It was dark. The May days are short in the north lands of the Scheldt.
She had her little winter cloak of frieze and her wooden shoes and her
little white cap with the sunny curls rippling out of it in their pretty
rebellion. She had her little lantern too; and her bundle, and she had
put a few fresh eggs in her basket, with some sweet herbs and the
palm-sheaf that Father Francis had blessed last Easter; for who could
tell, she thought, how ill he might not be, or how poor?
She hardly gave a look to the hut as she ran by its garden gate; all her
heart was on in front, in the vague far-off country where he lay sick
unto death.
She ran fast through the familiar lanes into the city. She was not very
sure where Paris was, but she had the name clear and firm, and she knew
that people were always coming and going thence and thither, so that she
had no fear she should not find it.
She went straight to the big, busy, bewildering place in the Leopold
quarter where the iron horses fumed every day and night along the iron
ways. She had never been there before, but she knew it was by that great
highway that the traffic to Paris was carried on, and she knew that it
would carry people also as well.
There were bells clanging, lights flashing, and crowds pushing and
shouting, as she ran up--a little gray figure, with the lantern-spark
glimmering like any tiny glow-worm astray in a gas-lit city.
"To Paris?" she asked, entreatingly, going where she saw others going, to
a little grated wicket in a wall.
"Twenty-seven francs--quick!" they demanded of her. Bébée gave a great
cry, and stood still, trembling and trying not to sob aloud. She had
never thought of money; she had forgotten that youth and strength and
love and willing feet and piteous prayers,--all went for nothing as this
world is made.
A hope flashed on her and a glad thought. She loosed the silver buckles,
and held them out.
"Would you take these? They are worth much more."
There was a derisive laughter; some one bade her with an oath begone;
rough shoulders jostled her away. She stretched her arms out piteously.
"Take me--oh, pray take me! I will go with the sheep, with the
cattle--only, only take me!"
But in the rush and roar none heeded her; some thief snatched the silver
buckles from her hand, and made off with them and was lost in the throng;
a great iron beast rushed by her, snorting flame and bellowing smoke;
there was a roll like thunder, and all was dark; the night express had
passed on its way to Paris.
Bébée stood still, crushed for a moment with the noise and the cruelty
and the sense of absolute desolation; she scarcely noticed that the
buckles had been stolen; she had only one thought--to get to Paris.
"Can I never go without money?" she asked at the wicket; the man there
glanced a moment, with a touch of pity, at the little wistful face.
"The least is twenty francs--surely you must know that?" he said, and
shut his grating with a clang.
Bébée turned away and went out of the great cruel, tumultuous place; her
heart ached and her brain was giddy, but the sturdy courage of her nature
rose to need.
"There is no way at all to go without money to Paris, I suppose?" she
asked of an old woman whom she knew a little, who sold nuts and little
pictures of saints and wooden playthings under the trees, in the avenue
hard by.
The old woman shook her head.
"Eh?--no, dear. There is nothing to be done anywhere in the world without
money. Look, I cannot get a litre of nuts to sell unless I pay
beforehand."
"Would it be far to walk?"
"Far! Holy Jesus! It is right away in the heart of France--over two
hundred miles, they say; straight out through the forest. Not but what my
son did walk it once;--and he a shoemaker, who knows what walking costs;
and he is well-to-do there now--not that he ever writes. When they want
nothing people never write."
"And he walked into Paris?"
"Yes, ten years ago. He had nothing but a few sous and an ash stick, and
he had a fancy to try his luck there. And after all our feet were given
us to travel with. If you go there and you see him, tell him to send me
something--I am tired of selling nuts."
Bébée said nothing, but went on her road; since there was no other way
but to walk, she would take that way; the distance and the hardship did
not appall two little feet that were used to traverse so many miles of
sun-baked summer dust and of frozen winter mud unblenchingly year after
year.
The time it would take made her heart sink indeed. He was ill. God knew
what might happen. But neither the length of leagues nor the fatigue of
body daunted her. She only saw his eyes dim with pain and his lips burned
with fever.
