The Horseman on the Roof

Home > Literature > The Horseman on the Roof > Page 9
The Horseman on the Roof Page 9

by Jean Giono


  Angelo handed him a cigar. “I’ve never smoked in my life,” said the old gentleman, “but I very much want to begin.”

  * * *

  Before evening, a man died in the barn. Rapidly. He slipped straight through their fingers and did not let them hope for a second. Then a woman. Then another man, who walked for a long time without stopping, halted, lay down in the straw, and slowly covered his face with his hands. The children began to cry.

  “Make those children shut up and listen to me,” said Angelo. “Come close. Don’t be afraid. You can see, can’t you, that I, though I look after the sick and touch them, am not ill? I who ate a whole chicken am not ill; and you who are afraid and suspicious of everything will die. Come close. I can’t shout what I want to tell you over the housetops. There’s only a single peasant guarding us. As soon as nightfall begins I’ll disarm him and we’ll go. It’s better to risk one’s life without a passport than to stay here waiting for a paper that isn’t any good if one’s dead.”

  The old gentleman was emphatically on Angelo’s side. There were also two men with a solid peasant look and ten or so women with children who accepted this plan. The others said that luggage couldn’t be left, and that they couldn’t carry their trunks on their backs across the fields.

  “The question is,” said Angelo, “whether you prefer to remain shut up until these panic-stricken villagers and gendarmes give you a chance to live, or whether you prefer to make a break for it. What does a trunk have to do with this?”

  But the trunks mattered a great deal, and they said that it was easy for him to talk.

  “All right, stay,” said Angelo; “everyone’s free to do as he likes.” But he tried to persuade the young governess.

  “No,” said she. “I’m staying here too.”

  She had unshakable confidence in the name of M. de Chambon. She was sure she would get a cabriolet and, above all, that famous paper, with which she saw herself flying across the country like an arrow.

  “I cannot allow myself to run the risk,” she said.

  “You are running a much bigger one by staying here,” said Angelo.

  She then said, with greatly increased firmness, that she was quite determined to travel properly. There was no reason for her to take to the roads like a gypsy. The gendarmes, who knew perfectly well who M. de Chambon was, had promised her a cabriolet and a paper. She would not leave except in a cabriolet and with a paper, in the proper way. There was no reason for her to act otherwise. Yesterday evening she had been out in the woods, in the dark, by the roadside; that was one thing. Angelo had helped her. She was grateful to him, but now things were different. She had been given a definite promise. “You heard it as well as I did. They even said that, if there was no cabriolet willing to take Monsieur de Chambon’s children to Avignon, they would requisition one. I haven’t dared tell you who Monsieur de Chambon is: Monsieur de Chambon is chief justice of the High Court. Now do you see?”

  Whereupon, evening having fallen, Angelo replied: “I’ll show you what a gendarme is, genuine or false!”

  He went up to the sentry and disarmed him with the greatest ease, for the man didn’t realize why his gun was being taken away from him. He thought it was to look at it.

  “Stand back and let us pass,” said Angelo. “Some of us here want to make ourselves scarce.”

  “You don’t need my gun for that,” said the sentry, “and you might let me have it back. You’re not the first to clear out, and the others didn’t make such a fuss. And I’ll tell you what: a hundred paces to the left of that cypress you can still see, there’s a track that goes a short league around and then leads into the main road.”

  This placidity considerably disconcerted several of the women who had decided to leave; they now decided to stay.

  The departure of Angelo and his followers was therefore rather sheepish, the more so as the sentry continued to shower them with the most detailed information on the way to skirt around the village. Angelo, however, persisted in thinking it better to leave. “And why complain when all goes well?” he said to himself. “Anyway, stop always imagining the worst and overdoing things. That little governess must be laughing at you.”

