The Horseman on the Roof (8 page)

“Hold on, old man, hold on,” said the young doctor, “you shall have it, you shall have my morphine. Hold on.” He rummaged in his satchel. He was trembling so much with haste that Angelo came and held open the sides of the satchel, which kept shutting over his hands. But he fixed the needle firmly into its syringe, drew out with great care every drop in a little phial, down to the last one, and gave the child an injection in the thigh. “Don't rub him any more,” he said, “cover him up.” He slipped his arm under the child's head and supported it. Gradually the indifference returned to the face. Angelo remained lying over the child's body without daring to move. He felt instinctively that in covering him in this way he might impart to him that blessed warmth.

“There you are,” said the young man, sitting up. “I shan't save one.”

“It isn't your fault,” said Angelo.

“Ah! flowers of that kind,” said the young man.…

*   *   *

Day had come. The heavy draperies of chalk were resuming their places in the silence.

“Disinfect yourself,” said the young man, going to lie down in the yellow grass, in a place that the sun would soon reach. But Angelo came and lay down beside him.

The sun climbed over the crest of the mountains opposite. It was white and heavy, as on the previous days. Angelo let it warm him without moving, until his sweat-soaked shirt was dry.

He thought his companion was asleep. But when he sat up he saw that the young doctor's eyes were open.

“How do you feel?” he asked him.

“Get out of here,” said the young man in a hoarse voice, unrecognizable. His neck and throat swelled, and he vomited so dense a flood of white and ricelike matter that it masked all the lower half of his face.

Angelo pulled off his boots and stockings. He stripped him of his breeches. He saw that they were stiff with diarrhea, already old and dry. He stuffed these breeches under the young man's bare legs. They were icy, already mottled with purple. He sprinkled them with alcohol and began to massage them as hard as he could.

They seemed to be getting a little warmer. He took off his coat and wrapped it tightly around them. He cleaned out the young man's plastered mouth. He rummaged in the satchel looking for the drug flask. There was nothing in the satchel but five or six empty phials and a knife. He tried to make the young man drink some alcohol, but he turned away his head saying: “Stop it, stop it, get away, get away.” Finally he managed to get the neck of the flask into his mouth.

He uncovered the legs. They were again icy, a thick cyanosis had passed the knee and was already spreading wide over the thighs. Still, under Angelo's ever more rapid rubbing, the flesh seemed to him to be softening, warming up, regaining a faint pearliness. He pressed on harder. He felt filled with a superhuman strength. But below the knee the legs were still icy, and now the color of wine-lees. He dragged the body close to the fire. He heated some stones. Directly he stopped rubbing, the cyanosis stole out from the knee, ramified like some dark fern leaf, and mounted into the thigh. He managed each time to chase it back, driving it down hard with his hands and thumbs. The young man had closed his eyes. This made him terribly ironical, because the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes became strongly defined as the face went to pieces. He seemed indifferent to everything; but once, when Angelo, without noticing, heaved a sigh in which there was perhaps some small satisfaction (he had just driven the cyanosis once more out of the thigh), without losing his toneless expression the young man groped with his fingers round his shirt, pulled it up, and revealed his belly. It was completely blue, terrifying.

He began to grimace and to be shaken by spasms. Angelo no longer knew what to do. He kept on rubbing the icy legs and thighs, whose purple had joined with the blue of the belly. He was himself shaken with great nervous shudders every time he heard the bones crack in that writhing body. He saw the lips move. There was still a breath of voice. Angelo pressed his ear close to the mouth: “Disinfect yourself,” the young man was saying.

He died toward evening.

“Poor little Frenchman!” said Angelo.

Angelo spent a terrible night beside the two corpses. He was not afraid of contagion. He didn't think about it. But he dared not look at the two faces, as the firelight flickered over them, their drawn-back lips baring jaws with dog's teeth ready to bite. He did not know that people dead of cholera are shaken with spasms and even wave their arms at the moment when their nerves relax, and when he saw the young man move his hair stood on end; but he rushed to massage his legs and continued to massage them for a long time.

