Short Fiction

seized her, and threw her against the still heated walls of the house. Then a squad of twelve men drew up in a rank opposite her, at a distance of twenty yards. She did not stir. She had understood. She waited.

“An order resounded, which was followed by a long report of muskets. One delayed shot went off all alone, after the others.

“The old woman did not fall. She sank down as if someone had mowed off her legs.

“The Prussian officer approached. She was cut almost in two, and in her shriveled hand she held her letter, bathed in blood.”

My friend Serval added.

“It was by way of reprisal that the Germans destroyed the château of the district, which belonged to me.”

I thought of the mothers of the poor gentle young fellows burned there; and of the atrocious heroism of that other mother, shot against the wall.

And I picked up a little pebble, still blackened by the fire.

The Tramp

He had known better days, in spite of his poverty and his infirmity.

At the age of fifteen both his legs had been crushed by a carriage on the Varville high road. Ever since then he had been a beggar, dragging himself along the roads and across the farmyards, balanced on his crutches, which had forced his shoulders to the level of his ears. His head appeared buried between two hills.

As a child he had been found in a ditch by the rector of Billettes, on the eve of All Souls’ Day, and for that reason had been christened Nicolas Toussaint (All Saints). He was brought up by charity, and remained a stranger to any form of education. It was after drinking some brandy given him by the village baker that he was lamed, which was considered an excellent joke; since then he had been a vagabond, not knowing how to do anything except hold out his hand for alms.

In earlier days the Baroness d’Avary had given him a sort of kennel filled with straw to sleep in, next to the chicken-house on the farm belonging to her country-house; and in the times of famine he was always certain of finding a piece of bread and a glass of cider in the kitchen. Often he received there a few coppers as well, thrown down by the old lady from the top of the terrace steps or from the windows of her room. Now she was dead.

In the village he was given scarcely anything; he was too well known; people were tired of him after forty years of seeing him drag his deformed and ragged body round from hovel to hovel on his two wooden paws. Yet he would not leave the neighbourhood, for he knew no other thing on earth but this corner of the country, these three or four hamlets in which he had dragged out his miserable life. He had set boundaries to his begging, and would never have passed over the frontiers within which he was used to keep himself.

He did not know if the world extended far beyond the trees which had always bounded his view. He had no curiosity in the matter. And when rustics, weary of meeting him continually at the edges of their fields or beside their ditches, shouted to him: “Why do you never go to the other villages, instead of always hobbling round these parts?” he would not answer and would go away, seized with a vague fear of the unknown, the fear of a poor man in confused terror of a thousand things, new faces, rough treatment, the suspicious looks of people who did not know him, and the policemen who went two by two along the roads, and sent him ducking instinctively into the bushes or behind the heaps of stones.

When he saw them in the distance, glittering in the sun, he acquired suddenly a strange, monster-like agility in getting himself into some hiding-place. He tumbled off his crutches, letting himself fall like a rag, and rolled up into a ball, becoming quite small, invisible, flattened like a hare in its form, blending his brown rags with the brown earth.

As a matter of fact he had never had anything to do with them. But he carried it in his blood, as though he had received this terror from the parents he had never seen.

He had no refuge, no roof, no hut, no shelter. He slept anywhere in the summer, and in the winter he slipped under barns or into cowsheds with remarkable adroitness. He always decamped before his presence was discovered. He knew the holes by which buildings might be entered; and the handling of his crutches had given surprising strength to his arms; by the strength of his wrists alone he would climb up into haylofts, where he sometimes stayed for four or five days without stirring out, when he had collected sufficient provisions during his rounds.

He lived like the beasts of the woods, surrounded by men, knowing no one, loving no one, arousing in the peasants no emotion but a sort of indifferent contempt and resigned hostility. He had been nicknamed “Bell,” because he swung between his two props like a bell between its two hammers.

For the past two days he had had nothing to eat. No one gave him anything now. People were at last quite tired of him. The peasant women at their doors shouted at him from the distance when they saw him coming:

“Be off with you, you clod! Why, I gave you a bit of bread only three days ago!”

And he swivelled round on his props and went off to the next house, where he was welcomed in the same fashion.

The women declared to their next-door neighbours:

“After all, we can’t feed the lazybones all the year round.”

The lazybones, however, needed food every day.

He had roamed all over Saint Hilaire, Varville, and Les Billettes without harvesting a solitary centime or an old crust. No hope remained, except at Tournolles; but that required of him