  They lost their way because of the excessive amount of information the sentry had given them, and because each interpreted it in his own fashion. The night, the open air, the need to act, and also the fear of having committed themselves to a plan that seemed less sensible directly it was available to everybody, upset the women with their train of sullen children. At last, at the end of an hour, they reached the main road, where they separated, the two peasants setting off across the hills and the women simply sitting down once more on the bank. Angelo went off with the man with the goatee.

  They walked for more than two hours before they saw, in front of them by the roadside, a long, low house, from the main entrance of which there issued a bright light and a considerable din.

  “Another fly-trap?” said Angelo.

  “No,” said the old gentleman, “this time it’s a wagoners’ inn; I know it.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  As they drew near they could hear that the din was composed of raucous singing and the screeching of women, as harrowing as the wails of she-cats. Angelo could not help being excited by these cries of titillated women, so straightforward and unequivocal. He thought of love. He was quite put out at having been caught off guard so suddenly by an emotion that normally crept over him slowly after many detours and moments of melancholy. Furthermore, although he had had no trouble disarming the obliging peasant dressed up as a gendarme who guarded the quarantine at Peyruis, he was still in his heroic mood.…

  The main room of the inn, long and wide, contained about twenty men and women, drunk and past caring. They were seated round the big dining-table, where they had inflicted considerable damage upon the dishes, bowls, and bottles, some of which were upset. The scene was lighted up by two enormous stable buckets of flaring punch and a profusion of oil lamps and candlesticks, so arranged as to leave not one single corner of that vast vaulted chamber in shadow.

  Angelo stopped a passing groom, his arms laden with bottles. He asked him sharply who these people were. He was furious on account of the postures and cluckings of some of the women, who were being openly mauled.

  “They’re people like you and me,” replied the man, who was middle-aged and had a good smell of rum in his voice.

  He went around distributing his bottles. He came back, dragging his feet. He wiped his hands on his leather apron. His look was vague and very benevolent.

  “Anyway,” he said, “what can I serve you to pass the time?”

  As Angelo did not answer him and continued to frown angrily, the man, who was perhaps the innkeeper in person and mistook the reason for this anger, said to him: “There’s no point in being annoyed. What good does it do? You’re not the only one, as you can see. Wait a bit. Tomorrow morning, as soon as it’s daylight, we’ll find a way to get round the quarantine barriers. My son and I know the hills like our own pockets. But if you want to drink, be quick about it. Wine’s going up. It’s already three sous.”

  “Isn’t wine harmful?” Angelo asked gravely.

  “Mine never harmed anyone, at any rate,” replied the man, nonplussed by this gravity.

  Angelo did then order a bottle, but added: “I don’t wish to drink with these people here. Haven’t you a private room?”

  “There’s no lack of rooms, but you’d have to drink in the dark. They’ve collected all the lamps and candles in the house. They simply couldn’t stand having a speck of shadow behind their backs. You must admit we’re living in queer times. I don’t advise you to drink Swiss fashion. The best thing just now is to be a good mixer. Who knows what’s in store for us from one moment to the next? They all came in one by one. They didn’t know each other this morning. Now look at them. In an hour, you’ll be in there with them.”

  Angelo was too upset to be able to reply. He was scared to death of thes
e women with their feet up on the bars of chairs, showing their legs up to the knees and an abundance of fine petticoats. He couldn’t bear the sight of those bodices hanging open over slips and stay-ribbons. He thought of the valley where the poor little Frenchman had died, as of a paradise. He was convinced there was nothing ridiculous in feeling like this.

  He took his bottle and glass to the end of the room, to a small isolated table.

  The old gentleman with the elegant little white goatee had approached the company. Though still very decorous, he had put up his lorgnette and was fatuously, and with a dazzling smile, examining a dark, milky young woman displaying plenty of bosom. She was undergoing a spirited assault from two men with waxed mustaches, typical commercial travelers; her defense was a coquettish compromise with semi-defeat.

  To calm his fidgety hands, Angelo fiddled with the latch of a small door behind his bench. Finally the door opened. It led into a stable. There were at least three or four horses at the feed boxes, and several of those light traps used by traveling salesmen.