She would walk twenty miles a day, and then, perhaps, she might get lifts
here and there on hay wagons or in pedlers' carts; people had always used
to be kind to her. Anyhow she counted she might reach Paris well in
fifteen days.
She sat under a shrine in a by street a moment, and counted the copper
pieces she had on her; they were few, and the poor pretty buckles that
she might have sold to get money were stolen.
She had some twenty sous and a dozen eggs; she thought she might live on
that; she had wanted to take the eggs to him, but after all, to keep life
in her until she could reach Paris was the one great thing.
"What a blessing it is to have been born poor; and to have lived
hardly--one wants so little!" she thought to herself.
Then she put up the sous in the linen bosom of her gown, and trimmed her
little lantern and knelt down in the quiet darkness and prayed a moment,
with the hot agonized tears rolling down her face, and then rose and
stepped out bravely in the cool of the night, on the great southwest road
towards Paris.
The thought never once crossed her to turn back, and go again into the
shelter of her own little hut among the flowers. He was sick there,
dying, for anything she knew; that was the only thing she remembered.
It was a clear, starlit night, and everywhere the fragrance of the spring
was borne in from the wide green plains, and the streams where the rushes
were blowing.
She walked ten miles easily, the beautiful gray shadow all about her. She
had never been so far from home in all her life, except to that one
Kermesse at Mechlin. But she was not afraid.
With the movement, and the air, and the sense that she was going to him,
which made her happy even in her misery, something of the old, sweet,
lost fancies came to her.
She smiled at the stars through her tears, and as the poplars swayed and
murmured in the wind, they looked to her like the wings and the swords
of a host of angels.
Her way lay out through the forest, and in that sweet green woodland she
was not afraid--no more afraid than the fawns were.
At Boitsfort she shrank a little, indeed. Here there were the open-air
restaurants, and the café gardens all alight for the pleasure-seekers
from the city; here there were music and laughter, and horses with brass
bells, and bright colors on high in the wooden balconies, and below among
the blossoming hawthorn hedges. She had to go through it all, and
she shuddered a little as she ran, thinking of that one priceless,
deathless forest day when he had kissed her first.
But the pleasure-people were all busied with their mirth and mischief,
and took no notice of the little gray figure in the starry night. She
went on along the grassy roads, under the high arching trees, with the
hoot of the owls and the cry of the rabbits on the stillness.
At Groenendael, in the heart of the forest midnight was striking as she
entered the village. Every one was asleep. The lights were all out The
old ruined priory frowned dark under the clouds.
She shivered a little again, and began to feel chill and tired, yet did
not dare to knock at any one of the closed house doors--she had no money.
So she walked on her first ten unknown miles, meeting a few people only,
and being altogether unmolested--a small gray figure, trotting in two
little wooden shoes.
They thought her a peasant going to a fair or a lace mill, and no one did
her more harm than to wish her good night in rough Flemish.
When the dawn began to whiten above the plains of the east, she saw an
empty cow-shed filled with hay; she was a little tired, and lay down and
rested an hour or two, as a young lamb might have lain on the dried
clover, for she knew that she must keep her strength and husband her
power, or never reach across the dreary length of the foreign land to
Paris.
But by full sunrise she was on her way again, bathing her face in a brook
and buying a sou's worth of bread and flet-milk at the first cottage that
she passed in bright, leaf-bowered Hoey-laert.
The forest was still all around her, with its exquisite life of bough and
blossom, and murmur of insect and of bird. She told her beads, praying as
she went, and was almost happy.
God would not let him die. Oh, no, not till she had kissed him once more,
and could die with him.
The hares ran across the path, and the blue butterflies flew above-head.
There was purple gloom of pine wood, and sparkling verdure of aspen and
elm. There were distant church carillons ringing, and straight golden
shafts of sunshine streaming.
She was quite sure God would not let him die.
She hoped that he might be very poor. At times he had talked as if he
were, and then she might be of so much use. She knew how to deal with
fever and suffering. She had sat up many a night with the children of the
village. The gray sisters had taught her many of their ways of battling
with disease; and she could make fresh cool drinks, and she could brew
beautiful remedies from simple herbs. There was so much that she might
do; her fancy played with it almost happily. And then, only to touch his
hand, only to hear his voice; her heart rose at the thought, as a lark to
its morning song.
