_Pallentem morte futura._ Agrippa’s galleys could not bar the way to
Antony’s purple-sailed trireme. This time, at least, the dove escaped
the vulture.
But hereupon Pied d’Alouette began again:
“They have taken away my knife!”
“Who have?”
Lifting his arm, the tramp waved it in the direction of the town and
gave no other answer. Yet he was following the course of his own slow
thought, for presently he said:
“They never gave it back to me.”
He sat on in solemn silence, powerless to express the ideas that
revolved in his darkened mind. His knife and his pipe were the only
possessions he had in the world. It was with his knife that he cut
the lump of hard bread and the bacon rind they gave him at farm-house
doors, food which his toothless gums would not bite; it was with his
knife that he chopped up cigar-ends to stuff them into his pipe; it was
with his knife that he scraped out the rotten bits in fruit and with it
he managed to drag out from the dung-heaps things good to eat. It was
with his knife that he shaped his walking-sticks and cut down branches
to make a bed of leaves for himself in the woods at night. With his
knife he carved boats out of oak-bark for the little boys, and dolls
out of deal for the little girls. His knife was the tool with which he
practised all the arts of life, the most skilled, as well as the most
homely, everyday ones. Always famished and often full of ingenuity, he
not only supplied his own wants, but also made dainty reed fountains
which were much admired in the town.
For, although the man would not work, he was yet a jack of all trades.
When he came out of prison nothing would induce them to restore his
knife to him; they kept it in the record office. And so he went on
tramp once more, but now weaponless, stripped, weaker than a child,
wretched wherever he went. He wept over his loss: tiny tear-drops
came, that scorched his bloodshot eyes without overflowing. Then, as
he went out of the town, his courage returned, for in the corner of
a milestone he came upon an old knife-blade. Now he had cut a strong
beechen handle for it in the woods of the Bergères, and was fitting it
on with skilful hands.
The idea of his knife suggested his pipe to him. He said:
“They let me keep my pipe.”
Drawing from the woollen bag which he wore against his breast, a kind
of black, sticky thimble, he showed the bowl of a pipe without the
fragment of a stem.
“My poor fellow,” said M. Bergeret, “you don’t look at all like a great
criminal. How do you manage to get put in gaol so often?”
Pied d’Alouette had not acquired the dialogue habit and he had no
notion of how to carry on a conversation. Although he had a kind of
deep intelligence, it took him some time to grasp the sense of the
words addressed to him. It was practice that he lacked and at first,
therefore, he made no attempt to answer M. Bergeret, who sat tracing
lines with the point of his stick in the white dust of the road. But at
last Pied d’Alouette said:
“I don’t do any wrong things. Then I am punished for other things.”
At length he seemed able to talk connectedly, with but few breaks.
“Do you mean to say that they put you in prison for doing nothing
wrong?”
“I know the people who do the wrong things, but I should do myself harm
if I blabbed.”
“You herd, then, with vagabonds and evil-doers?”
“You are trying to make me peach. Do you know Judge Roquincourt?”
“I know him a little. He’s rather stern, isn’t he?”
“Judge Roquincourt, he is a good talker. I never heard anyone speak so
well and so quickly. A body hasn’t time to understand him. A body can’t
answer. There isn’t anybody who speaks one half as well.”
“He kept you in solitary confinement for long months and yet you bear
him no grudge. What a humble example of mercy and long-suffering.”
Pied d’Alouette resumed the polishing of his knife-handle. As the work
progressed, he became quieter and seemed to recover his peace of mind.
Suddenly he demanded:
“Do you know a man called Corbon?”
“Who is he, this Corbon?”
It was too difficult to explain. Pied d’Alouette waved his arm in a
vague semicircle that covered a quarter of the horizon. Yet his mind
was busy with the man he had just mentioned, for again he repeated:
“Corbon.”
“Pied d’Alouette,” said M. Bergeret, “they say you are a queer sort
of vagabond and that, even when you are in absolute want, you never
steal anything. Yet you live with evil-doers and you are the friend of
murderers.”
Pied d’Alouette answered:
“There are some who think one thing and others who think another. But
if I myself thought of doing wrong, I should dig a hole under a tree on
Duroc Hill and bury my knife at the bottom of the hole. Then I should
pound down the earth on top of it with my feet. For when people have
the notion of doing wrong, it’s the knife that leads them on. It’s also
pride which leads them on. As for me, I lost my pride when I was a lad,
for men, women and children in my own parts all made fun of me.”
“And have you never had wicked, violent thoughts?”
“Sometimes, when I came upon women alone on the roads, for the fancy I
had for them. But that’s all over now.”
“And that fancy never comes back to you?”
“Time and again it does.”
“Pied d’Alouette, you love liberty and you are free. You live without
toil. I call you a happy man.”
“There are some happy folks. But not me.”
“Where are these happy folks, then?”
“At the farms.”
M. Bergeret rose and slipping a ten-sou piece into Pied d’Alouette’s
hand, said:
“So you fancy, Pied d’Alouette, that happiness is to be found under a
roof, by the chimney-corner, or on a feather-bed. I thought you had
more sense.”