Beyond, the passage was more and more in ruins. They advanced on all fours, hampered by the cloaks, case, and saddlebags. They made slow progress, in total darkness, over a real rubble-heap. At last Angelo’s out-thrust hand touched a sharply chiseled stone and he felt a cool draft coming from below. They had found the opening to something. By the light of sparks from his tinder, then of the wick on which he blew, Angelo saw that they had just emerged into a corkscrew staircase, as narrow as the passage but in good condition. A few turns down and they met daylight again and finally, cautiously, they reached a door that opened onto the thyme garden they had seen through the broken window in the gallery.
The autumn twilight was beginning to fall. They remained hidden. The garden looked as if it were regularly used. There must be other, easier ways into it. The place where Angelo and the young woman were hiding was moreover used as a toolshed, and two spades, a rake, and a big coarse straw hat like those worn by harvesters had been left there.
In the garden there was nothing but thyme and stones. It was clearly a terrace and must overlook a defense platform, a street, a bank—Angelo wondered which, and at what height. But it would have been too rash to go and see. They must wait till evening had really fallen. It was certainly a place loved by the nuns, to judge from those touching garden tools placed ready for tilling a terrace of white earth as dry as salt.
Swifts and swallows began to dart past the door-opening. Following the birds’ new custom, as soon as they perceived the motionless figures of Angelo and the young woman, they approached and even flew right in under the vault, wheeling round them with cries and violent wingbeats.
“This could easily give us away,” said Angelo. “Let’s go back up the stairs a bit and hide.”
They were hardly settled in the shadow when they heard footsteps in the garden. It was a nun, not at all the red-faced sister with big bare arms, but a tall, thin sort of shopkeeper whose ample black skirt forced upon her a certain look of nobility. She took off her coif, revealing a tiny head and an extraordinarily unpleasant face with quite small and very active black eyes. She came to fetch the rake and began to rake the paths. After which, she fumbled under her skirt, took out of her pocket a horn knife and, crouching down, meticulously weeded around the tufts of thyme. She threw herself with a sort of passion into this useless work.
At last it began to grow dark. The nun having withdrawn, Angelo ran to the edge of the rampart, leaned over, and returned.
“It’s only ten to twelve feet high,” he said, “and there’s a clump of wild laurel growing in the wall.”
They tied all the luggage together in a bundle.
“I’ll carry it,” said Angelo. “We’ll have to forget about our horses. Unless you’ll agree to a fight. That, I confess, would be balm to my heart and I think you too would get a good breath of fresh air out of it. But it wouldn’t be wise. Still, I’d give a lot, and in particular a lesson in fencing, to hear you talk as you did this morning to the soldiers who brought you here. All the time I had the feeling that at some more banal remark than usual you’d show a clean pair of heels and leave them gaping. If you haven’t thoroughly understood that in reality we did not surrender, I propose a little battle in the soldiers’ courtyard, when we’ll make all we have to tell them perfectly clear. Otherwise, we only have to throw the luggage overboard and jump twelve feet, making use of the laurel stump. There’s a grass bank on the other side, and it slopes straight down to the fields. We’ll walk as far as we can during the night, and tomorrow we shall be far away. I still have over three hundred francs. We’ll buy nags of some sort. Would you like to go to that little village near Gap, where you told me your sister-in-law lives?”
“That’s exactly what I must do. Besides, have you thought that even if you did give the soldiers a beating, it wouldn’t count, seeing that they’ve certainly got cholera and you haven’t? It interferes with swordsmanship, I imagine.”
“You mean it would interfere with mine?” said Angelo very obtusely. “It’s possible. We’re still a bit stiff and it’s no joke to leave this place by slithering on all fours through the walls. A twelve-foot jump isn’t much, after all. And there’s the laurel stump. I’d have liked to put sense into the heads of those sheep shut up there, but that would mean a song and dance.”
In spite of everything, before they left their shelter, Angelo went to make sure that the other door leading into the garden was shut.
