""I do not choose to be treated like a common woman. You implored me to accept you. I asked you for nothing. Keep me with you!"
"He stamped his foot.
""No, that"s a little too much! If you think you are going-"
"I had seized his arm.
""Keep still, Jean... Let me settle it."
"I went toward her and quietly, little by little, I began to reason with her, exhausting all the arguments that are used under similar circ.u.mstances. She listened to me, motionless, with a fixed gaze, obstinate and silent.
"Finally, not knowing what more to say, and seeing that there would be a scene, I thought of a last resort and said:
""He loves you still, my dear, but his family want him to marry some one, and you understand-"
"She gave a start and exclaimed:
""Ah! Ah! Now I understand:
"And turning toward him, she said:
""You are-you are going to get married?"
"He replied decidedly" "Yes."
"She took a step forward.
""If you marry, I will kill myself! Do you hear?"
"He shrugged his shoulders and replied:
""Well, then kill yourself!"
"She stammered out, almost choking with her violent emotion:
""What do you say? What do you say? What do you say? Say it again!"
"He repeated:
""Well, then kill yourself if you like!"
"With her face almost livid, she replied:
""Do not dare me! I will throw myself from the window!"
"He began to laugh, walked toward the window, opened it, and bowing with the gesture of one who desires to let some one else precede him, he said:
""This is the way. After you!"
"She looked at him for a second with terrible, wild, staring eyes. Then, taking a run as if she were going to jump a hedge in the country, she rushed past me and past him, jumped over the sill and disappeared.
"I shall never forget the impression made on me by that open window after I had seen that body pa.s.s through it to fall to the ground. It appeared to me in a second to be as large as the heavens and as hollow as s.p.a.ce. And I drew back instinctively, not daring to look at it, as though I feared I might fall out myself.
"Jean, dumfounded, stood motionless.
"They brought the poor girl in with both legs broken. She will never walk again.
"Jean, wild with remorse and also possibly touched with grat.i.tude, made up his mind to marry her.
"There you have it, old man."
It was growing dusk. The young woman felt chilly and wanted to go home, and the servant wheeled the invalid chair in the direction of the village. The painter walked beside his wife, neither of them having exchanged a word for an hour.
This story appeared in Le Gaulois, December 17, 1883.
A VAGABOND
He was a journeyman carpenter, a good workman and a steady fellow, twenty-seven years old, but, although the eldest son, Jacques Randel had been forced to live on his family for two months, owing to the general lack of work. He had walked about seeking work for over a month and had left his native town, Ville-Avary, in La Manche, because he could find nothing to do and would no longer deprive his family of the bread they needed themselves, when he was the strongest of them all. His two sisters earned but little as charwomen. He went and inquired at the town hall, and the mayor"s secretary told him that he would find work at the Labor Agency, and so he started, well provided with papers and certificates, and carrying another pair of shoes, a pair of trousers and a shirt in a blue handkerchief at the end of his stick.
And he had walked almost without stopping, day and night, along interminable roads, in sun and rain, without ever reaching that mysterious country where workmen find work. At first he had the fixed idea that he must only work as a carpenter, but at every carpenter"s shop where he applied he was told that they had just dismissed men on account of work being so slack, and, finding himself at the end of his resources, he made up his mind to undertake any job that he might come across on the road. And so by turns he was a navvy, stableman, stonecutter; he split wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells, mixed mortar, tied up f.a.gots, tended goats on a mountain, and all for a few pence, for he only obtained two or three days" work occasionally by offering himself at a shamefully low price, in order to tempt the avarice of employers and peasants.
And now for a week he had found nothing, and had no money left, and nothing to eat but a piece of bread, thanks to the charity of some women from whom he had begged at house doors on the road. It was getting dark, and Jacques Randel, jaded, his legs failing him, his stomach empty, and with despair in his heart, was walking barefoot on the gra.s.s by the side of the road, for he was taking care of his last pair of shoes, as the other pair had already ceased to exist for a long time. It was a Sat.u.r.day, toward the end of autumn. The heavy gray clouds were being driven rapidly through the sky by the gusts of wind which whistled among the trees, and one felt that it would rain soon. The country was deserted at that hour on the eve of Sunday. Here and there in the fields there rose up stacks of wheat straw, like huge yellow mushrooms, and the fields looked bare, as they had already been sown for the next year.
