‘You been a-?bear-?baiting, George, you know you have,’ said a shipmate, tossing his stone up and down, not to have the air of abandoning it. ‘We been to Hockley together.’
‘Bear-?baiting is different,’ said George. ‘The bears at Hockley is willing. This bear ain’t. I dare say it’s hot. Bears is Greenland creatures.’
The bear certainly looked hot. It was stretched out on what little grass it could find, strangely prostrate. But the clamour had spread; crews of other ships wanted to see it dance, and after some time the bear-?leader came up and gave them to understand that the animal was indisposed - could only perform at night - ‘im ave airy coat, mister; im ate up whole goat for im dinner; im belly ache.’
‘Why, shipmates, there you are. Just as I said,’ cried George. ‘How would you like dancing in a - great fur pelisse, in this - sun?’
Events had escaped from George’s control, however; an English sea-?officer, wishing to impress the lady with whom he was travelling, had spoken to the sergeant of gendarmerie, and now the sergeant whistled to the master of the bear.
‘Papers,’ he said. ‘A Spanish passport, eh? A very greasy passport too, my friend; do you sleep with your bear? Joan Margall, born in - what’s this place?’
‘Lerida, monsieur le sergent,’ said the man, with the cringing humility of the poor.
‘Lerida. Profession, bear-?leader. Eh, bien: a led bear knows how to dance - that is logic. I have to have proof; it is my duty to see the bear perform.’
‘Certainly, monsieur le sergent, at once. But the gentlemen will not expect too much from Flora; she is a female bear, and - ‘He whispered in the gendarme’s ear. ‘Ah, ah? Just so,’ said the gendarme. ‘Well, just a pace or two, to satisfy my sense of duty.’
Dragged up by its chain and beaten by its leader till the dust flew from its shaggy side the bear shuffled forward. The man took a little pipe from his bosom, and playing it with one hand while he held the chain with the other, he hoisted the bear on to its hind legs, where it stood, swaying, amidst a murmur of disapprobation from the sailors. ‘Crool buggers, these foringers,’ said George. ‘Look at his poor nose, with that great ring.’
‘English gents,’ said the man, with an ingratiating leer. ‘Ornpip.’
He played a recognizable hornpipe, and the bear staggered through a few of the steps, crossing its arms, before sitting down again. Trumpets sounded from the citadel behind the walls, the guard on the Narbonne gate changed, and the sergeant began to bawl ‘En route, en route, les prisonniers.’
With avid and shamelessly persistent busyness, the bear-?leader hurried up and down the line. ‘Remember the bear, gents. Remember the bear. N’oubliez pas l’ours, messieurs-?dames.’
Silence. The convoy’s dust settled on the empty road. The inhabitants of Carcassonne all went to sleep; even the small boys who had been dropping mortar and clods of earth from the battlements on to the bear disappeared. Silence at last, and the chink of coins.
‘Two livres four sous,’ said the bear-?leader. ‘One maravedi, two Levantine coins of whose exact provenance I am uncertain, a Scotch groat.’
‘When one sea-?officer is to be roasted, there is always another at hand to turn the spit,’ said the bear. ‘It is an old service proverb. I hope to God I have that fornicating young sod under my command one day. i’ll make him dance a hornpipe - oh, such a hornpipe. Stephen, prop my jaws open a little more, will you? I think I shall die in five minutes if you don’t. Could we not creep into a field and take it off?’
‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘But I shall lead you to an inn as soon as the market has cleared, and lodge you in a cool damp cellar for the afternoon. I will also get you a collar, to enable you to breathe. We must reach Couiza by dawn.’
The white road winding, winding, up and up the French side of the Pyrenees, the afternoon sun - the June sun now - beating straight down on the dusty slope: the bear and its leader plodding on. Scorned by carts, feared by horses, they had already walked three hundred and fifty miles, taking a zigzag route to avoid most large towns and the dangerous zone of the coast, and to stay two nights in houses belonging to sure friends. Stephen was leading the bear by the paw, for Jack could not see below his muzzle when his head was on, and in his other hand he had the broad spiked collar that covered the hole through which Jack breathed. He was obliged to put it on for the best part of the day, however, for although this was a remote valley there were houses every few hundred yards, hamlets not three or four miles apart, and fools that kept accompanying them on their way. ‘Was it a wise bear? How much did it eat a week? Was it ever wicked? Could he buckle the two ends of his month by exhibiting it?’ And the nearer they came to the mountains, the more anecdotes of the bears that had been heard of, actually seen, and even killed. Bears, wolves, smugglers and mountain bandits, the Trabucayres and the Migueletes. Communicative fools, cheerful villagers, all eager for a treat, and dogs. Every hamlet, every farmhouse had its swarm of dogs that came out, amazed, howling, yapping and barking, haunting the bear’s heels sometimes as far as the next vile swarm; for the dogs, if not the men, knew that there was something unnatural in the bear.
‘It will not be long now,’ said Stephen. ‘At the far end, beyond the trees, I can see the turning of the main Le Perthus road. You can lie in the wood while I walk to the village to find out what is afoot. Should you like to sit down for a moment on this milestone? There is water in the ditch, and you could soak your feet.’
‘Oh, I do not mind it,’ said Jack, staggering as Stephen altered the rhythm of his walk to peer into the ditch. ‘And I dare not soak them again, in any case.’ The massive, hairy
shape writhed a little - a mechanical attempt at seeing its tattered buttocks, legs and lower paws, dog-? lacerated. ‘The wood is not very far off, I dare say?’
‘Oh, not above an hour or so. It is a beech-?wood with an old marle-?pit; and you may - I do not assert it, but I say you may see the purple helleborine growing there!’
Lying in the deep cool fern with his collar off Jack felt the sweat still coursing down his chest, and the movement of ants, ticks, unidentified insects invading him; he smelt his own unwashed reek and the moist stench of the skin, imperfectly preserved in turpentine; but he minded none of it. He was too far gone to do anything but lie in the complete relaxation of utter weariness. It had of course been impossible to disguise him: a six-?foot, yellow-?haired Englishman would have stood out like a steeple in the south of France - a France alive with people tracking fugitives of one kind or another, foreign and domestic; but the price for this attempt was beyond anything he had believed possible. The torment of the ill-?fitting, chafing hide, the incessantly-?repeated small rasping wounds, the ooze of blood, the flayed soles of his feet, attached to the fur by court-?plaster, the heat, the suffocation, the vile uncleanliness, had reached what he had thought the unendurable point ten days, two hundred miles, ago, in the torrid waste of the Causse du Palan.