He said to himself: “How different it would all be if I were alone. (Then I don’t think. And what a pleasure that is!)”
Five minutes later they were on the slope. The young woman had jumped without fuss and had even made most clever use of the laurel stump. Everything had been extremely easy. Angelo, disappointed, was watching the shadows set up by the rising moon. They were feeling very tranquil. He would have liked some sort of fight, he did not quite know what. He had hoped to find at least one soldier at the foot of the wall, a sentry whom he would have had to disarm. He had had visions of himself struggling and overthrowing his adversary.
A few frogs were chanting in some cisterns that were no doubt half empty and echoed loudly.
“This is great fun,” said the young woman: “it reminds me of an evening when I jumped out of the window to go and dance in the square at Rians. My father hadn’t forbidden me to go out, far from it, but any stolen fruit—what a joy! And after all, jumping out of the window!”
“Women,” said Angelo to himself, “are incomplete creatures.”
He wondered why she was suddenly so lively after having been so downcast during the afternoon. “I too enjoyed crawling on all fours through the walls, but I knew how serious our position is. And it wasn’t so extraordinary to expect a sentry at the foot of this wall; there should have been if the captain whose voice I heard was doing his job.”
At length Angelo slung the bundle on his back and they set off down the glacis, gently sloping, muffled with grass, and ending in fields of lavender, wide open to freedom on all sides and even faintly scented.
They walked for about an hour through the fields, then found a track leading in the direction Angelo had decided to take. It soon began to climb. The moon, which had gradually taken its place at the highest point in the sky, was shedding a bright light. It revealed the muscular back of a treeless mountain studded with small rocks gleaming like silver.
The night was truly gentle. The crickets, restored to vigor by the heat of that Indian summer’s day, were now making their metallic grating sound, which seems like an intoxication of the air itself. The sluggish wind blew warm gusts.
Angelo and the young woman made good progress along this track, which headed vaguely northward. On the other side of the mountain, toward midnight, they crossed a fairly wide road lined by tall poplars, in whose long branches the moonlight played seductively. All was peaceful and reassuring. They even heard the wheels of a carriage in the distance and the jog trot of a horse that seemed to feel at ease in the softness of the night.
They hid behind some tall broom bushes and finally saw a cabriolet pass close by with its hood folded back, carrying a man and woman in calm conversation.
The road from which the cabriolet had come led eastward, along a valley bottom. The company of the poplars, leafless but glazed with white light, was very comforting. Judging from the two who had just passed, that part of the countryside must be agreeable.
“What we need,” said Angelo, who found his bundle absurd now that he had seen the well-sprung cabriolet bowling along behind its horse, “is a carriage like that. It would make up for our horses ten times over. At any rate, it would give us that well-to-do air which intimidates the soldiers. The man and woman we saw talking just now were not fugitives. Seeing them, it’s almost impossible to imagine there’s a quarantine at Vaumeilh, and yet it’s barely twenty kilometers from this road. Let’s go and see what there is over there. Especially as it’s still more our direction than the one we’ve been following until now. Let’s forget abou
t the rendezvous with Giuseppe. He’s big enough to find his way by himself. What matters for us is to get as quickly as possible to that village near Gap where your sister-in-law lives.”
“What is your name?” said the young woman. “Yesterday in the quarantine I needed to call you several times, though I was near you. After all, I can’t go on calling you ‘monsieur.’ Besides, it’s not such a help as a Christian name in delicate situations. Mine is Pauline.”
“My name’s Angelo,” said he. “And my surname’s Pardi. That’s certainly not my father’s name. I’m rather proud of its being simply the name of a large forest owned by my mother near Turin.”
“Your first name is very pretty. Will you let me carry my share of the baggage, now that we’re walking on a comfortable road?”