At Rixensart, buried in its greenery, as she went through it in morning
light, some peasants greeted her cheerily, and called to her to rest in a
house porch, and gave her honey and bread. She could not eat much; her
tongue was parched and her throat was dry, but the kindness was precious
to her, and she went on her road the stronger for it.
"It is a long way to walk to Paris," said the woman, with some curious
wonder. Bébée smiled, though her eyes grew wet.
"She has the look of the little Gesù," said the Rixensart people; and
they watched her away with a vague timid pity.
So she went on through Ottignies and La Roche to Villers, and left the
great woods and the city chimes behind her, and came through the green
abbey valleys through Tilly and Ligny, and Fleurus, and so into the coal
and iron fields that lie round Charleroi.
Here her heart grew sick, and her courage sank under the noise and the
haste, before the blackness and the hideousness. She had never seen
anything like it. She thought it was hell, with the naked, swearing,
fighting people, and the red fires leaping night and day. Nevertheless,
if hell it were, since it lay betwixt her and him, she found force to
brave and cross it.
The miners and glass-blowers and nail-makers, rough and fierce and hard,
frightened her. The women did not look like women, and the children ran
and yelled at her, and set their dogs upon her. The soil was thick with
dust like soot, and the trees were seared and brown. There was no peace
in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty thousand folks toiled together in
the hopeless Tophet, and swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and
multiplied, in joyless and endless wrestling against hunger and death.
She got through it somehow, hiding often from the ferocious youngsters,
and going sleepless rather than lie in those dens of filth; but she
seemed so many, many years older when Charleroi lay at last behind
her,--so many, many years older than when she had sat and spun in the
garden at home.
When she was once in the valley of the Sambre she was more herself again,
only she felt weaker than she had ever done, because she only dared to
spend one of her sous each day, and one sou got so little food.
In the woods and fields about Alne she began to breathe again, like a
bird loosed to the air after being shut in a wooden trap. Green corn,
green boughs, green turf, mellow chimes of church bells, humming of
golden bees, cradle songs of women spinning, homely odors of little herb
gardens and of orchard trees under cottage walls,--these had been around
her all her life; she only breathed freely among them.
She often felt tired, and her wooden shoes were wearing so thin that the
hot dust of the road at noonday burnt her feet through them. Sometimes,
too, she felt a curious brief faintness, such as she had never known, for
the lack of food and the long fatigue began to tell even on her hardy
little body.
But she went on bravely, rarely doing less than her twenty miles a day,
and sometimes more, walking often in the night to save time, and lying
down in cow-sheds or under haystacks in the noontide.
For the most part people were kind to her; they saw she was so very young
and so poor.
Women would give her leave to bathe herself in their bedchambers,
and children would ask her to wait on the village bench under the
chestnut-tree, while they brought her their pet lamb or their tumbler
pigeons to look at, but, for the most part--unless she was very, very
tired--she would not wait. It took her so long, and who could tell how it
fared with him in Paris?
Into the little churches, scattered over the wide countries between
Charleroi and Erquelinnes, she would turn aside, indeed; but, then,
that was only to say a prayer for him; that was not loss to him, but
gain.
So she walked on until she reached the frontier of France. She began to
get a little giddy; she began to see the blue sky and the green level
always swirling round her as if some one were spinning them to frighten
her, but still she would not be afraid; she went on, and on, and on, till
she set her last step on the soil of Flanders.
Here a new, strange, terrible, incomprehensible obstacle opposed her: she
had no papers; they thrust her back and spoke to her as if she were a
criminal. She could not understand what they could mean. She had never
heard of these laws and rules. She vaguely comprehended that she must not
enter France, and stunned and heartbroken she dropped down under a tree,
and for the first time sobbed as if her very life would weep itself away.
She could see nothing, understand nothing. There were the same road, the
same hedges, the same fields, the same white cottages, and peasants in
blue shirts and dun-hued oxen in the wagons. She saw no mark, no
difference, ere they told her where she stood was Belgium, and where they
stood was France, and that she must not pass from one into the other.