CHAPTER THREE

The soldiers arrived in the morning. There were a dozen of them. They had piled their equipment in a small field. Their captain was a fat ruddy man with a curling red mustache, so thick that it even hid his chin.

Angelo, having been afraid all night long and being in the habit of giving orders to captains, spoke very sharply to him about the soldiers who, before anything else, had set about brewing coffee some way off, joking in loud voices.

The captain turned red as a turkey-cock and wrinkled his little pug-dog's nose. “Gentlemen don't exist any more,” he said, “and you're singing a little too loud. I'm not to blame if your mother produced a monkey. I'll teach you to watch your step. Take that pick and start digging if you don't want my foot up your ass. I don't like white hands, and you'll soon learn who I am.”

“That's plain already,” said Angelo; “you're an unmannerly lout and I'm delighted that you don't like my white hands because you're going to get them in your face.”

The captain drew back and pulled out his sword. Angelo ran to the pile and took a soldier's short saber. The weapon was not half the length of his adversary's, but Angelo disarmed the captain with ease. In spite of fatigue and hunger, he had immediately felt sure of himself and capable of magnificent cat-leaps. The captain's sword flew twenty paces in the direction of the soldiers, who hadn't ceased to stuff wood into their fire while they watched and sniggered over their shoulders.

Without a word Angelo went back to where he had lain, freed the poor doctor's horse, saddled his own, mounted, and made off, after casting a quick look at the two corpses, now snarling more fiercely than ever. He crossed the field obliquely at a jog trot. He had covered only a few hundred paces when he heard what sounded like large flies humming by and, immediately afterward, the faint patter of gunfire. He looked around and saw ten or so small white puffs of smoke beside the willows where the soldiers had piled their equipment. The captain had opened fire on him. He dug his heels into his horse and made off at a gallop.

Shortly afterward he reached the road and continued to gallop. He now had neither cloak nor hat, his shirt was still soaked through with the night's sweat, his chest too was damp; he felt that it was not so hot as on the other days. Yet it was the same chalky weather, the same mists. He had now neither saddlebag nor linen; his two pistols were loaded with only one round each. “Anyhow,” he told himself, thinking of his altercation with the captain, “I'd rather be hacked to pieces than kill a man with a pistol; even if he does insult my mother. I like settling accounts with weapons that allow me to humiliate rather than anything else. Death is no revenge. Death is odd,” he said to himself, thinking of the “poor little Frenchman.” “It seems very simple; and very practical.”

He passed through a village where many people had tried this simple and practical device. The dead, fully dressed, in their shirts, naked, or worked over by the muzzles of the rats in their busy troops, lay piled in front of the houses on both sides of the road. They all had those fangs like mad dogs. Here there were already clouds of flies. The stench was so heavy that the horse was seized with panic and, probably terrified also by the carnival attitudes of some of the corpses, which were still standing and had their arms stretched out like crosses, took the bit between its teeth. Angelo let himself be carried on.

By the end of the morning, he had crossed a deserted stretch of country where nothing suggested the epidemic, except the fields in which the rye, although ripe, was uncut and beginning to flatten. He had slept a little in his saddle, although the horse had maintained a pretty lively pace; he was warm and did not miss his cloak; he had knotted a handkerchief round his head; and, apart from his empty stomach, he felt very fit.

He saw the Château de Ser among its trees, on a small knoll. He rode up as far as the terrace. It was a mountain manor house, crude and very dilapidated, the sort of place where one could imagine only a bachelor living. It was utterly deserted. His knocks on the door echoed through an empty house. In addition, under a large oak tree, he saw the earth freshly heaped over a rectangle of rather imposing size. All the same, he did not return to the road until he had circled the building two or three times and called repeatedly through a window on the first floor, which was still open, evidently because the shutters, rotted by rain and unhinged, wouldn't close. It was useless to call; the house was undoubtedly empty. None the less, he observed that here the dead and the fleeing had respected highly military rules. Nothing was left lying about, the grave had been filled in and, save for the open window under which he was standing, camp had been broken according to the laws of the quartermaster's science. Near the stables, even the hay had been forked over.