  “The hell with that rabble,” thought Angelo. He called to the man who was bringing a fresh supply of bottles. “Like to earn three louis?” he said.

  “We’re counting by fives from now on,” replied the other, who was used to commercial appeals and needed more than a familiar approach to turn his head. And as Angelo tried to take a lofty tone: “Your Highness,” he said, “it’s no use trying to diddle old Guillaume. I’ve seen enough in my life to know that you’re not going to give me five louis, maybe even six, for a day’s good deed. If I name my price, the rest is up to you. Come off it, and talk like the rest of us.”

  Ignoring the insolence with which this was said, Angelo explained at great length that his young wife and two children were being detained in the barn used for quarantine at the village. “Couldn’t I borrow the horse and trap of one of these men or women?” he said, fiercely.

  “It’s purely and simply a question of money,” said the man.

  He added, after scratching his head, stroking his chin, and looking his interlocutor up and down: “Provided that … Where are you going afterward?”

  “To Avignon.”

  “Then come in here.”

  He pulled Angelo into the stable and shut the door behind them. The smell of the horses went to Angelo’s head.

  “This is the way I see it,” said the man. “We can’t leave the little lady and the children in that mess. People are dying like flies, you know. Fork out ten louis down and here’s what I’ll do. You saw the blonde who’s losing her stockings back there? Well, she’s well known. And when I say well known, I mean well known. She’s fixing it up for sure with the fat old boy in the Souvaroff boots. He’s a cattle merchant from around here, and he’s got horses and carriages the way others have fleas. They’re fixing it up between them right now. Myself, I’m a family man. I’ll sell you the lady’s trap outright; it’s that one there. And the nice little chestnut. It’ll get you to Avignon if that’s your idea. I can’t do better than that. Ten louis outright. I’ll fix things up with the young lady’s family, as they say.”

  Angelo ardently tried to beat him down to seven, not so much to save money as for the sort of victory he always wanted to gain. But the man said gently, in a fatherly tone: “One doesn’t haggle over the life of one’s wife and children.”

  “The blonde can go hang,” thought Angelo while the man was harnessing up. “But this’ll teach that young lady, so proud and so confident in the gendarmes, once and for all, that clothes don’t make the man.” He was thinking also of the handsome little boy (he remembered that he had a nice well-starched English collar) and of the little girl whom, the day before, he had several times caught staring at him.

  At the moment of leaving, and as Angelo was already shaking the reins, the man said to him: “I like you; you’re a good-looking fellow. You’ll surely get lost among the crossroads. I’ll give you my son; he’ll guide you. Afterward you can just leave him on the road.”

  He came back with a boy of about fifteen, whom he was instructing in a low voice.

  “And be polite to the gentleman,” he added, with an odd expression.

  After more than an hour’s gallivanting along earth roads among plushy trees, which must have been willows and which kept brushing against the leather hood, they arrived at the famous barn that was used for quarantine. The creak of the springs over the hard ruts had roused all the owls, and they were calling desperately to each other through the echoes of an immense silence.

  Angelo pulled up the trap in a thicket. He gave the reins to the boy.

  “Wait for me here,” he said. “And keep the horse quiet.”

  It was still hot, and there was a sort of smell, which, though faint, made the horse obstinately shake its head and clink its bit.

  The silence was complete except for the mournful wailing of the owls.

  “Everybody’s asleep,” thought Angelo. “I must be very quiet myself and take pains not to wake anyone except the little governess and the two children, to avoid any fuss. The sentry might be less amenable than the one this afternoon. I’ll blow on my tinder-wick and I hope they’ll have enough presence of mind to recognize me at once and not cry out at seeing my face lit up all of a sudden in the dark. First I’ll wake the little boy; he seems very plucky.”

  At the same time he strove to make out in the extreme blackness of the night the place where the sentry must be standing. He had stopped some ten paces from the gloomy bulk of the walls, blacker than the night, and listened for the sounds, however light, that a man on watch never fails to make. After a moment, hearing nothing but the owls calling, he said to himself: “The sentry must be asleep too,” and drew nearer, carefully muffling his steps on the grass.

