out and was overcome with astonishment. Our cabin, shaped like a cone, looked like an enormous diamond with a fiery heart that had risen suddenly out of the frozen water of the marsh. Inside we could see two fantastic figures—those of our dogs, who were trying to get warm.
Suddenly a cry rang out above our heads, a strange, mournful, savage cry. The gleam of our fire had wakened the wild birds.
Nothing moves me so much as this first signal of life when nothing is visible. It stabs the darkness, so swiftly, and so far off, before even the first ray of daylight has appeared on the horizon. It seems to me in this glacial hour of dawn that this flying sound, carried on the wings of a bird, is a sigh from the very heart of the world.
Karl spoke. “Put out the fire. This must be daybreak.”
Indeed at that moment the sky began to lighten and flights of wild duck fled over the heavens, like lines drawn in swift sweeping strokes and quickly effaced. There was a flash in the darkness: Karl had just fired; the two dogs rushed out. Then the two of us fired in rapid succession, as soon as there appeared above the rushes the shadow of a flying tribe. Pierrot and Plongeon, panting and happy, brought the birds to us, bleeding. Sometimes their eyes still seemed to be observing us.
Daylight came at last, a day clear and blue. The sun came out at the bottom of the valley and we were just thinking of going back when two birds, with necks outstretched and wings extended, shot quickly over our heads. I fired. One of them fell right at our feet. It was a silver-breasted teal. Then from the sky above me, a voice, a bird’s voice cried. It was a lament, short and repeated, heartbreaking. The bird, the little bird who had escaped, began to wheel round against the blue of the sky above us, staring at his dead comrade whom I held in my hands.
Karl, on his knees, bright-eyed, his gun lifted, peered at her, waiting until she was near enough.
“You have killed the female,” he said. “The male won’t go away.”
My goodness! He certainly would not.
He wheeled round and round, all the time crying above us. Never has bitterness of grief so torn my heart as this desolate call, the mournful reproach of this poor bird lost in space.
Sometimes he fled from the menace of the guns that followed his flight. Sometimes he seemed ready to continue his journey across the sky by himself. But he could not make up his mind to it, and would come back again a moment later to look for his mate.
“Leave her on the ground,” said Karl. “He’ll come at once then.”
He did come, indeed, quite careless of any danger, drawn by his bird’s love for the other whom I had killed.
Karl took aim; it was as if someone had cut a string which held the bird suspended. I saw something, a black, tumbling creature; I heard among the rushes the noise of a fall. Then Pierrot brought him to me.
I put them, already cold, into the same grave—and I departed that same day for Paris.
Clochette
They are strange things, these old memories that haunt our minds and will not be dismissed.
This is such an old one, so old that I cannot understand why it remains in my mind so vividly and so tenaciously. I have seen so many sinister things, so many moving and terrible things since, that it astonishes me to find that I cannot pass a day, one single day, without a vision of Mother Clochette appearing before me in her habit as I knew her once upon a time, so long ago, when I was ten or twelve years old.
She was an old dressmaker who came to my parents’ house once a week, every Tuesday, to do the mending. My parents lived in one of those country houses called châteaux, which are merely old houses with high pointed roofs, surrounded by four or five dependent farms.
The village, a large village, a small town, stood some few hundred yards away, huddled round the church, whose red bricks were blackened by time.
Every Tuesday, then, Mother Clochette arrived between half past six and seven o’clock in the morning, and went directly to the linen room to begin her work.
She was a tall thin woman, bearded—covered with hair, rather, her beard growing everywhere on her face. It was an amazing beard, an unexpected beard, bursting out into incredible bunches and curling tufts of hair that looked as if a madman had scattered them across a vast face like the face of a petticoated policeman. She had hair on her nose, under her nose, round her nose, on her chin, on her cheeks; and her eyebrows, extravagantly long and thick, bushy and bristling and quite grey, looked like nothing on earth but a pair of moustaches planted there in error.
She limped, not just an ordinary cripple’s limp, but like a ship riding at the anchor. When she rested the weight of her bony lopsided body on her one good leg, she seemed to be gathering herself to rise on a monstrous wave; then she plunged all at once on the verge of disappearing into an abyss: she buried herself in the earth. Added to which, she swayed so wildly that her gait irresistibly suggested the thought of a storm; and her head, always covered with an enormous white bonnet, with its ribbons floating down her back, appeared to cross the horizon from north to south, and south to north, with her every movement.
I adored this Mother Clochette. As soon as I got up, I climbed to the linen room, where I found her installed, sewing, a warming-pan under her feet. As soon as I arrived, she made me take this warming-pan and seat myself on it so that I should not catch cold in this