The men took no notice of her. They went back into their guard-house,
and smoked and drank. A cat sunned herself under a scarlet bean. The
white clouds sailed on before a southerly sky. She might die here--he
there--and nothing seemed to care.
After a while an old hawker came up; he was travelling with wooden clocks
from the Black Forest. He stopped and looked at her, and asked her what
she ailed.
She knelt down at his feet in the dust.
"Oh, help me!" she cried to him. "Oh, pray, help me! I have walked all
the way from Brussels--that is my country--and now they will not let me
pass that house where the soldiers are. They say I have no papers. What
papers should I have? I do not know. When one has done no harm, and does
not owe a sou anywhere, and has walked all the way--Is it money that they
want? I have none; and they stole my silver clasps in Brussels; and if
I do not get to Paris I must die--die without seeing him again--ever
again, dear God!"
She dropped her head upon the dust and crouched and sobbed there, her
courage broken by this new barrier that she had never dreamed would come
between herself and Paris.
The old hawker looked at her thoughtfully. He had seen much of men and
women, and knew truth from counterfeit, and he was moved by the child's
agony.
He stooped and whispered in her ear,--
"Get up quick, and I will pass you. It is against the law, and I may go
to prison for it. Never mind; one must risk something in this world, or
else be a cur. My daughter has stayed behind in Marbais sweethearting;
her name is on my passport, and her age and face will do for yours. Get
up and follow me close, and I will get you through. Poor little soul!
Whatever your woe is it is real enough, and you are such a young and
pretty thing. Get up, the guards are in their house, they have not seen;
follow me, and you must not speak a word; they must take you for a
German, dumb as wood."
She got up and obeyed him, not comprehending, but only vaguely seeing
that he was friendly to her, and would pass her over into France.
The old man made a little comedy at the barrier, and scolded her as
though she were his daughter for losing her way as she came to meet him,
and then crying like a baby.
The guards looked at her carelessly, joked the hawker on her pretty face,
looked the papers over, and let her through, believing her the child of
the clock-maker of the Hartz. Some lies are blessed as truth.
"I have done wrong in the law, but not before God, I think, little one,"
said the pedler. "Nay, do not thank me, or go on like that; we are in
sight of the customs men still, and if they suspected, it would be the
four walls of a cell only that you and I should see to-night. And now
tell me your story, poor maiden: why are you on foot through a strange
country?"
But Bébée would not tell him her story: she was confused and dazed still.
She did not know rightly what had happened to her; but she could not talk
of herself, nor of why she travelled thus to Paris.
The old hawker got cross at her silence, and called her an unthankful
jade, and wished that he had left her to her fate, and parted company
with her at two cross-roads, saying his path did not lie with hers; and
then when he had done that, was sorry, and being a tenderhearted soul,
hobbled back, and would fain press a five-franc piece on her; and Bébée,
refusing it all the while, kissed his old brown hands and blessed him,
and broke away from him, and so went on again solitary towards St.
Quentin.
The country was very flat and poor, and yet the plains had a likeness in
them to her own wide Brabant downs, where the tall green wheat was
blowing and the barges dropping down the sluggish streams.
She was very footsore; very weary; very hungry so often; but she was in
France--in his country; and her spirit rose with the sense of that
nearness to him.
After all, God was so good to her; there were fine bright days and
nights; a few showers had fallen, but merely passing ones; the air was so
cool and so balmy that it served her almost as food; and she seldom found
people so unkind that they refused for her single little sou to give her
a crust of bread and let her lie in an outhouse.
After all, God was very good; and by the sixteenth or seventeenth day she
would be in the city of Paris.
She was a little light-headed at times from insufficient nourishment:
especially after waking from strange dreams in unfamiliar places;
sometimes the soil felt tremulous under her, and the sky spun round; but
she struggled against the feeling, and kept a brave heart, and tried to
be afraid of nothing.
Sometimes at night she thought she saw old Annémie. "But what if I do?"
she said to herself; "Annémie never will hurt me."
