The Horseman on the Roof (11 page)

“What else can one do?” said the young woman. “They've promised me a cabriolet, I shall wait for it. But I'm concerned about you. You should already be well on your way.”

“Perhaps it's better I should be near you,” said Angelo. “In any case, come, let's find a corner to ourselves.”

The sentry returned, accompanied by a fat man in a blue apron. He took a firm stand, and craned his neck so as to see everybody. “Those that want to eat,” he said, “orders, now, please.”

“What is there to eat?” said Angelo, coming over to him.

“Whatever you want, Baron,” said the fat man.

“Two roast chickens?” said Angelo.

“Why not?” said the man.

“All right,” said Angelo, “two roast chickens, some bread, and two bottles of wine; and buy me twenty cigars like this one.”

“Give me the money,” said the man.

“How much?” said Angelo.

“Thirty francs for you,” said the man, “because you're so good-looking.”

“You haven't lost your business sense,” said Angelo.

“Nobody else has, either,” said the man; “so I may as well keep mine. It'll be three francs more for the cigars. Have you got something for me to pack your stuff in?”

“No,” said Angelo, “wrap it all in a cloth and put in a knife.”

“One écu for the cloth and one for the knife.”

Angelo was the only one who ordered something to eat. Everyone watched him with a mixture of curiosity and dread. An old gentleman, with a very pretty little white goatee and a severe expression, said to him: “You are causing everyone the gravest risk by your imprudence, young man. You are going to have a cloth brought in from the village, where there are doubtless cases of sickness. All one should allow oneself to eat in times like these is boiled eggs.”

“I don't trust boiled water,” said Angelo, “and where you go wrong, you and all the others who are staring at me so wide-eyed, is in not living as usual. For three days I've been dying of hunger. If I faint from malnutrition you'll think I've got cholera and, out of pure terror, you'll pop off like flies.”

“I am not afraid, sir,” said the goatee; “I've shown my mettle.”

“Keep it up,” said Angelo. “One can never show enough of it.”

He ate his chicken, and was very glad to see the young woman and the children eat the other without apprehension. They drank some wine. To reassure everyone, Angelo threw the cloth out of a window. He went to give the sentry a cigar and remained on the doorstep smoking his own.

He had been there for a quarter of an hour, rather dazzled by the light of the great white sun, when he heard a commotion in the barn. People were precipitately drawing back from a woman stretched out on the straw. He went up to the poor creature; her teeth were chattering, and she had a great blue patch on her cheek.

“Has anyone any alcohol?” said Angelo; “any
eau de vie?
” he repeated, looking around at them all. At last a peasant woman produced a bottle from her basket. But she did not hand it to him. She placed it on the ground, moved some way off, and said: “Take it.”

The sick woman was young, with very beautiful hair and a milky neck. “Is there a brave woman present,” said Angelo, “to come and undo her linen, unhook her bodice and stays? I don't know how to.”

“Cut the laces,” said someone. A woman began laughing nervously. Angelo went back to the sentry.

“Get away from the door,” he told him, “there's a woman taken ill. I've got to get her out and lay her in the sun to warm her and prevent this sorry lot from dying of fear. I'll undertake to look after her by myself. Anyway, I'll do what I can, unless there's a doctor in the village.”

“You don't really think there'd be a doctor in the village?” said the sentry.

“Very well, I'll do all I can,” said Angelo. “Stand over there, if you're afraid they'll escape. But you could catch the lot of them under a hat.”

“Now look here,” he said, going into the barn again, “I must have someone to help me carry this woman outside, a man or a woman. Or a child, if everybody else feels too grand,” he added with a short, severe laugh.

“Don't involve the children in this sad business,” said the little white goatee. “
Genus irritabile vatum
 … I'll help you!”

They carried the young woman outside on a bed of straw. The old gentleman undressed her with great skill, and even managed to remove her stays without handling her too violently, a difficult feat, for she kept tossing her head and arms. During this operation she brought up a little of that familiar rice pudding, but Angelo cleaned her mouth and forced her to drink. The young woman's thighs, although icy and marbled with thick purple streaks, were plump and satiny. She kept fouling herself below, without stopping. The sentry had turned away and was gazing at the torrid hills where the heat was refracted in the steam off the grass as though on a prism. There was loud talk in the barn, with bursts of nervous laughter. At the end of two hours the young woman died. Angelo sat down beside her. So did the old gentleman. From the village came solitary cries and long, almost peaceful moans, which appeared black in the fierce sunlight.

“If Paris had seen Helen's skin as it really was,”
said the old gentleman,
“he would have observed an irregular, rough, gray-yellow network, composed of disordered meshes each containing a bristle rather like a hare's: he would never have fallen in love with Helen. Nature is a grand opera whose scenery is an optical illusion.”

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 these 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.