He took to the road again, at a walk. The day was ending. His hunger was now really fierce, and he thought of the coffee the soldiers had been heating while he stupidly quarreled with the fat captain.

The valley was widening out, and he saw that ahead of him, perhaps a league away, it gave onto another, much wider valley at right angles, in which the setting sun revealed a whole vista of groves and long alleys of poplars.

He spurred his horse onward, hoping that he would find this region less devastated. He told himself that there wasn't really much risk in eating, for example, a roast chicken. His mouth at once filled with a flood of saliva, which he had to spit out. He remembered his cigars. He still had four. He lit one of them.

He was close to the wide valley when he saw that ahead of him the road was blocked by barrels piled into a sort of barricade. And someone shouted at him to stop. As the person persisted in shouting: “Halt!” yet remained concealed even when he had stopped dead in the middle of the road, he advanced again a little nearer the barrels. He saw a gun-barrel leveled at him, and at last there emerged the head and shoulders of a man in a sackcloth blouse. “Halt, I say,” shouted this sentry, “and don't move, or I'll pump you full of lead.”

The man had a startlingly coarse face, as though someone had amused himself by assembling upon it the basest and most loathsome features. He was sucking the stump of a cheap paper cigar and his chin was stained with nicotine juice. He had been thoroughly shaved: beard, mustache, and hair. He had been scraped in this way for so long that his scalp was as bronzed as his cheeks. “Come on, step forward,” he said.

Angelo drew close enough to touch the barrels. The gun was still pointing at him. The man had little pig's eyes, very steady. “Got a note?” he said. As Angelo didn't understand he explained that he meant a sort of passport issued by the mayor of the village, without which he wouldn't be let through.

“And why?” asked Angelo.

“To make sure you aren't sick and bringing the cholera in your pocket.”

“Hell,” thought Angelo, “this isn't the moment to tell the truth.”

“So far from bringing it,” he said, “or wanting to bring it, I cleared out as soon as I heard there'd been a case. I went up the mountain and never went back to the village; that's why I haven't got a note or even a coat.”

The man was studying the horse's head and its harness, which was very elegant: the frontal, cheekstrap, and noseband were encrusted with silver, the rosettes, curb chain and rings of the backstay were all solid silver. He darted a furtive look around him. “How much have you got?” he asked in a low voice. Angelo gaped. “Yes,” said the man, “what it takes. Everything has to be explained to you, I see; you really are from the mountain,” and he rubbed his thumb over his forefinger as if he were counting coins.

This naïveté saved Angelo from a much greater danger than that of missing his dinner. He was so glad, after days of heroism, to meet a man whose cunning spoke to him of the refreshing peace of self-interest, that he was literally fascinated. He was also extremely hungry, and in spite of his aloofness the cholera was beginning to weigh on his mind.

“Of course I have,” said Angelo stupidly.

“Would you have at least a hundred francs?” said the man.

“Yes,” said Angelo.

“I shall need two hundred,” said the man, “but get off the road and go round by the little stream down there. Watch out if you see the other guards through the trees; they've gone on patrol as far as the barricade on the Saint-Vincent road; then come up here from that side. Don't try to bolt, I've got you covered, and remember, my boy, I'm not the least bit squeamish about shooting a man.” He pulled back his sackcloth sleeve and showed on his arm—which was enormous and hairy—the official tattoo-mark of the convict on heavy labor. He also tried to roll his little pig's eyes in a frightening manner, but Angelo, on the contrary, couldn't help drawing great comfort from this performance, and even from his shaven face, which displayed the signs of many vices.

Nevertheless, as he crossed the stream, after making sure that the undergrowth was empty as far as he could see, he took advantage of the moment when he was passing close to a thick clump of alders, which hid him to the waist, to put his hand in his pocket and count out ten louis into his handkerchief.