And now, as she grew nearer her goal, her natural buoyancy of spirit
returned as it had never done to her since the evening that he had kissed
and left her. As her body grew lighter and more exhausted, her fancy grew
keener and more dominant. All things of the earth and air spoke to her as
she went along as they had used to do. All that she had learned from the
books in the long cold months came to her clear and wonderful. She was
not so very ignorant now--ignorant, indeed, beside him--but still knowing
something that would make her able to read to him if he liked it, and to
understand if he talked of grave things.
She had no fixed thought of what she would be to him when she reached
him.
She fancied she would wait on him, and tend him, and make him well, and
be caressed by him, and get all gracious pretty things of leaf and
blossom about him, and kneel at his feet, and be quite happy if he only
touched her now and then with his lips;--her thoughts went no further
than that;--her love for him was of that intensity and absorption in
which nothing But itself is remembered.
When a creature loves much, even when it is as little and as simple a
soul as Bébée, the world and all its people and all its laws and ways are
as naught. They cease to exist; they are as though they had never been.
Whoever recollects an outside world may play with passion, or may idle
with sentiment, but does not love.
She did not hear what the villagers said to her. She did not see the
streets of the towns as she passed them. She kept herself clean always,
and broke fast now and then by sheer instinct of habit, nothing more. She
had no perception what she did, except of walking--walking--walking
always, and seeing the white road go by like pale ribbons unrolled.
She got a dreamy, intense, sleepless light in her blue eyes that
frightened some of those she passed. They thought she had been
fever-stricken, and was not in her senses.
So she went across the dreary lowlands, wearing out her little sabots,
but not wearing out her patience and her courage.
She was very dusty and jaded. Her woollen skirt was stained with weather
and torn with briers. But she had managed always to wash her cap white in
brook water, and she had managed always to keep her pretty bright curls
soft and silken--for he had liked them so much, and he would soon draw
them through his hand again. So she told herself a thousand times to give
her strength when the mist would come over her sight, and the earth would
seem to tremble as she went. On the fifteenth day from the night when she
had left her hut by the swans' water, Bébée saw Paris.
Shining away in the sun; white and gold; among woods and gardens she saw
Paris.
She was so tired--oh, so tired--but she could not rest now. There were
bells ringing always in her ears, and a heavy pain always in her head.
But what of that?--she was so near to him.
"Are you ill, you little thing?" a woman asked her who was gathering
early cherries in the outskirts of the great city.
Bébée looked at her and smiled: "I do not know--I am happy."
And she went onward.
It was evening. The sun had set. She had not eaten for twenty-four hours.
But she could not pause for anything now. She crossed the gleaming river,
and she heard the cathedral chimes. Paris in all its glory was about her,
but she took no more note of it than a pigeon that flies through it
intent on reaching home.
No one looked at or stopped her; a little dusty peasant with a bundle on
a stick over her shoulder.
The click-clack of her wooden shoes on the hot pavements made none look
up; little rustics came up every day like this to make their fortunes in
Paris. Some grew into golden painted silken flowers, the convolvuli of
their brief summer days; and some drifted into the Seine water, rusted,
wind-tossed, fallen leaves, that were wanted of no man. Anyhow it was
so common to see them, pretty but homely things, with their noisy shoes
and their little all in a bundle, that no one even looked once at Bébée.
She was not bewildered. As she had gone through her own city, only
thinking of the roses in her basket and of old Annémie in her garret, so
she went through Paris, only thinking of him for whose sake she had come
thither.
Now that she was really in his home she was happy,--happy though her head
ached with that dull odd pain, and all the sunny glare went round and
round like a great gilded humming-top, such as the babies clapped their
hands at, at the Kermesse.
She was happy: she felt sure now that God would not let him die till she
got to him. She was quite glad that he had left her all that long,
terrible winter, for she had learned so much and was so much more fitted
to be with him.
Weary as she was, and strange as the pain in her head made her feel, she
was happy, very happy; a warm flush came on her little pale cheeks as she
thought how soon he would kiss them, her whole body thrilled with the old
sweet nameless joy that she had sickened for in vain so long.
Though she saw nothing else that was around her, she saw some little
knots of moss-roses that a girl was selling on the quay, as she used to
sell them in front of the Maison du Roi. She had only two sous left, but
she stopped and bought two little rosebuds to take to him. He had used to
care for them so much in the summer in Brabant.