  He soon found himself at the barn door. It was wide open. There was no trace of any sentry. The silence of the barn was also somewhat surprising. He expected to hear the sounds of breathing and the crackle of straw under restless bodies, but the walls, having shut off the cry of the owls, held only a silence more compact than the night.

  “Could we have made some mistake?” he wondered.

  He groped his way forward. His foot met an obstacle. He bent over and touched skirts. He knelt down and struck a light. He blew upon the embers of his tinder-wick and, as it flared, he recognized, distorted in an appalling grimace, the face of the peasant woman who had refused to leave without her trunk. She was dead. He blew on the embers as hard as he could and looked around him, but the red glow gave him only a very small range of vision. He stepped over the peasant woman and advanced several paces to look some more. He found another body, a man’s, and some abandoned luggage. At last he thought he recognized some frills of Irish lace over pretty little buckled shoes below linen pantaloons. It was the little girl. Her eyes were opened wide in terrible amazement. She must have died very rapidly, and without being cared for; her dress wasn’t even disarranged. The little boy was a little further on, huddling into the young governess, who was all convulsed, her lips drawn back over cruel teeth like a mad dog about to bite.

  Angelo kept blowing on his wick and thought of absolutely nothing. Later he walked at random in the dark and stumbled over two or three more bodies; or they may have been the same ones, for unexpectedly he found himself outside again with the owls.

  He called. He searched for the thicket where he had left the trap. He fell into an irrigation ditch full of water. He shouted again. He felt the hard ruts of the track under his feet. He found the thicket and called at the top of his voice as he walked with his arms held out in front of him. The trap was no longer there. He heard, a long way off, the galloping of a horse and the rumbling of a vehicle on the highroad.

  He was in such a fury that he kept hissing like a wood-fire and could not even manage to swear. He began to run straight ahead, and it was not until he had tumbled two or three times more into the irrigation ditch that he finally had the sense to sit down in the rushes.

  He was sta
ggered by the double-dealing of the boy who had deserted him, who had, no doubt, been carefully instructed. He was upset more by this than by the dead people.

  The faint smell that had made the horse toss his head became somewhat more definite when a hot little wind began to blow fitfully from the direction of the village. Only fifty paces away, the barn had its own supply of corpses. Angelo pictured the livid and heavy sun that would be rising in a few hours’ time.

  His imperious need to be generous, especially at this moment when he was floundering in what seemed to be a hideous general misunderstanding, made him consider seriously the idea of staying where he was till daybreak and then going to the village to offer his help in burying the dead. But he remembered the indifference of the sentry and said to himself:

  “Those peasants will hate you because you have your own ideas about courage; or simply because you know more about it than they do; especially if you talk to them of quicklime. It would take no time to pitch you into the trench with a knock over the head from a spade. That would be silly.” This last word convinced him.

  He got back on to the path. At all events, he would allow himself to pay the innkeeper back. He felt greatly consoled by the thought that that sturdy thickset man would probably be backed up by his son, who must have returned with the trap. “It’ll be a fine party, and they won’t forget me.” He hated being made a dupe!

  He reached the inn as day was about to break. The glow of the lamps was still visible in the threadbare night. But there, too, things had moved fast. The big room was cold and empty. A man lay stretched flat on his belly in the middle. It was one of the two with waxed mustaches. A woman sprawling over the table appeared to be asleep. Angelo called to her gently. He laid his hand on the woman’s forehead. It was burning. He called to her again, saying: “Madame,” with great gentleness. He lifted up her face. She was plainly dead. The two open eyes were white as marble. And it was only physical weight that caused the sudden drop of her lower jaw, opening the mouth and letting slowly flow from it a thick flood of that white matter resembling rice pudding, but extraordinarily evil-smelling.

 

‹ Prev