Randel was hungry, with the hunger of some wild animal, such a hunger as drives wolves to attack men. Worn out and weakened with fatigue, he took longer strides, so as not to take so many steps, and with heavy head, the blood throbbing in his temples, with red eyes and dry mouth, he grasped his stick tightly in his hand, with a longing to strike the first pa.s.serby who might be going home to supper.
He looked at the sides of the road, imagining he saw potatoes dug up and lying on the ground before his eyes; if he had found any he would have gathered some dead wood, made a fire in the ditch and have had a capital supper off the warm, round vegetables with which he would first of all have warmed his cold hands. But it was too late in the year, and he would have to gnaw a raw beetroot which he might pick up in a field as he had done the day before.
For the last two days he had talked to himself as he quickened his steps under the influence of his thoughts. He had never thought much hitherto, as he had given all his mind, all his simple faculties to his mechanical work. But now fatigue and this desperate search for work which he could not get, refusals and rebuffs, nights spent in the open air lying on the gra.s.s, long fasting, the contempt which he knew people with a settled abode felt for a vagabond, and that question which he was continually asked, "Why do you not remain at home?" distress at not being able to use his strong arms which he felt so full of vigor, the recollection of the relations he had left at home and who also had not a penny, filled him by degrees with rage, which had been acc.u.mulating every day, every hour, every minute, and which now escaped his lips in spite of himself in short, growling sentences.
As he stumbled over the stones which tripped his bare feet, he grumbled: "How wretched! how miserable! A set of hogs-to let a man die of hunger-a carpenter-a set of hogs-not two sous-not two sous-and now it is raining-a set of hogs!"
He was indignant at the injustice of fate, and cast the blame on men, on all men, because nature, that great, blind mother, is unjust, cruel and perfidious, and he repeated through his clenched teeth:
"A set of hogs" as he looked at the thin gray smoke which rose from the roofs, for it was the dinner hour. And, without considering that there is another injustice which is human, and which is called robbery and violence, he felt inclined to go into one of those houses to murder the inhabitants and to sit down to table in their stead.
He said to himself: "I have no right to live now, as they are letting me die of hunger, and yet I only ask for work-a set of hogs!" And the pain in his limbs, the gnawing in his heart rose to his head like terrible intoxication, and gave rise to this simple thought in his brain: "I have the right to live because I breathe and because the air is the common property of everybody. So n.o.body has the right to leave me without bread!"
A fine, thick, icy cold rain was coming down, and he stopped and murmured: "Oh, misery! Another month of walking before I get home." He was indeed returning home then, for he saw that he should more easily find work in his native town, where he was known-and he did not mind what he did-than on the highroads, where everybody suspected him. As the carpentering business was not prosperous, he would turn day laborer, be a mason"s hodman, a ditcher, break stones on the road. If he only earned a franc a day, that would at any rate buy him something to eat.
He tied the remains of his last pocket handkerchief round his neck to prevent the cold rain from running down his back and chest, but he soon found that it was penetrating the thin material of which his clothes were made, and he glanced about him with the agonized look of a man who does not know where to hide his body and to rest his head, and has no place of shelter in the whole world.
Night came on and wrapped the country in obscurity, and in the distance, in a meadow, he saw a dark spot on the gra.s.s; it was a cow, and so he got over the ditch by the roadside and went up to her without exactly knowing what he was doing. When he got close to her she raised her great head to him, and he thought: "If I only had a jug I could get a little milk." He looked at the cow and the cow looked at him and then, suddenly giving her a kick in the side, he said: "Get up!"
The animal got up slowly, letting her heavy udders bang down. Then the man lay down on his back between the animal"s legs and drank for a long time, squeezing her warm, swollen teats, which tasted of the cowstall, with both hands, and he drank as long as she gave any milk. But the icy rain began to fall more heavily, and he saw no place of shelter on the whole of that bare plain. He was cold, and he looked at a light which was shining among the trees in the window of a house.