The girl who sold them told her the way to the street he lived in; it was
not very far of the quay. She seemed to float on air, to have wings like
the swallows, to hear beautiful musk all around. She felt for her beads,
and said aves of praise. God was so good.
It was quite night when she reached the street, and sought the number of
his house. She spoke his name softly, and trembling very much with joy,
not with any fear, but it seemed to her too sacred a thing ever to utter
aloud.
An old man looked out of a den by the door, and told her to go straight
up the stairs to the third floor, and then turn to the right. The old
man chuckled as he glanced after her, and listened to the wooden shoes
pattering wearily up the broad stone steps.
Bébée climbed them--ten, twenty, thirty, forty. "He must be very poor!"
she thought, "to live so high"; and yet the place was wide and handsome,
and had a look of riches. Her heart beat so fast, she felt suffocated;
her limbs shook, her eyes had a red blood-like mist floating before them;
but she thanked God each step she climbed; a moment, and she would
look upon the only face she loved.
"He will be glad; oh, I am sure he will be glad!" she said to herself, as
a fear that had never before come near her touched her for a moment--if
he should not care?
But even then, what did it matter? Since he was ill she should be there
to watch him night and day; and when he was well again, if he should wish
her to go away--one could always die.
"But he will be glad--oh, I know he will be glad!" she said to the
rosebuds that she carried to him. "And if God will only let me save his
life, what else do I want more?"
His name was written on a door before her. The handle of a bell hung
down; she pulled it timidly. The door unclosed; she saw no one, and went
through. There were low lights burning. There were heavy scents that were
strange to her. There was a fantastic gloom from old armor, and old
weapons, and old pictures in the dull rich chambers. The sound of her
wooden shoes was lost in the softness and thickness of the carpets.
It was not the home of a poor man. A great terror froze her heart,--if
she were not wanted here?
She went quickly through three rooms, seeing no one and at the end of
the third there were folding doors.
"It is I--Bébée." she said softly, as she pushed them gently apart; and
she held out the two moss-rosebuds.
Then the words died on her lips, and a great horror froze her, still and
silent, there.
She saw the dusky room as in a dream. She saw him stretched on the bed,
leaning on his elbow, laughing, and playing cards upon the lace coverlet.
She saw women with loose shining hair and bare limbs, and rubies and
diamonds glimmering red and white. She saw men lying about upon the
couch, throwing dice and drinking and laughing one with another.
Beyond all she saw against the pillows of his bed a beautiful brown
wicked looking thing like some velvet snake, who leaned over him as
he threw down the painted cards upon the lace, and who had cast about his
throat her curved bare arm with the great coils of dead gold all
a-glitter on it.
And above it all there were odors of wines and flowers, clouds of smoke,
shouts of laughter, music of shrill gay voices.
She stood like a frozen creature and saw--the rosebuds' in her hand. Then
with a great piercing cry she let the little roses fall, and turned and
fled. At the sound he looked up and saw her, and shook his beautiful
brown harlot off him with an oath.
But Bébée flew down through the empty chambers and the long stairway as a
hare flies from the hounds; her tired feet never paused, her aching limbs
never slackened; she ran on, and on, and on, into the lighted streets,
into the fresh night air; on, and on, and on, straight to the river.
From its brink some man's strength caught and held her. She struggled
with it.
"Let me die! let me die!" she shrieked to him, and strained from him to
get at the cool gray silent water that waited for her there.
Then she lost all consciousness, and saw the stars no more.
When she came back to any sense of life, the stars were shining still,
and the face of Jeannot was bending over her, wet with tears.
He had followed her to Paris when they had missed her first, and had come
straight by train to the city, making sure it was thither she had come,
and there had sought her many days, watching for her by the house of
Flamen.
She shuddered away from him as he held her, and looked at him with blank,
tearless eyes.
"Do not touch me--take me home."
That was all she ever said to him. She never asked him or told him
anything. She never noticed that it was strange that he should have been
here upon the river-bank. He let her be, and took her silently in the
cool night back by the iron ways to Brabant.