“Certainly not. I have a long stride and I don’t feel the weight. The cloaks are very soft on the shoulder. Your little case and our bags are properly wrapped up. It’s quite enough that you should be forced to walk in riding-boots. That’s not too easy. Riders without their mounts are always a bit absurd, but the cabriolet that passed us—which was, I admit, the very image of tranquillity and peace—doesn’t reassure me. The only thing that reassures me is the distance we’ve been putting for some hours between ourselves and that quarantine where you lost your courage for five minutes. Aren’t you tired?”
“My boots are excellent and I used always to wear them for my walks in the woods. They were very long walks. My husband is an expert on boots and pistols. It was he who taught me to double-load. He also took care to have boots as pliable as gloves made for me. We live in a country of brushwood and hills where one has to go leagues to distract oneself with the spectacle of nature.”
“That’s the way we lived at Granta, before I joined the Cadets. And every time I went home, before I left for France, every day it was some endless ride, or even a road march on which you had to drag your horse by the bridle if you wanted to get out of the forest to see a fine sunset, a beautiful dawn, or simply the open sky my mother loves so much.”
The road had risen little by little onto high land where it wound between woods of ilex. The moon, half buried in the west, was casting that strange light, tinged with yellow, which creates dramatic realities. The horizon into which it was sinking seemed to have burst into silver dust amid which there floated the misty phantom of the mountains. The night was at once dark and brilliant; the trees, etched black against the brightness of the moon, stood out sparkling white against the shadows of the night. The wind no longer knew in which direction to blow; it swayed like a warm palm tree.
Angelo and the young woman had been walking for nearly six hours. They were no longer spurred on by dread of being pursued and captured. These woods were quite different from Vaumeilh, this light far removed from any in which one could picture ordinary patrols.
Twenty paces from the road they found under the ilexes a thicket of tall broom that encircled, as though by design, a little room of warm springy earth. Angelo put down the bundle. It was useless to deny it, he was limp with fatigue and, in spite of the moonlight, had been secretly in a vile temper for the last hour of walking.
“I don’t like carrying baggage,” he had kept saying to himself.
He unrolled the cloaks and made a comfortable bed.
“Lie down,” he said to the young woman, “and if I may give some advice, take off your breeches. You’ll rest better. We can’t tell what’s ahead of us, except that, judging by what we’ve already seen, it won’t be easy sailing. Let’s try to be ready for anything. If we reach a town, ten to one it’ll be putrid and full of soldiers. We don’t have horses any more. We’re going to have to hoof it. I now think those two bowling along so charmingly in the cabriolet must have been fools. Walking isn’t at all the same as riding. If you get blisters, your wounds don’t heal and you can’t walk any more. It would be absurd to die stupidly where you are from having neglected your thighs.”
He spoke to her as to a trooper. She was too tired to give any other reply than: “You’re right.” She quickly did as he said. Besides, he was right. She slept deeply for twenty minutes, then roused herself and said: “You’ve nothing over you! You’ve put my cloak under me and yours on top of me!”
“I’m quite all right,” said Angelo. “I’ve slept on the hard ground in the bitterest cold with nothing to cover me but my dolman. And that’s not much. Now I’ve got my good velvet jacket, I’m in no danger, but since you’re awake, wait.”
And he gave her some brown sugar to eat and a small tot of alcohol to drink.
“We’ve empty stomachs. The tea we drank in the window recess and the little handful of maize flour are a long way back. A sleep’s not always as good as a dinner, especially after a march like the one we’ve just done. We should have lit a fire and cooked some polenta, but I confess I’m tired. This’ll keep us going for at least an hour or two.”
Angelo did not fall asleep at once. His shoulders were aching. He had never carried a pack; he was worn out.
He wondered whether the road they were on really led to a town, and whether that was to be desired or dreaded. Were there garrisons and quarantines everywhere? The two travelers in the cabriolet had not seemed to be worrying. Perhaps they were archbishop’s children with passports of the kind that get saluted. He remembered the dry cholera that had leaped upon the captain in the open countryside and unhorsed him. There was a certain equality, after all. He was seeing the black side of things.
