that surrounded his compound.
No one was about. He got into conversation with her. They only
exchanged a few words, for she was evidently terrified of being
seen with him. But she came again to the coconut grove. She played
him carefully till his suspicions were allayed; she teased his desires;
she made him give her little presents, and at last on the promise of
what was for both of them quite a sum of money she agreed to
come one dark night to the compound. A ship had just come in and
her husband would be working till dawn. It was when he opened
the door for her and she hesitated to come in as though at the last
moment she could not make up her mind, that he stepped outside
to draw her in, and fell to the ground with the violence of the knife-
thrust in his back.
'The fool,' muttered Louis Remire. 'He only got what he de-
226
W. Somerset Maugham
served. He should have smelt a rat. The eternal vanity of man.'
For his part he was through with women. It was on account of
women that he found himself in the situation he was in now, at
least on account of one woman; and besides, at his time of life, his
passions were assuaged. There were other things in life and after a
certain age a man, if he was sensible, turned his attention to them.
He had always been a great fisherman. In the old days, at home in
France before he had had his misfortune, as soon as he came off
duty, he took his rod and line and went down to the Rhone. He got
a lot of fishing now. Every morning, till the sun grew hot, he sat on
his favourite rock and generally managed to get enough for the
prison governor's table." The governor's wife knew the value of
things and beat him down on the price he asked, but he did not
blame her for that; she knew that he had to take what she was
prepared to give and it would have been stupid of her to pay a
penny more than she had to. In any case it brought in a little money
useful for tobacco and rum and other odds and ends. But this even-
ing he was going to fish for himself. He got his bait from the lean-
to, and his rod, and settled down on his rock. No fish was so good
as the fish you caught yourself, and by now he knew which were
those that were good to eat and which were so tough and flavour-
less that you could only throw them back into the sea. There was
one sort that, fried in real olive oil, was as good as mullet. He had
not been sitting there five minutes when his float gave a sudden
jerk, and when he pulled up his line, there, like an answer to prayer,
was one of those very fish wriggling on the hook. He took it off,
banged its head on the rock, and putting it down, replaced his bait.
Four of them would make a good supper, the best a man could
have, and with a night's hard work before him he needed a hearty
meal. He would not have time to fish tomorrow morning. First of
all the scaffold would have to be taken down and the pieces
brought back to the room in which it was kept, and there would be
a lot of cleaning to do. It was a bloody business; last time he had
had his pants so soaked that he had been able to do nothing with
them and had had to throw them away. The brass would have to
be polished, the knife would have to be honed. He was not a man
to leave a job half finished, and by the time it was through he would
be pretty peckish. It would be worth while to catch a few more fish
and put them in a cool place so that he could have a substantial
breakfast. A cup of coffee, a couple of eggs and a bit of fried fish;
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
