The Tramp
For forty days he had been walking, seeking everywhere for work. He had left his own hometown, Ville-Avaray, in the Manche, because there was no work to be got there. A carpenter’s mate, twenty-seven years old, a respectable, sturdy fellow, he had lived for two months on his family, he, the eldest son, with nothing to do but sit with his strong arms folded, amid the general unemployment. Bread became scarce in the home; the two sisters did day-work, but made little money, and he, Jacques Raudel, the strongest, did nothing because there was nothing to do, and ate the bread of others.
Then he had sought information at the Town Hall, and the clerk had told him that there was work to be got in the Midlands.
So he had set off, fortified with papers and certificates, with seven francs in his pocket; on his shoulder, in a blue handkerchief tied to the end of his stick, he carried a spare pair of shoes, a pair of trousers and a shirt.
And he walked without rest, day and night, along the interminable roads, under sun and rain, and never reaching that mysterious land where workmen find work.
At first he clung firmly to the idea that, being a carpenter, he must never work at anything but carpentry. But, in all the workshops where he offered himself, he was told that they had just dismissed men for lack of orders, and finding himself at the end of his resources, he resolved to do any work he might meet with on his way.
Thus he became by turns navvy, stable-boy, and stonecutter; he split wood, trimmed timber, dug a well, mixed mortar, tied faggots, and herded goats on a mountain, and all for a few pence, for he could only manage to get an occasional two or three days’ work by offering himself at a very low price, to tempt the avarice of employers and peasants.
And for a week now he had failed to find a job of any kind; he had nothing left, and lived on a few crusts of bread that he owed to the charity of the women from whom he begged on their doorsteps, as he passed along the roads.
Night was falling, and Jacques Raudel, worn out, with weary legs and an empty stomach, despondent in spirit, plodded barefoot in the grass at the roadside, for he was saving up his last pair of shoes, and the other pair had gone long before. It was a Saturday, towards the end of autumn. Grey clouds, swift and heavy, were chased across the sky by the gusts of wind that whistled in the trees. There was a feeling of approaching rain in the air. The countryside was deserted, now, at dusk on the eve of a Sunday. Here and there, in the fields, there rose, like monstrous yellow mushrooms, ricks of threshed straw; and the land, already sown for the coming year, seemed naked.
Raudel was hungry, hungry like a hungry beast, with the savage hunger that drives wolves to attack men. Exhausted, he lengthened his stride so that he would have fewer steps to take, and, with heavy head, the blood surging in his temples, red eyes, and a dry mouth, he gripped his stick with a vague desire to strike the first passerby he chanced to meet returning home to eat his broth.
He gazed at the roadside with a picture in his mind of potatoes lying unburied on the upturned soil. If he had found some, he would have collected dead wood, made a little fire in a ditch and supped royally on the hot, round roots, after first holding them, burning hot, in his cold hands.
But it was too late in the year, and, as on the previous evening, he had to gnaw a raw beetroot that he pulled from its furrow.
For the past two days he had been talking aloud, as he quickened his stride, goaded by his obsessing thoughts. He had scarcely thought at all, before this, applying all his mind, all his simple faculties, to the tasks he had been trained to do. But now, fatigue, his frantic pursuit of work that was not to be found, refusals, insults, nights spent on the grass, fasting, the scorn he felt all the stay-at-homes had for the tramp, their daily repeated question: “Why don’t you stay in your own place?” his grief at not being able to use the valiant arms whose strength he could feel, the remembrance of his parents left at home, also almost penniless—all these were filling him little by little with a slow anger, increasing every day, every hour, every minute, and escaping from his mouth in brief, involuntary phrases of plaintive discontent.
Stumbling over the stones that rolled from under his bare feet, he grumbled: “Misery … misery me … lot of swine … not four sous … not four sous … and now it’s raining … lot of swine. …”
He was indignant at the injustice of his lot, and blamed man, all men, because nature, the great blind mother, is unjust, cruel, and treacherous.
“Lot of swine,” he repeated through clenched teeth, watching the thin grey wisps of smoke going up from the roof at this, the dinner hour. And without reflecting on that injustice, that human injustice, called violence and theft, he longed to enter one of these houses, knock down the inhabitants, and sit down at the table in their stead.
“I haven’t the right to live, now …” he said, “seeing they let me die of hunger … and yet I only ask for work … lot of swine!” And the pain in his limbs, the pain in his stomach, and the pain in his heart went to his head like the madness born of drink, and gave birth in his brain to this simple thought: “I have a