He reckoned that for the past six days they had been traveling blindly. There was no clear reason for supposing that the village near Gap was to the northwest of the spot where they now were. He told himself that the cause of liberty had nothing to do with that village near Gap. He recognized that it was now impossible to return to the place of rendezvous Giuseppe had fixed, but he saw himself on a horse, or he did not see himself at all. The foot-slogging and, above all, the pack, had made him melancholy. He was not very sure, either, of having made a real escape from the quarantine at Vaumeilh. Burning a little powder in the wood of a door was not a sufficient event to make one sure of the thing and of oneself. He thought, too, of Dupuis, who had neglected to take the pistols from the baggage, and had even let him keep the little saber: all for ten francs, perhaps indeed for nothing and from indifference. The soldiers had not even searched him.
“Everybody is becoming an official,” he thought, “and I don’t see what place there is for me in such a world.”
The moon, however, now almost at the end of its descent and half buried in the mists of the horizon, was sliding long pink rays under the ilex branches. The young woman was sleeping steadily and heaving faint, charming sighs.
Angelo thought of his little cigars. He smoked one with such pleasure that he lit a second from the stump of the first.
If Giuseppe had been there he would at once have been pleased to explain to him that things were not so stupid as people thought. No one was guarding the quarantine at Vaumeilh. People were picked up, packed into four walls. They stayed put. There was no need to bother about them. They guarded themselves. The able ones even did a little business.
“I blundered,” Angelo thought: “all I need have done was to go down to the grille and say: ‘Open up, I’m leaving.’ ‘This is rather a surprise,’ they’d have replied, ‘but yes, no doubt you don’t belong here.’ Now, one can easily die simply through lacking that simple sort of initiative. I don’t die, but I do make three times the gestures necessary. If Giuseppe were here I’d say: ‘I know exactly what to expect. You’ll rob me of my horse legally and make me carry a pack.’ He’d get angry and reply: ‘You’re not stupid, but what can we do for the people, then?’ For he doesn’t believe he’s one of them. And that’s what he’s proud of. They make revolutions to become dukes. I do too, but they’ll rob me of my horse. Only the cholera is genuine.”
Ever since they had taken to the country roads, they had seen very few dead, except for that arrogant captain whom they had foun
d on the road, curled up like a child in its mother’s lap, with his stripes and his spurs. But Angelo remembered Manosque, and his horror on the roofs when he could not close his eyes without finding himself immediately covered with birds who knew what they wanted. He remembered, too, the infernal heat, the braziers where the corpses were being burned, and the droning of the flies.
Despite the coolness of the morning (dawn was not far off) and the utter silence of the forest, asleep over its vast expanse, he saw in his mind’s eye with great precision the agonies and the deaths that must be still laying waste the inhabited places.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The tea was made and the polenta cooking on a magnificent fire when the young woman awoke.
“Don’t move,” said Angelo, “you’re still exhausted.”
He gave her some boiling hot, very sweet, tea.
“I’ve been on my little patrol,” he said; “fifty yards from here, there’s a crossroads with a signpost. According to this, we’re five leagues west of Saint-Dizier. Don’t you remember passing through a place of that name on the journey you told me about? It does seem to be our way.”
“No, I don’t remember Saint-Dizier. But let me get up and help you.”
“You’re helping me by staying where you are. If you get up, in five minutes you’ll be in the absurd position of having to lie down again. I haven’t told you everything. Immediately after the crossroads, the road goes down into a valley, and just on the slope, a hundred yards at most from where we are, there’s the most charming hamlet of four houses one could hope to see. What’s so extraordinary, the people there are behaving quite normally. Just now, a woman was feeding her chickens. A man started harvesting a field and is still there. If it weren’t for the rim of the valley and these trees, you’d hear him speaking to his horse. I shouldn’t be surprised if there were children playing outside. In any case, I didn’t show myself, but an old woman put a chair in the sun outside her door, sat down, and is knitting. There are also at least three quite old men smoking their pipes and talking about rain and fine weather, standing with their hands in their pockets.”