But he set off.
It was December; a cold wind ran over the fields and whistled in the bare branches and the clouds galoped across the low, dark sky, hastening to an unknown goal. The cripple went slowly on, painfully moving his crutches one after the other, steadying himself on the one twisted leg that remained to him, terminated by a clubfoot swathed in a rag.
From time to time he sat down at the roadside and rested for a few minutes. Hunger was overwhelming his confused and stupid wits with utter misery. He had only one idea, to eat, but he did not know how it was to be brought about.
For three hours he struggled along the long road; then, when the trees of the village came into sight, he hastened his movements.
The first peasant whom he met, and of whom he asked alms, replied:
“Here you are back again at your old trade! Shall we never be rid of you?”
And “Bell” departed. At every door he was roughly treated and sent away without being given anything. But he continued his round, patient and obstinate. He did not garner a halfpenny.
Then he visited the farms, dragging himself across fields soft with rain, so exhausted that he could not lift his sticks. Everywhere he was driven away. It was one of those cold, melancholy days on which hearts are hardened, and tempers hasty, on which the soul is dark, and the hands open neither to give nor to succour.
When he had visited every house with which he was acquainted, he went and lay down in the corner of a ditch which ran alongside Maître Chiquet’s farmyard. He unhooked himself, this being the best way of expressing the manner in which he let himself fall down between the high crutches that he slipped under his arms. For a long time he remained motionless, tortured by hunger, but too much of an animal fully to comprehend his fathomless misery.
He waited for he knew not what, in that vague state of expectation which lives on, deathless, in all of us. There in the corner of the yard, in the icy wind, he awaited the mysterious aid from heaven or mankind which a wretched victim will always hope for, without wondering how, or why, or by whose agency it can possibly arrive. A flock of black hens was passing, seeking their sustenance in the earth, which gives food to all creatures. At every moment their sharp beaks found a bit of grain or an invisible insect, after which the birds would continue their slow, sure search.
“Bell” watched them, thinking of nothing; then there came to him, into his belly if not into his head, the feeling, rather than the thought, that one of those birds would make excellent eating, grilled over a fire of dead wood.
The idea that he was about to commit a theft never touched him. Taking up a stone which lay within his reach, he threw it at the nearest hen, and, being an expert shot, killed it outright. The bird fell on its side, beating its wings. The rest fled, swaying from side to side on their thin legs, and “Bell,” clambering once more into his crutches, started off to retrieve his booty, his movements resembling those of the hens.
As he arrived beside the little black corpse stained on the head with blood, he was given a violent blow in the back which made him loose hold of his sticks and sent him rolling for ten paces in front of him. Maître Chiquet, exasperated, rushed upon the marauder and showered blows upon him, beating him furiously, with the fury of a peasant who has been robbed, belabouring with fist and knee the entire body of the cripple, who could not defend himself.
The farmhands came up in their turn, and joined their master in battering the beggar. When they were weary of beating him, they picked him up, carried him off, and shut him up in the woodshed while someone went to fetch the police.
“Bell,” half dead, bleeding, and fainting with hunger, remained lying on the ground. Evening came, the night, then dawn. He had still had nothing to eat.
About midday the police appeared and opened the door with great care, expecting to meet with some resistance, for Maître Chiquet had given them to understand that he had been attacked by the beggar and had defended himself with great difficulty.
“Come on! Up you get!” shouted the sergeant.
But “Bell” could not move. He tried hard to hoist himself on to his sticks, but did not succeed. They thought he was shamming, trying to trick them, acting with the obstinate ill will common to malefactors, and the two armed men laid rough hands on him and set him on his crutches by main force.
Terror had gripped him, his instinctive terror of all wearers of the yellow shoulder-belt, the terror of the hunted before the hunter, of the mouse before the cat. With a superhuman effort he managed to remain upright.
“Off we go!” said the sergeant. He walked. All the farmhands watched him go. The women shook their fists at him; the men sniggered and abused him: he was caught at last! Good riddance!
He went off between his two guards. He succeeded in finding the desperate energy necessary to keep going until evening, stupefied, no longer even realising what was happening to him, too frightened to understand anything.
The people they met on the way stopped to watch him go by, and the peasants murmured:
“It’s some thief or other.”
Towards nightfall they reached the capital of the canton. He had never been so far as this. He hardly realised at all what was going on, nor what might happen to him afterwards. All these terrible, unforeseen events, these faces and strange houses, bewildered him.
He did not utter a word, having nothing to say, for he
