Blown by the north wind over the hard, white ground along with a whirl of dead leaves, M. Bergeret crossed the Mall between the leafless elms and began to climb Duroc Hill. His footsteps echoed on the uneven pavements as he walked towards the louring, smoky sky which painted a barrier of violet across the horizon; to the right he left the farrier’s forge and the front of a dairy decorated with a picture of two red cows, to the left stretched the long, low walls of market-gardens. He had that morning prepared his tenth and last lesson on the eighth book of the Æneid, and now he was mechanically turning over in his mind the points in metre and grammar which had particularly caught his notice. Guiding the rhythm of his thoughts by the beat of his footsteps, at regular intervals he repeated to himself the rhythmic words: Patrio vocat agmina sistro.... But every now and then his keen, versatile mind flitted away to critical appreciation of a wider range. As he descended the street of the BergÈres, on the side opposite Duroc Hill, he suddenly noticed the mildness of the air. Just here the road winds downward between walls of limestone, where the Allured by the sweetness of air and sun, M. Bergeret sat down by the side of the road, on one of the blocks which had been quarried out of the mountain years ago, and which were now covered with a coating of black moss. Through the delicate tracery of the branches overhead he noticed the lilac hue of the sky, streaked here and there with smoke trails. Thus to plunge in lonely reverie filled his soul with peaceful sadness. In attacking Agrippa’s galleys which blocked their way, he reflected, Antony and Cleopatra had but one object, and that was to clear a passage. It was this precise feat that Cleopatra, who raised the blockade of her sixty ships, succeeded in accomplishing. Seated in the cutting, M. Bergeret enjoyed the harmless elation of settling the fate of the world on the far-famed waves of Acarnania. Then, as he happened to throw a glance three paces in front of him, he caught sight of an old man “Good-day to you, sir,” said the old fellow. “The sun is pretty. And I’ll tell you what’s more—it isn’t going to rain.” M. Bergeret recognised the man: it was Pied d’Alouette, the tramp whom M. Roquincourt, the magistrate, had wrongly implicated in the murder that took place in Queen Marguerite’s house and whom he had imprisoned for six months in the vague hope that unforeseen charges would be laid at his door. This he did, either because he thought that the longer the imprisonment continued the more justifiable it would seem, or merely through spite against a simpleton who had misled the officers of the law. M. Bergeret, who always had a fellow-feeling for the oppressed, answered Pied d’Alouette in a kindly style that reflected the old fellow’s good-will. “Good-day, friend,” said he. “I see that you know all the pleasant nooks. This hillside is warm and well sheltered.” “I know better spots than this. But they are far away from here. One mustn’t be afraid of a walk. Feet are all right. Shoes aren’t. I can’t wear good shoes because they’re strange to my feet. I only rip them up, when they give me sound ones.” And raising his foot from the cushion of dead leaves, he pointed to his big toe sticking out, wrapped in wads of linen, through the slits in the leather of his boot. Relapsing into silence once more, he began to polish the piece of hard wood. M. Bergeret soon returned to his own thoughts. Pallentem morte futura. Agrippa’s galleys could not bar the way to Antony’s purple-sailed trireme. This time, at least, the dove escaped the vulture. But hereupon Pied d’Alouette began again: “They have taken away my knife!” “Who have?” Lifting his arm, the tramp waved it in the direction of the town and gave no other answer. Yet he was following the course of his own slow thought, for presently he said: “They never gave it back to me.” He sat on in solemn silence, powerless to express the ideas that revolved in his darkened For, although the man would not work, he was yet a jack of all trades. When he came out of prison nothing would induce them to restore his knife to him; they kept it in the record office. And so he went on tramp once more, but now weaponless, stripped, weaker than a child, wretched wherever he went. He wept over his loss: tiny The idea of his knife suggested his pipe to him. He said: “They let me keep my pipe.” Drawing from the woollen bag which he wore against his breast, a kind of black, sticky thimble, he showed the bowl of a pipe without the fragment of a stem. “My poor fellow,” said M. Bergeret, “you don’t look at all like a great criminal. How do you manage to get put in gaol so often?” Pied d’Alouette had not acquired the dialogue habit and he had no notion of how to carry on a conversation. Although he had a kind of deep intelligence, it took him some time to grasp the sense of the words addressed to him. It was practice that he lacked and at first, therefore, he made no attempt to answer M. Bergeret, who sat tracing lines with the point of his stick in the white dust of the road. But at last Pied d’Alouette said: “I don’t do any wrong things. Then I am punished for other things.” “Do you mean to say that they put you in prison for doing nothing wrong?” “I know the people who do the wrong things, but I should do myself harm if I blabbed.” “You herd, then, with vagabonds and evil-doers?” “You are trying to make me peach. Do you know Judge Roquincourt?” “I know him a little. He’s rather stern, isn’t he?” “Judge Roquincourt, he is a good talker. I never heard anyone speak so well and so quickly. A body hasn’t time to understand him. A body can’t answer. There isn’t anybody who speaks one half as well.” “He kept you in solitary confinement for long months and yet you bear him no grudge. What a humble example of mercy and long-suffering.” Pied d’Alouette resumed the polishing of his knife-handle. As the work progressed, he became quieter and seemed to recover his peace of mind. Suddenly he demanded: “Do you know a man called Corbon?” “Who is he, this Corbon?” It was too difficult to explain. Pied d’Alouette waved his arm in a vague semicircle that covered “Corbon.” “Pied d’Alouette,” said M. Bergeret, “they say you are a queer sort of vagabond and that, even when you are in absolute want, you never steal anything. Yet you live with evil-doers and you are the friend of murderers.” Pied d’Alouette answered: “There are some who think one thing and others who think another. But if I myself thought of doing wrong, I should dig a hole under a tree on Duroc Hill and bury my knife at the bottom of the hole. Then I should pound down the earth on top of it with my feet. For when people have the notion of doing wrong, it’s the knife that leads them on. It’s also pride which leads them on. As for me, I lost my pride when I was a lad, for men, women and children in my own parts all made fun of me.” “And have you never had wicked, violent thoughts?” “Sometimes, when I came upon women alone on the roads, for the fancy I had for them. But that’s all over now.” “And that fancy never comes back to you?” “Time and again it does.” “There are some happy folks. But not me.” “Where are these happy folks, then?” “At the farms.” M. Bergeret rose and slipping a ten-sou piece into Pied d’Alouette’s hand, said: “So you fancy, Pied d’Alouette, that happiness is to be found under a roof, by the chimney-corner, or on a feather-bed. I thought you had more sense.” |